Don't forget your gas mask--it's a stinker

Rating: 6/10 (18 May 2002)

"The Phantom Menace" was not a very good movie but it has grown on me in the last couple years. "Attack of the Clones", however, is so bad it is ridiculous. I did not go to the theater to see a comedy but the lines between Padme and Anakin we so awful that people in the theater were laughing out loud. Fortunately, I had a bag of popcorn to barf in just in case.
The movie starts out spectacularly and the chase through the "streets" of Coruscant puts you on the edge of your seat. But once you get about a third of the way through the movie you start to detect the smell and by the end you need a gas mask to keep from choking. The writing is bad and it doesn't help that the film moves from scene to scene too quickly. You're watching a scene for maybe a minute or so and the dialog and/or the screen action leads you to believe that something else is going to happen, but instead of seeing what you expect, you're wisked off half way across the galaxy. Five minutes later you wisked back in another edit, but by this time you've lost interest. This happens many, many times throughout the film.
There are some sweet spots that emerge from the smell though. You find out why Yoda is considered to be such a bad-ass Jedi, the visual effects are very good, and the music is stylisticly very different from other Star Wars scores John Williams has written. Unfortunately, towards the end of the movie some of the musical cues heard earlier for action sequences are heard again... sometimes several times... at the end of the movie, along with a couple cues from action sequences from "The Phantom Menace". This is a big budget film, not a TV show where this sort of thing is common. What's the deal here?
I give it 5 out of 10 stars. See it in the theater but go to a matinee. It's not worth paying $8.75. Save that money for when George Lucas brings out the "Special Edition" of this movie after he has a chance to fix some of its problems.