Good is a point of view, Anakin. And the Jedi point of view is not the only valid one.

I've been paralyzed by the thought of writing about Star Wars Episode 3 ever since I saw it on opening day. I ended up not being able to resist, and went and saw a midnight showing. When I was watching it, I had a fine time, but the problem is when I think about the movie all I can think about are the things that were wrong with it.

I think there's two factors that contribute to that. The first is I'm a nerd and a big fan of Star Wars in general - so I take the nerdy stuff a little more seriously. But the real problem is there are an enormous number of talented people working on this movie, they have an astonomical budget, and I figure they should be able to come up with someting better. they have a different expectation then your average movie.

That's the rub. Episodes 4-6, the ridiculous amount of talent involved and their budget means we should expect more out of the movie. But Episodes 1-2 trained us to expect less. So Episode 3 is in this funky place where it exceeds the expectations from Episodes 1-2 but falls way short of what we should expect from it.

That's how I can have fun watching it on opening night, enjoy myself, and then have mostly bad things to say on further reflection. Now I've balanced all that out a bit and can talk about it reasonably.

First the good things: It was lots of fun, energetic, and absolutely gorgeous.

But there was lots of badness. The most notable thing is the horrific dialog. But it's not just the dialog, it's the story arcs that go along with it. It's like Lucas plotted out the movie on a big chart and then didn't embelesh that detail at all. It shows in the lack of character development and the poor dialog.

I think the key problem is Lucas is so in control that no one can tell him how it all needs to be better. No one stops and says "George, this dialog is ass." Seriously, all it would have taken is a some good rewrite work to give it some color and character development. That would have helped a lot.

Many people have said the neat thing about this movie is watching how the pieces of the puzzle finally come together to get us back to Episode 4. The problem is the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle aren't interesting, they're pretty square. Overall the lack of creativity in the story is such a crazy dichotomy to the amazing creativity in the visuals. But the problem with the visuals is they universally feel a bit stale, since there's no good story anchor to go along with it all. It just feels like watching a pretty technology demo or sometihng.

Ug, see this is exactly what I was worried about. The whole article would just become one big rant about all the bad things. In the end I did enjoy myself. It's bland, the dialog is laughably bad, the actors have no chance with that dialog and Lucas as their director, and the story leaves a lot to be desired. But it's a good time, gorgeous, action packed, and not a terrible way to spend a few hours if you're at all interested in Star Wars.

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