>>718782147
>Your neckbeard echo chamber
From article written in the 90s and early/mid 00s:
>The day after The Phantom Menace opened, a former student sent me an urgent e-mail: "Saw the new Star Wars, sucks like a big Hoover, Lucas has betrayed my whole generation."
>Is the magic back? Not without a price, baby. The Star Wars engine has been stalled for so long, you have to trudge through nearly an hour of Episode II – Attack of the Clones just to hear it cough and turn over.
>We have to start somewhere, and I will start with the acting. It is simply, uniformly, astonishingly bad. Liam Neeson is on Mogadon. He doesn't just phone in his performance, he puts it in the post without enough stamps on it; he Sellotapes it to the leg of a pigeon. Ewan McGregor does the same: a boring, misguided solemnity, and a plum-in-the-mouth English accent I can only assume is a sort of backdated Alec Guinness. He would have done better to copy the young Guinness from, say, The Man in the White Suit - at least we might have had something with freshness and fun. It is not their fault, however. Director George Lucas has clearly made a decision to exclude any spice or vinegar in the bland, universally acceptable Diet Coke he wishes to sell all over the world.
>But what about the agnostic viewer? The hopeful ticket buyer walking in not as a cultist, but as a moviegoer hoping for a great experience? Is this “Star Wars” critic-proof and scoff-resistant? Yes, probably, at the box office. But as someone who admired the freshness and energy of the earlier films, I was amazed, at the end of “Episode II,” to realize that I had not heard one line of quotable, memorable dialogue. And the images, however magnificently conceived, did not have the impact they deserved.
