'Bred Crumbs

06:23 PM At Powell and Market, a few Bible-thumpers were out yesterday, apparently getting in an early warmup for Pride Weekend at the end of the month. As a man in a T-shirt that read FEAR GOD bugged tourists waiting for the cable car, other people, including a small child (never too early to indoctrinate!), held up signs that said TRUST JESUS.

Robbie: So, we're supposed to fear God but trust Jesus?
Me: Yeah. It's kind of a good-cop/bad-cop sort of thing.
Robbie: Damn you! You stole my joke!

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[Spoilers? I don't think so, but you might. Read on at your own risk.]

George Lucas has done it again. He has managed to cobble together a half-hour of passable entertainment and pad it out with an hour and a half of dung so rank that you begin to understand what Ed Wood would have accomplished if he'd had a budget and an effects house.

Many reviewers say, knowing it means nothing, that Star Wars Episode II is at least better than Episode I, but on average, it's really just as awful. This time, instead of annoyance and insensitivity, Lucas gives us boredom and incompetence. You will find better storylines, better dialogue, and better acting on any soap opera, on any day.

Here's how far the saga has fallen: in Star Wars, the great, generation-changing work that Lucas is bent on desecrating*, we know we're in for something good right off the bat when, after a text scroll conjuring up grand events, we see a spaceship on the run from a massive pursuer. In Attack of the Clones, after a text scroll conjuring up the agenda of a Microsoft Outlook meeting invite, we see a spaceship on an errand, taking a senator to a conference. Feel the excitement.

What follows for the next half-hour is so much deadly dull walking and talking about politics in dark hallways that it makes The West Wing look like The Matrix. Fortunately, the CGI city glimpsed through the windows is pretty cool, and it is the only thing in the frame that draws or warrants attention. Then for some reason the movie is interrupted by a trailer for The Fifth Element, which might wake you up a little.

The most excruciating part is yet to come, as Natalie Portman's Padme and Hayden Christiansen's Anakin nearly wrest the title of Least Believable Sci-Fi Couple Ever away from Chakotay and Seven. After more dull gabbing and sub-Joey Tribiani acting, Padme falls for Anakin (no spoiler there; we all knew this going in) in spite of the fact that this tedious whiner completely creeps her out at least twice. Eventually, each talks about how the other is making him/her miserable and destroying him/her inside. What a cute pair.

Amid all that, a sequence that could have been touching, involving Anakin's bad feeling about his long-lost mother, is derailed by Lucas' lazy plotting. This movie should have hinged on emotion, and the next will have to, but it looks like Lucas has completely forgotten how that works. He can't even muster a stab at Spielbergian manipulation anymore.

Finally, two-thirds or more of the way in, things start to happen, once Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor, from whom we could have used a chorus or twelve of "Come What May" to spice things up) stumbles upon Isengard, where Saruman is building a mighty army of orcs. (Which is to say, Christopher Lee is carving out the most specific acting niche ever, specializing in overlords who fight wizards in pointy fortresses with huge basements.)

The movie is not all bad. That last half-hour or so is kinda fun; Yoda, more convincing in CGI than as puppet, has a great scene; Natalie Portman is as solid as her abs when she escapes her hairdos and her leaden boyfriend; the other-worldly landscapes are incredible-looking as always; and digital projection works great, though occasionally visible pixel-edges can be a little distracting.

Then again, distraction is just what you'll be looking for as the horrible first ninty minutes of this mess drag by. The movie is so lacking in drama that once the events that turn out to have been the climax wind down, only the numbing sense of the passage of time beating on the inside of your skull tells you the movie's almost over, and then Lucas does some summing up by the panel to tell us our lesson is done for the day, and then that old fanfare ushers everyone out of the theater as a few diehards applaud halfheartedly out of a misplaced sense of obligation, daring not think the blasphemous feeling deep within – that the nine bucks would have been far, far better spent seeing Spider-Man again.

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