Overblown, overhyped and overdrawn; the worst Star Wars yet

Rating: 3/10 (9 December 2003)

While George Lucas's previous Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace, was not without its faults, it at least had its heart in the right place. It retained some of the sense of fun and excitement the original films had about them, even if it was too childish for most of the series' long-time fans. The original films were all about the entertainment value, and even in these films' darkest parts during the third acts of Empire and Jedi these films were engaging and supremely entertaining.
In his fifth Star Wars film (the second in the story chronologically) Lucas mistakes drawn out melodrama for emotional engagement and replaces entertaining sequences with action that seems tacked on as an afterthought and often feels redundant and out of place. The romance between Padme and Anakin is downright painful to watch, the Jedi apprentice's first steps toward the dark side are handled in a clumsy manner, and neither Christensen nor Portman connect with the audience - or each other for that matter. This is like a very bad fan-fiction with expensive special effects.
The screenplay is rotten. The charming one-liners of the original trilogy are replaced with lifeless and ridiculous pieces of dialogue Lucas mistakes for wit. While the lacklustre delivery in almost every scene doesn't help (even the usually brilliant McGreggor is drab and uninteresting), the terrible screenwriting just makes it worse. "This party's over" (Mace Windu); "This is such a drag" (a beheaded C-3PO) and the overplayed dialogue between Kenobi and Skywalker during the speeder chase are just a few examples of the supreme cheese this screenplay offers.
The effects are good, but used badly. I love a good special effects sequence as much as the next guy, but I'd rather watch something that's clearly physically real on camera (a good model sequence for instance) augmented by computer effects. The likes of The Matrix and The Fifth Element and to a lesser extent Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy delivered here where Lucas depends on computers to a fault. Jackson's films are shot wherever possible in real locations using real actors and excellent creature make up (like the original Star Wars films) rather than horrible clearly computer generated creatures like 'Dex' and 'Jar Jar' and computer generated environments (Geonosis) in Lucas's films.
The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, like the recent Matrix sequels Reloaded and Revolutions make the mistake of doing everything with computers and the illusion of a believable world is lost. It just doesn't look real. The battle sequences at the end of both The Matrix Revolutions and Attack of the Clones suffer from too much computer generated effects and the illusion of a 'galaxy far far away' is replaced by the 'computer game lookalike at the arcade'.
At the end of the day though, beyond the special effect-heavy visuals and clunky screenplay, Attack of the Clones basically suffers mostly from poor storytelling. It's a boring story that's paced badly through Lucas's poor direction and let down by crap dialogue and acting. We can only hope that Lucas responds to criticism and delivers a third prequel that actually delivers on some of the promise created in the original trilogy. At the moment however, there's nothing to indicate there's anything more on the way than another wooden computer generated feature film to put the final nail in the Star Wars coffin.