But we can blame George Lucas for the bad acting.

I'm told that he gives only two directions: "Faster" and "More intense".

I enjoyed the film, but I agree that the acting was wooden. In my theater, one particularly woodenly-acted line actually elicited peals of laughter from the audience:
"Are you all right?"
"Yes, I'm all right".

And I agree that Lucas can't tell a love story to save his life. I don't think he even understands love. I can't see why Amidala fell for Anakin, there's just no motivation there. I could almost buy it if it was a pity thing, but if so, they could have made it more obvious. My wife brought up the point that all of Lucas's kids are adopted, and he can't maintain a stable relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Now we see why.

However, with all of that out of the way, I have to say that the last scenes in the movie were incredible, and were worth the entire experience. The worst lines get uttered right before the movie gets good (Amidala declaring her love for Anakin before going into the arena). From the moment they're hauled out into the arena, after that, the movie completely and utterly rocked. It was a complete feast of action and visuals that blows away anything else ever put on screen.

As for the first half of the movie, well, the speeder chase through Coruscant was pretty cool, and the Jango Fett fight was cool, but the rest of it could have been binned.

Actually, he can't bin the rest of it, as it was all necessary exposition. At this point, I'm hoping he's all out of exposition by the time he writes Ep3. Everything is set up now, he should just get to the action in Ep3.

So what is going to happen in Ep3 I wonder? I see the following things that need to be resolved:

- We need to see Palpatine refuse to give up his emergency powers and declare himself emperor. We've already seen the setup for this.

- We need to see the Death Star get built.

- We need to see the plans get stolen.

- We need to see how Luke and Leia get hidden from Anakin.

- We need to see Anakin's descent into the dark side.

- We need to see the Jedi realize they've been backing the Wrong Horse all this time and get wiped out in the process (with Yoda and Ben going into hiding).

- We need to see why Ben chooses Tatooine as his hermit hideout. I'm figuring it's related to delivering Luke to the Lars family. As far as Yoda is concerned, I assume he just likes swamps.

- We need to see how the rebel alliance gets born out of this conflict. For a while, I thought Dooku's separatists would become the alliance, but it's made clear in the end that this is not going to be the case.

- We need to see why Threepio and Artoo's memory gets erased so that Threepio doesn't remember who-owns-who by Ep4.

- We need to see this asinine Midichlorian thing explained.

- We need to see the "Jedi can merge with the force" thing explained (why didn't Qui-Gon do it, etc.).

- We need to see why Vader can sense Luke's presence across a planet, but can't sense that Leia is his daughter when he's in the same room torturing her for the location of the rebel base.

I think these last three points will be somehow related. I'll bet that Yoda takes Obi-Wan off to explain some deep secrets of the Light side of the force, and shows him the "merge" trick. This must somehow be related to Midichlorians and bloodlines in such a way that all of those things get wrapped up neatly.

Comments?