Attack of the Clones

Jb-depends what you want to see personaly you've confused me with your argument-you say the simplistic Western take for good and evil works for the first three movies( and you should note that the only dichotimy is within Anakin)-ok but now you seem to expect some big political complex plot for the new movies-er how come?
I thought Darth Maul was an excellent bad guy- Christopher Lee does okay but again you are competing with an iconic figure in Darth Vader.
And anyway isn't Vader meant to be the personification of evil?-you'd hardly expect anyone else to be as powerful and that is the whole tone of these new movies,it all leads up to Vader....
As regards Anakin's development there is a much more complex struggle going on here (and much more than you simplisticly state again depends what you want to see..) than any of the previous movies and again you contradict yourself-simplistic is good for the first 3 movies but not here.
Again the full story hasn't been told between Vader and Kenobi-again the known ending is getting in the way.
Finally I think part of the problem is indeed the fact that Star Wars was 25 years ago,it was a special but very simple movie-plot wise there's been nothing interesting in the movies since Vader was revealed as Luke's father.
Times have changed,Lucas was never going to live up to the expectation these movies were going to have,people seem to have gotten hyper-critical over these movies too forgetting that all the previous movies short comings.
The dialogue in these movies has always been duff as Ford himself said to Lucas "George you can write this s*&^ but you sure can't say it"........

Note the actors getting most of the praise are all the British actors, not the Americans. Roger Ebert has commented on this. The British school of acting is to work from the outside in. The British actors are able to invent and force a persona on a character they are going to play. The American school works from the inside out. Since Lucas has not given the characters much of a soul or motivation, the American actors are totally lost; there is no character to develop; where as the British actors know basically what there character is (bad, good, evil, naive, strong, weak, etc), so they just invent a character.

This is one of the reasons why the producers of the Harry Potter movie insisted on having an entire cast of British and British trained actors.

Sugarbrie,
Really with all due respect what tosh,that's such a wild generalisation it's not true,the main difference is that Lucas has went for experienced British actors for specific older parts,to a large extent he's went for unknowns for the younger parts who are mainly American it's hardly fair to compare McGregor with the young guy who plays Anakin,who does a decent job but not much more I admit.
Logically actually this makes sense since McGregor has got to try to become Sir Alec Guiness,he needs a bit of weight there and obviously he's went mainly for lesser known actors for the younger parts so not to detract from the characters-also Anakin has only got to get the black suit on later,not become Jimmy Stewart.
As for your Harry Potter analogy that's off too since the author Ms Rowling (she's Scottish)only allowed the book to be filmed if they stayed true to the story which is set in England and for British actors to play the part,since she is one of the UK's richest women-she didn't need the cash from the movie-quite simply if the studio didn't agree the movie would never have been made.
She certainly didn't want her movie Americanised but that wasn't to do with the quality of American actors rather she wanted the movie to stay very close to the book,most authors even the extremely rich ones do not usually fight to keep their vision uncompromised.
I agree to some extent that historically(British actors had the stage tradition a lot of Americans didn't) that may have been the case but surely nowadays the acting coaching,experience etc. must be closer....

Ben, I am just passing on Roger Ebert's comments from the Sun Times. Roger comments have no relation at all as to why Lucas chose which actors. It had to do with why in Roger's opinion it seemed that the British schooled actors faired very well as far as their performance in the picture; while the American schooled actors generally came across flat.

To repeat: The american school teaches actors to feel like the character feels inside; and to try to become them and project that out. Not given much to feel inside to project out by the script and the direction, they all generally seemed flat and wooden.

Ben--I perhaps should have organized my thoughts somewhat differently and take some of your points. I grant that Darth Vader has to be the strongest of the Dark Side characters. What I was trying to get at is that "The Empire Strikes Back" has a nice and fairly consistent feel to it that is lacking in the recent efforts (and "Return" as well). I thought a more consistent feel, better foreshadowing, etc., would have contributed to the film and placed it more effectively as part of sequence building to Anakin's transformation we all know is coming. I think this would have made the movie more compelling for me. I concede your point about Anakin's internal conflict but for me the poor writing and acting detracted from it.

I do think, however, that the more complex background should make I and II somewhat different from the other films. Those films were set up with good vs. evil and the rebel alliance was small and focused on narrow goals (hence relatively few central characters). We knew the Empire was evil and didn't have to know how it got there or that way. And that was enough. Since I and II deal with a polity about to enter a civil war, I think a few more details about what is going on would be helpful. And could help improve the story. The trade war in I was not well treated. I am not saying that these things should simply make the plot more complex or detract from the Anakin story. But to create a greater sense of the workings of the Republic and the political intrigue that is going on would help the story and contribute to the consistent feel (of impending crisis?) I felt was missing. A shot of chaos in the Senate, groups of Senators arguing some point in the background, more references to other recent crises, a few references to the Republic's governance arrangements, etc., could suffice. The earlier films were very busy with all sorts of aliens and activity in the background. I and II have less of that, but their place could have been used to partially flesh out the larger background against which the central story is being told--with the aim of supporting rather than detract from the main plot. As someone else pointed out, these and the dialogue problems could be addressed by an outside director.

While I think these films require a different touch than IV-VI, there are precedents in literature and film that could be drawn on for these--as Lucas drew effectively on other precedents previously.

Mostly, I was disappointed because I wanted to be much more entertained than I was. I doubt I will ever watch I or II again but will probably return to I, II, and the opening part of III many times in the future. I was all the more disappointed because I felt these problems could and should have been overcome given the effort that went into them.