The Empire?

• Darth Vader's outfit. Suave in black, and what a cool samurai-ish helmet. He picks up all the chicks, too - "tall, dark, and on life support."
  
• The dudes in the black with the helmet that mimicks Vader's with the chinstrap. I mean, that was a stylish chinstrap. It either matched the rest of the helmet, or it was the opposite - white - which looked really cool. Awesome fashion designers. They even coordinated with their boss!
  
• The stormtroopers. I mean, that's a cool uniform with the armor. And it makes them look tall ("tall, dark, and on life support" helps you pick up chicks, remember?) - that's why Leia commented on how short Luke was. She expected all Stormtroopers to be tall and suave. But no, he was a kid with a bad haircut. He couldn't've been a Stormtrooper. He was short.
  
• The snowtroopers. Looking cool with a variation on the same theme as the stormtroopers. They even look like a team, even though they look different. It's a unique team thing going on, and that's hip.
  
• The scout troops. I mean, helmets with built-in sunglasses - that's great!
  
• The emperor's guards. Red! BRILLIANT! Just when you thought they were stickin' monochrome - they throw you a quick one and give the Emperor's boys a special look.
  
• And the Emperor. What a groovy nightrobe for a bad guy! It's like blue corduroy.

Reviewers have concentrated on the lack of romantic chemistry and on a supposed "lack of story." The former is mostly correct but mostly unimportant, and the latter is dead wrong.

The Romance

Yes, the romantic scenes are so corny as to make one cringe. Several factors conspired to make this so: the need to compress the romantic storyline in the limited time it has to share with everything else, thus concentrating much romantic weight onto just a few lines; that filming lasted a mere six weeks -- far too short for any chemistry between the actors to develop on the set; and that this relationship is supposed to be based on lust -- first and awkward lust, no less - rather than love. But the important point is that this relationship is fully believable in the context of the series. Anakin is attracted to Padme's body and Padme is attracted to Anakin's ability to use the Force.

So the romantic relationship is an integral part of the wonderful story of Episode II and the entire series, but the lack of on-screen chemistry simply meant that it wasn't realistic at a purely emotional level on-screen. However, if one did apply the suspension of belief necessary for any science fiction to the romance, emotion and empathy could easily be derived from the intellectual analysis of the script: a beautiful young woman and a powerful young man intentionally placing themselves in romantic surroundings, ignoring warning signs, and ignoring their own good sense. And it evokes empathy because the experience of bad relationships is nearly universal amongst people.

Contrast this to the romance from the original trilogy between Han and Leia. There, the acting between the rogue Harrison Ford and the icy Carrie Fisher yielded a believable romantic tension. But it was a situation of opposites attracting -- people from different classes of life. It was more fairy tale than real life (actually this one observation is this entire review in a nutshell). Fairy tales can certainly be emotionally engaging, but where it lacked in the original trilogy is that it had nothing to do with the rest of the story. If the romance were simply eliminated, the rest of the story would be essentially unchanged.

Which is better -- a badly-acted but situationally realistic romance integral to a much larger story, or a well-acted fairy tale romance incidental to the story? There is no clear winner, and I personally prefer the former (although I hated how it made me cringe at times during my viewing of Episode II), yet the reviewers have trashed Episode II evidently preferring the latter.

The Story

The story is where Episode II shines, but to appreciate the story requires a thorough understanding of the Star Wars universe, including the so-called "Expanded Universe" -- the novels beyond the movies. The new trilogy also introduces a paradigm shift from classic Greek play of pure good vs. pure evil to modern Hegelian/Marxist dialectic. These are what made the Episode II story profound and engaging, but these evidently slipped by the reviewers.

Watching Episode II is like watching a latter-year Star Trek: The Next Generation episode -- if you weren't familiar with everything that had gone on before, you would have no idea why things were happening the way they were, and you would only be able to appreciate the surface story. You would also achieve no catharsis over long-standing mysteries being solved.

For example, the Timothy Zahn trilogy -- all one thousand pages -- of post-Return of the Jedi novels dealt entirely with the remnants of the quashed Empire scavenging old cloning equipment from the Clone Wars to resurrect the Empire. So finally being able to see clones, a clone factory, and the beginning of the Clone Wars filled in a void that I had been curious about for ten years since reading the Zahn trilogy. Zahn continually referred to the Clone Wars, but never gave any detail -- no doubt to give Lucas maximal latitude in the new movie trilogy.

The tie-ins to all the other movies in Episode II were plot-related, unlike the copycat scenes that Episode I had. Episode I gave us a pod race for the purpose of selling videogames, an Empire-like ship-monster encounter to fill time, and a throw-away bad guy introduced and killed-off in a single episode. In Episode II, nothing could be deleted without affecting the story. Episode II is efficient in the Aristotelian sense.

Hard as it is to believe to a Star Wars fan, there seem to be people who don't even remember stuff from the movies, such as Uncle Owen (and his gruesome death), Luke's workshop, Emperor Palpatine, Boba Fett (let alone his ship), Vader's mechanical hand, the Mos Eisley spaceport, and the dissolution of the Senate. Reviewers have maligned Episode II as "just another flick from the Star Wars franchise" -- as if it were a Bond flick or Woody Allen flick -- when in fact it is not a stand-alone movie but rather is an integral part of the Star Wars story, universe, and Expanded Universe.

Episode II greatly complexifies the ethics and politics of the Star Wars universe, and this has gone unappreciated by the reviewers. No longer the pure good vs. pure evil of the original trilogy, Episode II introduces us to more realistic politics driven by greed, subterfuge, deception, layers of manipulation, and shifting alliances. Episode II draws from real-world history rather than from fairy tales.

The ethics are also interesting. One would expect cloning to be viewed as immoral even this early in the Star Wars universe timeline, yet Yoda uses clones. A similar ethical situation arose last year when the ostensibly anti-abortion President Bush authorized federal funds to be used in research involving stem cell lines from already-killed embryos, under the theory that the damage has already been done. Moral theologians to this day are debating whether this was an ethical decision. Yoda's decision is interesting for the same reason.

The Hegelian dialectic is the most interesting aspect of Episode II, however. The Republic is the starting condition, the Federation the thesis, the Rebellion the antithesis, and the Empire the synthesis. Dictators throughout world history have explicitly and implicitly used this devious technique -- creating wars both to prop themselves up and to divert attention from the real issues -- to gain and retain power. In Episode II, we see the real world machinations that Palpatine has to go through to gain power, in contrast to the fairy tale unstoppable force he is in Return of the Jedi. Science fiction has always been about analogy to the real world, and science fiction fans love to analogize. It is a skill perhaps lacking in movie reviewers.

Conclusion

The romance is part of the story, and the story excels. A compressed acting schedule conspired with a compressed script to introduce a few flaws into what is otherwise a great movie. Those of the Star Wars generation complained that Episode I was aimed at kids rather than them. Well, Lucas aimed Episode II squarely at long-term Star Wars fans -- which evidently reviewers are not. I only hope that Episode III doesn't follow the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis and give us something that satisfies only Lucas.