Rubbish

Rating: 1/10 (25 May 2005)

The "Star Wars" saga always had its faults, with wooden acting, clichÃ©d plots, eye rolling moments, cheap puns, etc. But "Star Wars" and its immediate successors also had characters, and one had an emotional investment with those characters. The early effects looked bad (seeing the movie when it first came out in the '70s one thought the Cantina scene looked like a bad Friday night Halloween party). But they had real people moving through real space, often on obvious sets (you can't make an orbiting death star look like anything but a set, so let's cut them some slack). "Phantom Menace" and "Clones" suffered from the same faults as listed in the first sentence, but "PM" had the more egregious faults of the stupid pod-race and the annoying kid. "Clones" had so many digital effects it stopped looking like real people inhabiting real spaces, but a cartoon with live-action, like the Toonville of Roger Rabbit. Lucas does effects better than anyone and there are wonderful moments of digital technology in this movie, but creating whole worlds and digital characters makes it look too cartoony, especially when real people leap off buildings or when characters get stuck on some sort of Rube Goldberg conveyor belt. Perhaps it's because "Clones" stuck in the middle of a Trilogy, but the storyline went nowhere. And does anyone really give a hang for Anakin or Padme? They're supposed to be the heart of the movie and they feel more like pinballs in George Lucas' great arcade.