As with Episode I, I ended up seeing at the absolute first possible showing. Also as with Episode I, this was completely unplanned. Except this time it was also free.
I'm not a fanboy, I swear! This just keeps happening to me, more or less by accident. I didn't even know I'd be seeing it until earlier today.
Anyway, it was pretty good, all things considered. There is some drag in the middle and Anakin is a whiny teenager, but the action scenes are exciting, Jar-Jar is barely present, and the political intrigue was interesting.
The dialogue is a bit stilted and hokey, but that's Star Wars for you. George Lucas always wants his characters to be larger than life, but he doesn't understand that the way to do that is not through use of language, but through actions.
Christopher Lee, amusingly, plays almost the exact same character as he did in Lord of the Rings. Bizarre.
But Lucas says the opposite:
Lucas says he never claimed to be good at writing dialogue. "I've always been a follower of silent movies. I see film as a visual medium with a musical accompaniment, and dialogue is a raft that goes on with it. I create films that way - very visually - and the dialogue's not what's important. I'm one of those people who says, yes, cinema died when they invented sound. The talking-head era of movies is interesting and good, but I'd just like to go to the purer form.
I think it's a bad sign that his work is such a mess that one can't tell if it relies on language too much, or means not to at all.
Re:Lucas and language
autarch on 2002-05-18T14:58:40
Bizarre.
I just assumed he _was_ trying to use dialogue because the dialogue is _so_ incredibly labored and overdone, I assumed that could only happen intentionally. Or perhaps he and his co-screenwriter have simply unconsciously absorbed every possible cliche ever heard and then accidentally regurgitated them into the script.
