don Jaime
05-15-2002, 10:03 AM
We got our prints in Tuesday and test ran them last night. The news is good: it's a lot better than The Phantom Menace, good enough to see, in fact. There are some mistakes that don't bring it up to the level of the original trilogy, though.
Hayden Christensen was inspired casting. He's such a bad actor you can believe the sub-quality child actor from TPM could grow up to be this "Dawson's Creek" reject. Most of the time Christensen is wooden, unless he's angry, then he screams a lot. Luckily for him, Natalie Portman is even worse and serves as a distraction. If she showed one emotion, I didn't catch it.
Jango Fett, on the other hand, got a good actor. I didn't catch his name, but he looks like Duane "The Rock" Johnson with scars and a low, Australian voice. He's scarier with helmet OFF. Sadly, Jango's reputation is overblown. He's a pitiful shot, he picks a fight with Mace Windu that barely lasts a minute, and Obi-Wan pretty much beats him bare-handed. Most of his action scenes make him look so klutzy, you finally understand why the Stormtroopers cloned from him couldn't hit the broad side of a nebula.
The other actors passed, too. Ewan McGregor is stuck in some needlessly twee scenes with Christensen early on, but after his detective work starts, he does fine, kind of like Jim Garner on "The Rockford Files." Samuel L. Jackson spends most of the movie meditating (Intense Staring with his Eyes Closed Action!) but gets a good confrontation scene to make up for it. We see Christopher Lee as Count Dooku (rhymes with cuckoo) and Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine are both excellent studies in quiet, hidden evil. Cropped and toned way down, Ahmed Best's Jar Jar Binks is not irritating, and I'm glad. C3PO is used in a ludicrous attempt at comic relief, but Anthony Daniels is voice actor enough to make you enjoy the situation even when you roll your eyes at it.
With so many special effects, some are bound to need work. There are too matte paintings and chromakeys that are clearly matte paintings and chromakeys. Too often there's so many effects happening at once they distract from what you're supposed to be looking at, like in Corus**** at rush hour our in the droid assembly plant. The best used effects come at the end, in the big battle and final lightsaber duel.
Best scene: Yoda. Our little crowd laughed and cheered the whole time. And that's all I have to say. If you know what this scene is, it's much better than you heard. If you don't know, it's worth the price of admission alone.
Worst scene: the Naboo kiss. Padme and Anakin are at a lake (looks like Como in Italy). She's wearing a dress Cher rejected as too revealing. He prods her like day-old meat in the school cafeteria, and then their lips meat. I thought of the MST3K crew's comment on a different movie: "He looks like a carp getting it on."
Unanswered questions: How can Owen Lars be a bearded late teenager when his mom only had him eight years ago? If Count Dooku is ex-Jedi and they all know him by reputation, how can the crawl call him "mysterious"? Are droid parts really that interchangable? If the whole movie hinges on protecting Padme, why doesn't she wear plain clothes and tell R2D2 to stop following her? The one time this does happen (at Anakin's suggestion) and they go to Naboo disguised as refugees, what are they supposed to be refugees from? What exactly is the plan to protect her? Does anyone have one?
Rating: Four stars out of five. You want to see.
Hayden Christensen was inspired casting. He's such a bad actor you can believe the sub-quality child actor from TPM could grow up to be this "Dawson's Creek" reject. Most of the time Christensen is wooden, unless he's angry, then he screams a lot. Luckily for him, Natalie Portman is even worse and serves as a distraction. If she showed one emotion, I didn't catch it.
Jango Fett, on the other hand, got a good actor. I didn't catch his name, but he looks like Duane "The Rock" Johnson with scars and a low, Australian voice. He's scarier with helmet OFF. Sadly, Jango's reputation is overblown. He's a pitiful shot, he picks a fight with Mace Windu that barely lasts a minute, and Obi-Wan pretty much beats him bare-handed. Most of his action scenes make him look so klutzy, you finally understand why the Stormtroopers cloned from him couldn't hit the broad side of a nebula.
The other actors passed, too. Ewan McGregor is stuck in some needlessly twee scenes with Christensen early on, but after his detective work starts, he does fine, kind of like Jim Garner on "The Rockford Files." Samuel L. Jackson spends most of the movie meditating (Intense Staring with his Eyes Closed Action!) but gets a good confrontation scene to make up for it. We see Christopher Lee as Count Dooku (rhymes with cuckoo) and Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine are both excellent studies in quiet, hidden evil. Cropped and toned way down, Ahmed Best's Jar Jar Binks is not irritating, and I'm glad. C3PO is used in a ludicrous attempt at comic relief, but Anthony Daniels is voice actor enough to make you enjoy the situation even when you roll your eyes at it.
With so many special effects, some are bound to need work. There are too matte paintings and chromakeys that are clearly matte paintings and chromakeys. Too often there's so many effects happening at once they distract from what you're supposed to be looking at, like in Corus**** at rush hour our in the droid assembly plant. The best used effects come at the end, in the big battle and final lightsaber duel.
Best scene: Yoda. Our little crowd laughed and cheered the whole time. And that's all I have to say. If you know what this scene is, it's much better than you heard. If you don't know, it's worth the price of admission alone.
Worst scene: the Naboo kiss. Padme and Anakin are at a lake (looks like Como in Italy). She's wearing a dress Cher rejected as too revealing. He prods her like day-old meat in the school cafeteria, and then their lips meat. I thought of the MST3K crew's comment on a different movie: "He looks like a carp getting it on."
Unanswered questions: How can Owen Lars be a bearded late teenager when his mom only had him eight years ago? If Count Dooku is ex-Jedi and they all know him by reputation, how can the crawl call him "mysterious"? Are droid parts really that interchangable? If the whole movie hinges on protecting Padme, why doesn't she wear plain clothes and tell R2D2 to stop following her? The one time this does happen (at Anakin's suggestion) and they go to Naboo disguised as refugees, what are they supposed to be refugees from? What exactly is the plan to protect her? Does anyone have one?
Rating: Four stars out of five. You want to see.