Oh, don't go blaming the actors. A ham can paste emotion onto lines; an actor works with the scene's subtext, and generates excitement by layering an unspoken statement behind the spoken one. But to do this, the writer has to give the actors something to work with. It can't be dialogue that consists of "I love you, you're so pretty," "I love you more," "No, I love you, more" "You hang up first," "No, you hang up first,"...
The mess of this movie (and the last two) is solely Lucas's fault. He simply can't write worth a damn, and it shows. And after re-watching the original trilogy recently, I am more impressed than every by Harrison Ford, because he was able to generate subtext even with some mind-numbingly flat writing.
And, at the end, they are stading in front of the "death star" that was just about at the construction point as it was at the begining of the original star wars. The only problem was that the kids still had about 17 years to grow. Was this Death star being built by union labor?
Well, it looked to me like it was the bare outlines of the Death Star, and nowhere near complete. But, even if you are correct, this was the least of the continuity errors in this series.
I agree the dialogue needed work but Ewan McGregor did fine with it. Anikin and Padme didn't.
Being a conservative, usually means being an optimist. Episodes 4-6 were uplifting victories while 1-3 were dark tragedies which is probably why you liked 4-6 better.
You must read DorkTower too....
'"Only a Sith deals in Absolutes" is an Absolute, so you must be a Sith, Sith-head.'
Bingo! There was an all star cast in this movie. When Samuel L. Jackson looks bad in a movie, I think the problem does not lie with the actors.
Sad part is, the plot is excellent, it's just very badly written, developed, and directed by Lucas, and that's solely where the fault lies.
With even a few tweaks to the script this could have been a dramatically better movie. With a top notch writing crew and director it would have been an instant classic.
It's the movie-that-could-have-been, and Lucas blew it.
I agree totally! In fact, some of the best lines from that movie are from his improvements :
Princess Leia : "I love you!" Han Solo : "I know!"
He did that because Fisher kept flubbing up the moment/line (because of her drug addiction) and he just asked Kirshner if they could just simplify the whole dialogue that had been previously written. It was a brilliant move in my opinion.
Ford really should be a writer/director, rather than an actor though. He, too, has gone off the deep end in recent years.