About fifteen minutes in, my resolve started to wane. For moral support, I went to the supermarket and purchased Mountain Dew. It helped.
I can’t think of anything I just saw that wasn’t bad. Even the Twi’leks — the single most awesome race in the SW galaxy (far, far away) — were crudtacular.
But the dialogue — o Iesu, the dialogue.
Not a single word made the slightest bit of sense and, as if to flaunt the fact that nothing’s making any sense, everything gets repeated about twenty times. It’s almost as if the writers knew that the audience was going to doze off and so would need constant reminding of what was going on. I swear I saw the same piece of dialogue between Dooku and Ventress five times (I get the impression that they’ll need to discuss her failures…).
But the problems are a little bit deeper than merely that.
Action scenes are awesome when there’s a good chance somebody you like is going to snuff it. There’s an element of risk to the characters: they might not be 100% successful. When your characters are basically immortal — SPOILERS: Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader, who doesn’t die until Return of the Jedi, and Obi Wan Kenobi ends up living on Tatooine under the cunningly cunning alias ‘Ben Kenobi’ before being killed on the first Death Star by Darth Vader née ‘Anakin Skywalker’ in A New Hope — you can’t rely on putting them in potentially fatal situations for drama.
But that’s basically all they do. Indeed, they jump from potentially fatal situation to potentially fatal situation with very little plot to sustain the jumps.
The way out of this problem is to have interesting characters, baffling mysteries, and unpredictable plot twists. Instead, we get Anakin Skywalker (the single most boring character in the Star Wars universe: ‘Whine, whine, whine. Sand people killed my mum. I need to prove how awesome I am all of the time.’), Obi Wan Kenobi (git), Ahsoka (the only non-immortal, but death (alas, alas) never claims her), and an unending supply of very, very mortal clones (who frequently die on mass to the sound of my chuckles).
Speaking of those clones, they seem to be more successful when they’re stupidly outnumbered. The kill-rate exponentially increases as the ratio enemies:clones increases. No joke, they get slaughtered en masse when they think they’re going to get backup, but transform into killing machines of superhuman luck when they think nobody’s coming to help them.
Thus, unless you’re gung-ho on watching the television series (which I am) don’t bother with the ‘movie’. It will make you want to Force choke everybody involved.
Only The Sangfroid 