Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones

The fundamental flaws in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones are pretty much summed up in a single scene in this film. Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala are sitting at a dinner table (?), and decide to share a piece of fruit. And during this entire scene, the piece of fruit is completely computer generated, and it shows. It's horribly obvious when Anakin slices it in half, and becomes downright inexcusable when Padme takes a bite of it. We can see the actors are just miming the motions. God has killed a kitten because of this. That piece of fruit symbolizes everything unholy about this film. It symbolizes the hollow acting Lucas deliberately set out to draw from each performer. We have talented actors here, we know they can do better than this because we've seen them do better than this. Well, except Hayden Christensen. A friend's mother really gave an accurate assessment of him when she said that he was really good at what he did: going berserk and then crying about it later. "I don't wanna fight." His performance was as forced as everything else in the film. The script? Don't even get me started. People who defend this film from its detractors as saying "Star Wars never had good dialogue, that's not the point" are certainly semi-justified, but what they aren't realizing is that there was at least a small standard of quality in the first trilogy. There's a reason The Empire Strikes Back is actually considered a good film. No, the dialogue and acting were never really that great, but they were tolerable, and light years ahead of this dreck. Every plot development seems forced, every line cliche. The worst part is that this is even a step backward from Episode I, and is liberally sprinkled with painful one-liners that are supposed to be witty exchanges. Folks, when I want one-liners, I'll watch Army of Darkness. If this is going to be a serious film, they need to take a hiatus. Perhaps the piece of fruit is most symbolic of the film overall in that the film, like the fruit, looks beautiful but somehow horribly false and impossible to believe (the CG looks like a step DOWN from Phantom Menace, I swear), and is ultimately nothing but air. It's hollow, there's no substance here. The sense of fun present in the original trilogy, and even a little in Phantom Menace, is totally gone. It looks and feels like it was a chore for everyone involved to make, including Lucas himself. I suspect Star Wars fans will finally wake up to this one like they did to Episode I and it will plummet off the top 250 here. The reality of it is that the only true Star Wars films are the original trilogy, and this senseless new trilogy will probably ultimately be disowned like Alien 3, RoboCop 3, Halloween III (noticing a pattern?), and other poor sequels. ...all in a piece of fruit.

First off, don't blame the actors or the special effects. It's not their fault. Whenever someone knocks a bad movie, which Episode II qualifies as, they immediately raise the pitchforks towards the actors. If your going to lay some blame, lay it at the feet of George Lucas. It was his puerile script that brought the actors to their knees, and his lack of direction that made them stay there. It was George's unholy fascination with all things digital that massacred the screen with billions of wasted pixilated images, making the flesh and blood actors seem like they stepped into the Twilight Zone. This movie serves one purpose and one purpose only...to manually pleasure George Lucas' fanbase. The only things that seperate this wheelbarrow full of fertilizer from the average sci-fi schlock are the overinflated budget for Lucas' digital toys and the useless insertion of previous Star Wars characters. (SPOILERS ABOUND BELOW) The movie flows like a frozen sewage runoff. It goes from high speed, high altitude car chases, to boring, forced angst by the fireplace. To say that Christensen and Portman have no chemistry is to say that the Middle East might be facing some political problems. Their romance is about as believable as grass growing on the moon. Maybe they could have done better if the script hadn't been written with crayons. I thought these prequels were about Anakin's spiral downward from the path of balance into the Darkside. Is that ever going to happen or are we going to be forced to watch a third episode of video game previews for the Game Cube? We were given a lackluster hint with the slaughter of the Sand People but that barely cuts it. It wasn't even shown, thereby castrating the power of the scene. We just have to hear Anakin whine about it for about three seconds. Usually, when someone butchers a whole village of men, women, and children there's a whole lot more soul searching going on afterward. Of course, Lucas goes the pansy route and glosses over the whole thing. Most people I've talked to didn't even remember the scene until it was brought up to them. I'm probably one of the few people completely disgusted witht the Yoda fight at the end with the unimpressive Darth Sarumon (Lee plays the exact same character in LOTR: former wizard turned evil lackey=former jedi turned evil lackey). It's almost as if instead of a hand being up Yoda's posterior they've inserted a heroin suppository. Lucas has, in a brief half-minute, meaningless fight scene, destroyed the mystery of Yoda. The entire fight was unwarranted. If Yoda can raise ships from swamps and hold big chunks of pillar in the air, why can't he just pick up Count Poopoo and bang him against the wall a few times, soften him up a little, so to speak. Why? Because Lucas has toys he must abuse, that's why. The real star of this movie is the CGI. And CGI doesn't make good film. CGI is a support for a movie, that's it. There were far too many real world references, as well. Death sticks=cigarettes. Lame. Fifties diner in a galaxy far, far away, complete with sassy robo-waitress. Lame. This is supposed to be far removed from our world in the aforementioned galaxy far away. All I missed was the Fonz. Where the Hell was he? It might have been an improvement. In closing..Lucas needs to stop writing, directing and editing. Let a grown up handle these things. All that crap about these movies being for kids is a lark. These movies are for the nerds of the late seventies and early eighties who can't seem to move on in the world. The charm of Star Wars was gone before Lucas unveiled his uber-deluxe, special treatment of the films for the third time. And now he's doing it again. Maybe he'll go the Spielburg route and replace all the blasters with peace symbols. Rating 1 out of 10. I'd rate it lower, but I was never good with fractions.

The movie have a better and easier story than the previous one, a better performances, a better visual and special effects, and the world is still look large and rich, the Anakin and Padmé romance thing feels unnecessary but it's necessary and if it's not because of the Luke and Anakin father and son story it is very unnecessary, but i'm still fine with it, i just feel it that way, the rest of Attack Of The Clones is just as fascinating as before.

Excellent world building and plot andnew characters. Christopher Lee was excellent. The cast and costumes was excellent. The action scenes were fun. I didn't really mind the dialogue because the plot was original.