Better than Menace and Jedi.

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2004)

Lucas always said that his prequels would be very different from the original trilogy. How right he was as he has yet to surpass A New Hope or The Empire Strikes Back.
AOTC is a vast improvement on The Phantom Menace as we finally get to see the Republic turning into the Empire we all know and love from the original films and it feels much more like a SW film. However, I think the problem that the prequels have is that the subject matter is really only going to be of interest to Star Wars fans. I can't imagine that the average cinema-goer could give a damn about how the Republic became the Empire.
I think the acting and drama in this was way better than TPM and the action at the end surpassed anything seen before in a SW movie. OK it's not a great movie, but for a SW fan like me it held my interest and has a lot more depth/richness to it than Return of the Jedi.
Lucas still hasn't managed the chemistry between the characters/actors which made the first two films so good and I still can't take Ewan's impersonation of Alec Guiness seriously. Also, the Christopher Lee character was so boring and uninspired. How could the man who gave us Vader and Fett come up with Count Dooku? I think a female villain would have been great. I was so disappointed when the female babe of a bounty hunter at the start of the film turned out to be an alien. What was the point of that? Can't women be bad in the SW universe?
6/10