Redeemed by effects (barely)

Rating: 3/10 (18 May 2002)

Though a fan of Star Wars, plots in all four previous movies have been wanting. Darth Vadar's "I am your father and your hottie is actually your sister" thing has been done to death in Hong Kong in the 1960's, and frankly has no place in today's cinema, fresh as it may be for a western audience. Coincidence that The Lion King was also to be an alleged stolen plot from Asia? Me think not.
===Spoilers== Any way, the plot utterly floundered in ATOC. While the arc could have been very interesting, with the plot of the Dark Side slowly being uncovered, the lead character, Anakin the Brat, was totally unconvincing and was in fact painful to watch. His "tormented self" elicited from me not sympathy but an urge to take a light sabre to his face, since his "pain" came across more like "moaning and whining". In anger, he killed the whole tribe of raiders who caused his mother's death. If I didn't all know that he will be Darth Vadar eventually, I would have asked: So what? Did it say that he felt more powerful when driven by anger? No. Did he say he felt good killing? No. Lax plot development there. Instead, the future Darth Vadar cried like a baby. Wow, that really scared me there...erm, okay.
Amidala, while a nice piece of eye candy if you are into the teenage looks (a marketing ploy on the part of Mr Lucas?), was almost equally hopeless, though her character did not allow her to sink to the same depth as Anakin. The dialogue between these two, well, let's not even go there. 90210 had better dialogue. The scriptwriter shot for Shakespeare but fell far, far short.
Obi-wan's inspection tour of the clone factory was equally daft. WHO wrote the dialogues for this film? As if anyone with an IQ of 50 couldn't figure out that Obi-wan didn't belong there, and wouldn't have exposed him? As if Jango Fett would think twice about killing Obi-wan on the spot as they met in Fett's home? And since Fett was the original for the clone army and was "paid handsomely", why does he live in a nut-sized cubicle a quarter the size of Palpatine's office or Amidala's room on Coruscant? Don't the film crew even consider these basic inconsistencies? Slipshod work is that it is.
The final battle scenes were interesting to watch, though I am sure many are already bored by the display of computer graphics capabilities used in every other film these days. Jango Fett, being the most feared bounty hunter in the Republic, got finished off in 2 seconds. Tough luck on him having to meed Windu I guess? And I still think the Imperial troops should have brought along cans of Raid along with the guns. Would have finished the job much faster.
Last off the cuff comment: Christopher Lee, first as Saruman, and now Dooku. He has no luck getting new roles, does he?