Eye-candy for everyone!

Rating: 3/10 (20 March 2011)

Perhaps Lucas thought that the problem with "The Phantom Menace" was Jar Jar Binks: nope, it was the fact the movie hadn't a good story or good characters. But, in this movie, all he did was just remove Jar Jar from the equation. And then he gave us pretty much the same thing again: lame story, boring characters, but all covered up in drool inducing eye-candy.
The story this time is a little more interesting: (minor spoilers!) the whole "Clone Army" stuff is a fair mystery, but the lack of resolution of this plot makes it, you guessed it, entirely pointless. At the end, clones are there just to fill up a phrase said by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, and the battles between droids and clones are completely devoid of any emotional value: what's on the stake here?, droids or manufactured people?. It's just boring.
But the worst part is the character of Anakin Skywalker. In the last movie he was a "goodie-goodie", but now is an annoying and whiny character, who lives complaining about everything, and goes on killing rampages when angry. If Lucas was trying to make these movies around "the Tragedy of Darth Vader", the first basic step is to make your protagonist a likable character, or at least, an anti-hero with a "fatal flaw", not a whiny, angry and annoying brat: tragedy comes from the empathy generated by the character, and suffering alongside him. The character of Anakin is so lousy, it's almost impossible to sympathize with him.
The movie has so dull sequences that it's almost unbearable: the "love" scenes are so stupid, it's unbelievable to think that the guy who wrote them was also the creator of "Star Wars". The action sequences are OK, I guess, but without a good story, it's just boring eye-candy. And Yoda goes on a light-saber battle, in a sequence so ridiculous, he almost looks like Speedy Gonzalez.
To conclude: Lucas didn't learn. The problem was not poor Jar Jar, the comic relief who couldn't make it: the problem was the lack of story.
3/10