That's pretty much what I was trying to express CO... characters drive the movie. Going back to my example of the action scenes, they may be the most spectacularly amazing feat of digital wizardry I've ever seen, but if there's no emotional attachment to the characters, it's ultimately uninteresting. In the OT, we'd get cut scenes of the action, but a good portion of the screen time was absorbed with following individual characters. In ANH, much of the final battle focuses on the pilots, not the actual ship-to-ship fighting. In ESB, it's watching Luke and the rest of the pilots in Rogue Squandron that's exciting, not so much the actual "external battle." Same thing is true of the final battle in ROTJ (i.e., we follow Lando and Wedge in space, and Han and company on Endor).

In the PT, by contrast, the focus is on the battle... in TPM, aside from watching the lightsaber fight (which was great because it focussed on individual characters), we're watching droids *yawn* fight no-name gungans, who aren't even sympathetic as a species. Same is true with the battle in AOTC -- do I really care which no-name Jedi dies or which robot gets blown up? No, because these characters mean nothing to me. At least things kind of got on track in ROTS, in my opinion, because once again most of the fighting focussed on individual characters that we have some emotional attachment to (or at least, should have an attachment to).

Overall, I'd agree that one of the great failings of the PT is the characters. Not only were they not focussed upon sufficiently, but most of the performances were too rigid and two-dimensional. I wonder if this is due in part to Lucas discouraging any deviation from the script. If so, it's too bad, as the actors could likely have delivered better performances if only they could have changed some of the dialogue. I would hope that they had as much leeway as Scorcsese gave his actors in The Departed, where he was happy with any alterations the actors wanted to make to their characters or dialogue, as long as it didn't change the overall story or character arc.

As for my original question, is the PT "technically" different from the OT? For example, is it just my imagination, or are there more medium and close-up shots in the OT? If so, would this have a subconscious effect on the viewer by making them feel more/less intimate with the on-screen characters?