Star Bores, Episode Poo: Some Smack on the Drones

  Yeah, that's right. The biggest thing making the new Star Wars films so drastically less entertaining than the original trilogy is the Jedi tromping dourly through every frame. (or pixel, in the case of Attack of the Clones.) The Jedi in the new films are bland, boring, and featureless as individuals, short-sighted and self serving as a group, and frankly less interesting as comtemporary reality than they were as historical abstract in episodes IV through VI.
  In the original trilogy, the Jedi were a mysterious order, objects of myth and various degrees of belief or disbelief. They carried exotic weapons, and could tap into amazing, magical powers that were beyond the reach of "normal" creatures. In the new films, Jedi are still elite, but far from mythic, and making them the main characters has taken much of the fun out the stories.
  "But LBB, Luke Skywalker was the main character in the first trilogy, and he was a Jedi!" Wrong! Luke Skywalker was not a Jedi, not until episode VI. Even once he became a Jedi, he wasn't the same aloof, sour cypher that populates the current films. He was a whiny bitch, which is hardly better than a bathrobe-wearing crash test dummy, but he also wasn't forced to carry the action of the original trilogy. He was surrounded by a strong supporting cast of non-Jedi characters, both human and not. Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Yoda (by far the most charismatic Jedi of the lot, which doesn't sound like much until you consider that he was made of rubber first, and later entirely digitized), Darth Vader, Han Solo. These characters had personality, which is far more than I can say for the current crop of Jedi. The only thing they do better than Chewbacca is fight with lightsabers. While these melees are some of the coolest visual spectacles ever filmed, they don't require a lick of acting or storytelling. George, here's a hint; if the you can't get a dynamic performer like Ewan McGregor to out-act a man wearing 15 pounds of mohair and yak hair, whose dialogue was a combination of pre-recorded animal grunts, chances are you're doing something wrong.