"Star Wars" Turns 30 ...

what's amazing to me is that after such great casting in the originals, the new three have some of the worst, at least in portman and christensen, who have zero chemistry. The kid in PM was brutal. Christensen is about as wooden as they come, and yes, the "romance" scenes in Clones are cringe-inducing. Portman may be a good actress, I haven't really seen her in much else, but she's as flat as christensen in Clones.

And Samuel L. Jackson is wasted. He should have insisted on a "we got m**********r Siths on this planet!" line.

 

Hayden can act. See Shattered Glass or My Life as a House. But a lack of chemistry and cheesy bad love dialogue is hard to overcome.

 

i didn't say he can't act; i agree, he is v. good in shattered glass. But he sucks bigtime as young darth vader. Hard to take him seriously as a future villain. Harder to take him as supposed romancer of portman's character. How couldn't the people in charge see those two had no chemistry, the way luke & leia & han all did.

 

True...but in light of later revalations, the chemistry between Luke and Leia was kinda creepy

 

so true. When Leia plants one on Luke in The Empire Strikes Back - to get back at Han, I believe - it's hard not to cringe.

 

You could make ONE reasonably good movie if you edited "Phantom Menace" and "Clones" together -- get rid of all the Jar-Jar Stepin Fetchit bullshit in TPM, eliminate almost all of Jake Lloyd's spoken lines, get rid of all the insipid love dialogue in AOTC, and you'd have 2:20 of decent stuff.

Then, when you get to "Sith," you know all you need to know to set up the original series.

In fact, the only time when Christensen and Portman show any chemistry together whatsoever is when they're on the "save Obi-Wan" mission in Clones, when Anakin says "we can't go save him, I was ordered to protect you on Naboo," Padme says, "Well, I'm going to help Obi-Wan, so if you want to protect me, you'll just have to come along," and Anakin kind of grins and winks. That's the only time (that, and the coliseum battle shortly thereafter, where they actually work as partners) you see any real indication of why the characters would have fallen in love, so they could have dispensed with all the "my heart is beating hoping that kiss will not become a scar" scene and all that happy horse shit.

 

Didn't someone do that already? I forget the name of it, but I'm pretty sure it exists. "The Phantom Edit" maybe?

 

My bad. It's simply an edit of Ep. 1, not a combo of both. Someone needs to do that though!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit