saw this yesterday, thought it was terrible. it is comically operatic first of all. within the first 30 minutes there are three or four scenes of different imperial spaceships arriving somewhere and delegations with solemn faces and hilarious costumes exiting the ramps in slowmotion to crescendoing chords in landscapes that look differently but all have the exact same sense of serene vastness to them.
this is the temparement throughout the film, in the way its shot to the way the story is told. every shot is hilariously stylized. like reading a novel where every other sentence is some grand aphorism. never do you get the feeling of inhabiting the world he's building. you're being taken through it like a theme park ride, every element propped up for and angled and lighted for maximum impact.
and then the worst thing is that nothing ever really happens in it. it's really boring and you don't really care about what happens because you never get the sense that the film sees the plot as anything but circumstancial.
either that there's this hymnal predetermination to it.