Here you go. Best bit: “From the first frame, all but the learned geeks in the audience won’t know what the heck is going on. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker (celebrity voices impersonated) are in the midst of the legendary and pointless Clone Wars, the battles of which seem to transpire on either Planet Marriott Airport or Planet Phallic Symbol.”
Oh, and Entertainment Weekly gave the film an **F**.
I found the proper link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/14/AR2008081401083.html
There is a hyphen in the /wp-dyn/ part that was missing.
Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to see this for free. At LucasArts, in their private theater. Instead, I opted to hang out in my friend’s garage, drinking and playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I’m confident that I made the correct decision.
If you think that that somehow makes you sound less nerdy, you’d be wrong. 
I think you kinda missed the point of my post.
Word.
When even the Star Wars crowd I hang out with prefer to talk about the Dark Knight than…this, you know it’s bad.
I was 7 when Star Wars came out. I’ve seen SW, ESB and ROTJ at least 500 times. (My parents owned a single screen movie theater when I was young and I watched them after hours regularly). I liked the prequels way more than just about everyone else. My former screen name here was Dooku.
I walked out.
And now for the democratic response…
I actually liked it quite a bit. And so did my eight year old girl. She might be as high on Star Wars right now as she’s ever been and I’ve been working on her for pretty much her entire life.
Is it juvenile? Yes, of course. With some obvious dialog and such? Yes.
But that’s what it’s always been. Right from the get go in 1977 (I was 10 when the first one came out). Those who criticize it so heavily are seeing it through adult eyes and realizing that the magic isn’t there aren’t getting what they’re missing: the magic isn’t in them any more to accept it. Through any sort of critical eyes ALL of them are pointless action films. Juvenile power fantasies akin to Disney’s princess stories. In princess movies the put upon girl discovers she’s a princess and she gets to go have a happy life. In star wars films the put upon discovers that he or she has special powers and gets to go live a life of adventure.
Had this not been a Star Wars film but, rather, a random ‘two knights get on some adventures in the midst of a war’ movie there might be criticism but it wouldn’t be hatred. The level of angst shown around the net, and even here, would be out of place except when seen through the eyes of people overly concerned with what they expected.
Look, I bow to NO ONE in my level of Star Wars fandom. I’ve made my own costumes and built lightsabers and blasters and had action figure collections and even, at one point in junior high, used those figures to shoot a stop motion version of Episode IV that lasted about 45 minutes (I think my pal Scott and I showed it once). But, even though it altered my life and threw me into fandom (for well and ill I’d never trade that) I’m under no illusions about what we’re talking about here. We’re discussing, as if it should be ‘The Godfather’, a series of films that are simplistic power fantasies on the level of 1960s era comic books.
Or, in short, I found the movie to be entertaining and fun. My kids agreed (the four year old was scared but the eight year old identified enormously with the new character and is, right now, jumping around on her bed, well after bedtime, pretending to fight with a lightsaber).
Yeah, but you can get some nasty diseases doing that 
Blll
At the least, fleas.
Ebert’s review is fairly humorous:
“You know you’re in trouble when the most interesting new character is Jabba the Hutt’s uncle. The big revelation is that Jabba has an infant to be kidnapped. The big discovery is that Hutts look like that when born, only smaller. The question is, who is Jabba’s wife? The puzzle is, how do Hutts copulate? Like snails, I speculate. If you don’t know how snails do it, let’s not even go there. The last thing this movie needs is a Jabba the Hutt sex scene.”
My problem with this line of argument is that my tastes are still pretty fuckin’ juvenile, and yet, the latest Star Wars movies have all left me cold. Non-movie Star Wars, I still enjoy. Comics? Sure, love 'em. Video games? I’ve got Force Unleashed on pre-order. The Clone Wars cartoon that came out between the second and third prequel? I own both DVDs. Fantastic stuff, as good as the original movie. Heck, I even play the Star Wars RPG. I’m pretty firmly in touch with my inner child. And the last three actual Star Wars movies have blown Bantha chunks. If my dislike is purely a product of me growing up, why is it so specific to the Star Wars material produced by George Lucas, and not all of the vast legion of Star Wars licensed material that wasn’t directly created by Lucas?
Johnathan Chance just goes to show that George still has more work to do!
Bwa ha ha ha!
I don’t entirely agree with Jonathan’s assessment, but I’ll take a crack at this: because what Lucas directly creates is the juvenile stuff, and the stuff created by other people is essentially stuff created by other grown-up fans. The Clone Wars miniseries was created by someone who saw their idealized version of Star Wars rather than Lucas’s version. It just happens that Lucas’s version sucks in comparison.
Still, I don’t think that’s entirely the case. I’ve seen this argument a lot, that the original trilogy is really campy and awful and the new direct-from-Lucas stuff is no worse. But…it’s really not. Empire Strikes Back has been hailed as one of the best movies of the last 30 years or so, consistently. The original movies are engaging, the actors are competent, and there’s a sense of fun. Lucas got it right back then; the movies may be campy, but they work, even now.
The prequel trilogy smacks of someone like a marketing exec studying the originals and setting out to create new movies just like the old ones. They got the superficial details right, but for one or more reasons they just couldn’t capture the essence. That it’s Lucas and not some random exec who doesn’t ‘get’ the originals makes it all the more puzzling.
To jump to another track, I think the real issue with this latest movie isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that the audience complaining about it isn’t the target audience. Everything I’ve seen says there’s nothing in the movie someone over 12 would be interested in, and Jonathan’s 8 year old child enjoyed it. This makes me think that, you know, maybe it’s a kid’s movie. The problem as I see it is that all the 30+ year old Star Wars fans assume that because it’s a Star Wars film, it’s made for them, and when it fails to work on an adult level it’s presumed to fail entirely.
I’m sort of rambling at this point. There’s like three different points in the above post, and I’m not entirely sure they’re all related. Oh well. I typed it, may as well submit it. 
That’s a pretty good point, Bosstone. And took it further than I’d expected it could go.
All I’d like to post in concurrence for Miller, however, is that, while he says his tastes remain juvenile, he does not. I think growing up, paying bills, getting laid, the whole thing, changes one no matter what.
Also, remember that the movie is a lead in to a television show on The Cartoon Network, if I have it down properly. It’s a kid’s property aimed at building interest in a kid’s cartoon on a kid-oriented cable TV channel.
Again, I enjoyed it quite a bit, especially the new jedi, but I know it’s not aimed at me.
The Empire Strikes Back is the only movie in the entire series that George Lucas did not direct. And even though the absence of his hand is what made the movie so much better, Lucas did not like having such little control over Irvin Kershner, and apparently vowed not to let that happen again.
Richard Marquand’s name is in the credits as director of Return of the Jedi, but he really did very little; Lucas basically backseat drove the whole thing.
There is nothing that stops a movie for an 8 year old for being awesome for adults as well. For example, Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars. Specifically. For other examples, Star Wars. Or, say, Pixar.
This is simply not good, and the fact that an 8 year old can enjoy it does not make it good. It makes it ‘not horribly unenjoyable’.
Am I alone in thinking that a lot of the difference in the perceived quality between the originals and the prequels (and this, um, mid-quel?) lies with the characters?
The originals gave us Vader as one of the archetypical movie-villains, the Emperor’s grey eminence, Yoda, diminutive in structure, even somewhat laughable in presentation, yet almost unrivalled in wisdom and power, a theme also somewhat present in R2 (the ‘unassuming hero’ type), the lovable rogue Han Solo, and hell, even C-3PO’s comic relief and the Leia/Luke/Han love-triangle/mildly incestuous relationship at least provided some form of character dynamics – granted, most of it was stereotypical, but the characters fit their stereotypes, it’s a basic good vs. bad/adventure tale which is naturally a bit black and white, and there’s something to be said for aptly fulfilling the expectations that go with a genre, and translating them appropriately into a certain framework, I think.
And what do we get now? That tattooed double-saber wielding dude whose name I keep forgetting, Count Dooku and General Grievous on the side of the baddies, who in toto didn’t really do anything but prove that more lightsabers doesn’t mean better, and on the good guys’ side… I’m not sure I even want to go there. Even what used to be good there was turned into a laughable pastiche, think R2 The Uber-Droid.
It’s the originals’ simplicity that’s to a large part responsible for their lasting appeal – good vs. bad, use the force, you can do anything if you believe in yourself, outward appearance does not the hero make, stuff like that. They weren’t deep movies, surely, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t good movies, apart from any nostalgia (which of course plays a role, too). But their simplicity has turned into simple-mindedness with the prequels – more CGI, more lasers, bland pastiches of characters. The new ones may have as little depth as the originals, but they’re also simply bad movies.
Thank you, Finagle. That’s my exact thought as well.
What disgusts me most about this new movie is that all it seems to do is to try to rack up points by referencing to the older movies, silently admitting and knowing that they are superior. It’s like they have already given up before the movie’s even released.
Look at this this trailer and see how carefully planted the references are: Yoda, the name “Skywalker”, the music, the double suns.
I think it damages the original movies in several ways. Not only because the supposed quality of this new movie taints the Star Wars name, but the epic scale of some of the central characters is completely lost. Darth Vader was an awesome, dark overlord, now he’s an animated wooden drone with a pigtail. Yoda used to be a mysterious guru in a swamp, now he’s just everywhere. But most of all… Jabba the Hutt – now has a baby? And an uncle, who speaks english none the less? Jabba used to a gross, though memorable side adventure, but now it’s like the entire franchise is his little private slug family re-union.
More than anything, it might be the fact that it *is *a franchise that’s the problem. Now it’s just about trademarks, icons and bad taste, when in the Empire Strikes Back, it was still completely free to take any direction.
Remember, this year will see the 30th anniversary of Life Day. You got something against slugs celebrating Life Day?