Bring some reasonable expectations and the viewpoint of a ten-year-old to this and it's actually a good time. Of course, that means factoring out the most blistering hype-a-thon of recent memory, but that's what makes us strong, isn't it?Some future cultural historian is going to have a grand time dissecting the reception that movies like this get. I expect them to focus especially on the effect that hype and relentless overexposure has on expectations. With respect to SWITPM (or however you acronymize it), they'll have the joyous task of explaining how a fun romp comes to engender expectations of cinematic nirvana.
I went, I saw, I had a good time. The good parts are really good. There are sights in here I've never seen before. There is a crisply edited, genuinely exciting sequence (the pod race). Of the remainder, it's frequently eye candy of an orgasmic order.
Really, there's nothing in here that a good script doctor and a ruthless editor couldn't fix. The real problem is that the pace slackens off just enough to expose the most egregious writing and performance direction and make it seem way worse than it is and leaving it stranded in a dramatic dry spell. It's the curse of this movie that its loving creator couldn't make the trims and polish the lines to whiz the audience from one treat to another. Sad it is to observe the decline from the original, which had a dazzling, virtuoso sense of pace and not much else, to this. A steady decline from film to film which actually worked for Empire (which had the benefit of a real director) but has led to this.
Boy I sure do hope George learns how to spend his $100m better.Cut a half hour out of this thing and it could really be something. Here's a concept: Star Wars I: The Audience's Cut. Paging Marcia!