Just a Few More Minutes

Edited Scenes
The good news for folks who only tolerated the plot and dialogue is that apparently Lucasfilm had to edit out some segments in order to fit into the maximum IMAX running time. So the following scenes are either shortened or cut entirely:

• The meeting between the Jedi and Chancellor Palpatine after the assassination attempt is gone (which takes out a lot of the separatist and Count Dooku backstory).
• The "my-how-you've-grown-Anakin" routines by Jar Jar and Padme are cut, picking up the scene when they're sitting around the coffee table and Anakin's arguing with Obi-Wan.
• The whole "frolicking-in-the-fields" bit between Anakin and Padme? Blessedly gone.
• No reference survives to Anakin having nightmares about his mother except for when he and Padme decide to leave for Tatooine.
• Owen and Beru are never introduced, leaving the audience wondering who these guys on the Lars homestead are.
• Anakin's confession to Padme about wiping out the Sandpeople is shortened.
• Palpatine's inner circle manipulating Jar Jar into casting the vote for emergency powers? Gone.

Ordinarily, exposition is the kiss of death to drama. But the character bits and backstory that lie on the cutting room floor for the IMAX edition, while speeding up the story significantly, also make Episode II more of a cartoon. You have less of an idea who these characters are, and less reason to care about them or understand the decisions they made. On the other hand, some of the dialogue in these scenes is absolutely execrable. So it's an acceptable trade-off.

This is especially true given that most people seeing the IMAX edition will have already seen the original. So accept the slight "CliffsNotes" effect as a means of getting to what we really want: gigantic projections of cutting-edge computer graphics. And here's where Episode II does not disappoint.

Pretty Pictures
One of the problems with watching a fast-action drama on an IMAX screen is that your peripheral vision is essentially useless. On the other hand, the huge image makes it much easier to focus on background details -- and doing so reveals that Industrial Light and Magic cut very few corners, if any, in developing the environment for Episode II.

My friend Laura derisively described Yoda during his lightsaber battle with Dooku as a "spinning rat on a stick." The larger screen reveals that in fact the animators didn't hide too much behind motion blur -- most of Yoda's flips and spins are -- while not "realistic" -- fully animated with leaps, crouches and turns.

More breathtaking is the final ground battle between the clone and droid armies. This is where ILM shone -- no matter where your eyes focus, you see an impressive variety of technology and troop movements that suggest that ILM actually blocked out the entire battle. On the IMAX screen, a crashing background vehicle becomes more than decoration, but a player in this massive battle. The crash-landing of a Trade Federation battle cruiser creates a literal fog of war, and the sight of clone troopers and Jedi plunging into the dust cloud is unearthly.

A word of warning: the asteroid hunt between Jango Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi was impressively loud in a normal THX auditorium. In the larger IMAX setting, with intimidating amplifiers that wouldn't be out of place at Walnut Creek, the "seismic charge" explosions are actively painful.

It Ain't Art, But Gosh, It's Fun
By any artistic standard, objective or subjective, Episode II is not a "good" movie. But it's a fun one, especially if you can easily access your "childlike sense of wonder" or your appreciation for nostalgia. Bringing it to IMAX makes it more of a technological experience than an actual movie, and that somehow helped me suspend my disbelief in the dialogue and plot even more.

I liked Episode II for the same reason I liked Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which had similar plot and dialogue problems -- a believable, unearthly world was built. By immersing viewers more deeply into that world, Lucasfilm's IMAX experiment is a success.