The beautiful special effects and imagery straight off of 1970s DAW Books sci-fi paperback covers can’t take away from how lead actor Hayden Christensen has the screen presence of a jar of expired mayonnaise. He’s so dimensionless that I’m still not sure that he’s not another one of this film’s many CGI creations.
In George Lucas’s defense though, it IS a hard role to cast. Christensen here is the angry, teenage Darth Vader back when he was earning his Jedi stripes and there was still hope for him. He’s not the cute little kid from the previous movie anymore; now, he’s your regular pencil neck rebel without a clue. He can’t be TOO likable because the flashes of his future dark side here won’t be believable. On the other hand, he also can’t be too alienating because it will make all of the other characters who still believe in him look like idiots.
Lucas’s solution: Cast a bland, limited-range teen idol type, a guy who could have been plucked straight out of the audition line of a new boy band. If it worked in 1977 with Mark Hamill, why couldn’t it work in 2002 with this Hayden Chris-whatever?
And it almost does work. A stronger writer might could pull it off, but Lucas is a filmmaker of expansive vision and a writer with a rusty grasp on his tools. Just see the infamously bad scenes here of the budding romance between Christensen and Natalie Portman. Lucas generates so few sparks between them, you’d think he was a 58-year-old virgin. The special effects team work overtime to create a sun-kissed paradise for the backdrop while Lucas can’t write two lines of believable dialogue in a row. He directs it like a bad movie love story that depends more on the actors having pretty faces than any hint of revealing body language or give-and-take rapport. Even worse, those scenes keep taking us away from the much more lively story thread of young Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his pursuit of a mysterious assassin across the cosmos.
Lucas isn’t completely lost, though. As a classic film buff, my favorite part of this is the homage to John Ford’s The Searchers in the scene on Tatooine when Anakin rushes to find his kidnapped mother. The lighting is nearly the same as Ford’s frightening sequence from 1956 in which a frontier family is about to be massacred by Indians. Anakin rides straight toward tragedy here. You can tell by the ominous red sky. It’s a subtle callback to the pivotal moment in Lucas’s original Star Wars from 1977 that famously also referenced Ford when Luke Skywalker speeds home to find it scorched to the ground and his aunt and uncle certainly dead.
Tatooine is the Monument Valley of this particular fantasy world.
If I ever met George Lucas, I’d probably talk to him about old movies. Don’t know if I have any questions for him about Star Wars.