Besides Hayden Christensen, Jar-Jar Binks, and the awful scripts, they're not half-bad. That wasn't intended to sound so much like a backhanded compliment, but that's how I feel - that they were good movies, but ultimately marred by poor execution and a few damning flaws, making them bad movies, if that makes sense.
No, Hayden and the scripts were almost uniformly good (with a few groan-worthy bits). Even Jar-Jar was mostly tolerable despite being mostly useless, much as Threepio was in the OT. I'd say that the main problems were:
- Samuel L. Jackson obviously being miscast (he seems terminally bored, if not pissed off about not being allowed to scream obscenities)
- Natalie Portman's acting
- Jake Lloyd's acting in Ep1
- Too much use of CGI where puppets would have been more appropriate, with the exception of Yoda, whose Episode I puppet was the ugliest, most horrible thing ever seen in any of the SW movies.
- frequent spotty bits and minor complaints: the occasional awkward or pedestrian bit of dialog like "you're breaking my heart", the literal "rolling through a field of flowers" scene in Ep2, a certain shot in Ep3 where Natalie Portman had the most horrible hair and makeup job of her entire acting career, too much Jar-Jar in Ep1 (not the fact that he exists, just the fact that he gets
too much dialog and screen time).
- basically Episode I in general
^^No, it's OK. I haven't dismissed them because of anything I've heard, really. It's just that life is short and those films look plainly targeted towards children. Or certainly young adults. And I get bored easily.
Oh,
hell no only Ep1. Ep2 was much more mature and Ep3 was the only SW movie to score a PG-13 rating.
Hey, my childhood still hurts from where he raped it so hard, but he's a good
director. Baycam is not shakeycam. Shakeycam is something that you see in Battlestar Galactica. Baycam is when the camera is held very, very close to the ground during highway chase scenes.
Bay DOES commit a few sins, mostly excessive use of slow motion, fast cuts, and the sun being obscured by characters and objects (a day goes by in about 10-20 minutes in Baytime to maximize the number of sunrise/sunset shots), but shakeycam is not one of those sins.
