Star Wars villains too mild for Vatican critic

Kylo Ren isn't menacing enough for the reviewer for the Vatican City's daily newspaper. Photo / Supplied

The Vatican City's daily newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, usually reports on the day-to-day activities of the Pope and the Catholic Church, but also includes a number of film reviews and cultural articles.

This week, the publication (the daily edition runs in Italian, but there are also weekly issues in eight other languages, including English) decided to weigh in on J.J. Abrams' new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.

Turns out, the paper has one pretty serious complaint ... the film's villains just aren't evil enough.

"The new director's set-up fails most spectacularly in its representation of evil, meaning the negative characters," declares the paper's unnamed reviewer (via Tom Kington of the LA Times).

"Darth Vader and above all the Emperor Palpatine were two of the most efficient villains in that genre of American cinema," the reviewer says.

"[In The Force Awakens] the counterpart of Darth Vader, Kylo Ren, wears a mask merely to emulate his predecessor, while the character who needs to substitute the emperor Palpatine as the incarnation of supreme evil represents the most serious defect of the film.

Kylo Ren played by Adam Driver. Photo / Supplied

"Without revealing anything about the character, all we will say is that it is the clumsiest and tackiest result you can obtain from computer graphics."

In other words: Snoke's supersized hologram might impress Ren and other First Order officials. But when it comes to smoke and mirrors spectacle and artificial pomp, the Vatican definitely hasn't been taken in.Telegraph Group Ltd