Multiple viewings only make it more obvious what a wasted opportunity this series is getting to be.

Rating: Null/10 (21 November 2003)

** out of ****
My interest in Star Wars is rather casual. I'll watch the movies in theaters, but not with the massive expectations so many people have. Truth be told, the only film in the series to truly impress me on virtually every level was The Empire Strikes Back (Star Wars was great fun as well, though with weaker dialogue and acting than ESB). But movies like these are rare, these big-budget slices of escapism that harken back to the old days of Saturday matinee serials, only with (much) higher production values and (in this case, marginally) better acting. Damn, I seriously can't wait for Indiana Jones 4.
I actually looked forward to Attack of the Clones. The premise offered more opportunities, the special effects would be slicker than ever, and surely, even George Lucas could have improved his writing skills after the results we saw in Phantom Menace. But in the end, it's not much of an improvement over Menace, in fact, I'm not even sure it's an improvement at all. Despite the occasional energetic effort behind the camera, Attack of the Clones is mostly lifeless, pedestrian, and boring.
It starts off quite well, with a failed assassination attempt on Senator Amidala's (Natalie Portman) life. For protection, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan Mcgregor) and his apprentice Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) are assigned as her bodyguards. If you'll recall, Anakin had a bit of a crush on Amidala in Phantom Menace and nothing has changed the ten years since. Anyway, another assassination attempt on Amidala fails yet again, with Kenobi and Anakin hot on the heels of the would-be assassin. This leads to a spectacular speeder chase that puts the similar sequence in The Fifth Element to complete shame. So far, so good.
But whatever hopes I had for the movie were shattered soon afterward, when the film's core plot, the love story, became the central focus. I'm actually a sucker for a good "forbidden love" romance; I loved Titanic, enjoyed Sabrina, and even found myself mildly won over by Fools Rush In. But the love story here is so dull, it bears nothing in the way of vitality or genuine chemistry. It's like watching a brother and sister kiss (disturbing memories of Leia and Luke's kiss are all flooding back in).
Though Christensen and Portman fail to strike any sparks, it's not entirely their faults. George Lucas and Jonathan Hales' dialogue is horribly silly, there's actually a scene where Anakin compares and contrasts Amidala with sand, of all things. The culmination of Amidala's declaration of love for Anakin doesn't feel right, especially since it comes so soon after his murderous actions, which she apparently forgets almost immediately after he confesses to her.
Christensen is an actor with maybe a kernel of potential. I've never seen Life as a House, but I keep hearing a lot of good things about him. As Anakin, he displays many of the qualities we expect: he's arrogant, hot-headed, rash, and temperamental. Christensen's delivery of the dialogue could easily lead one to assume that he's a no-talent pretty boy actor, but it's a bit more complex than that. Lucas' dialogue almost never does him any favors, even if the script does give him the opportunity to expand his ever-growing hostile personality. That the Jedi council doesn't pay more attention to him is a bit of a mystery, they know the kid's got potential (that's an understatement if I ever heard one), but even when he slaughters an entire tribe of Tusken raiders, he's not even berated for such actions (to be fair, it's not like he told anyone, though Yoda clearly sensed his feelings during the massacre).
Natalie Portman is a proven talent, but much like Christensen, you could never guess it from her performance. She gives it her best try, but to no avail, coming off as one-dimensional, basically a perfectly safe role model for young girls everywhere without the slightest hint of flaw in her noble personality. It's a portrayal of cartoonish decency, written as only George Lucas could have.
Like The Empire Strikes Back, the story splits into two narratives. Sharing screen time with the love story is Obi-Wan Kenobi's investigation of the assassination attempts. Hercule Poirot (or Indiana Jones, for that matter, who proved quite the clever historian at putting together clues to find his sacred artifact), he is not. Piecing together clues is obviously not Kenobi's forte. The script goes out of its way to make him look like an idiot (and the people he's investigating even bigger idiots!); take for instance, the scene where he finds no trace of a star system in the planetary archives, and has to inquire Yoda and a class of padewan learners why it's not on the map (duh, it was removed).
His investigation leads him to the water-logged planet of Kamino. This is by far the most visually stimulating of the film's newly introduced worlds (too bad it's all glanced over). The Kaminoans live on ports supported in the same way an oil rig would be, only presumably in a far more complex manner, given the size of these habitats. Kenobi discovers a clone army that was apparently ordered by a Jedi master named Sifo-Diyas, except the guy's been dead for ten years. The army was cloned from bounty hunter Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison), whose New Zealand accent leads me to believe there's a planet full of Australians somewhere in that galaxy.
This converging storyline is only somewhat more interesting than the love story, but at least it sets up a couple of reasonably cool (albeit very short) action sequences, including Kenobi's hair-raising battle with Fett and an asteroid chase that'll remind many of The Empire Strikes Back. Ewan Mcgregor is a fine actor, easily the best of the film's leads, so you at least get the joy of watching this guy emulate Alec Guinness almost perfectly.
Attack of the Clones is a much darker picture than Phantom Menace, but not necessarily any better as a result. The pacing here is almost as weak (in both films, we have fun bookending sequences and an elongated boring middle segment) and the climactic action sequences (six of them in the last thirty-five minutes!) are something of a mixed bag.
My attention snapped back when the film suddenly came to life around the hour fifty-minute mark with a knockout battle sequence between several Jedi and hundreds of droids inside a massive coliseum. This setpiece boasts the film's most rousing scene, a scuffle between Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson, one of my faves, but clearly acting from a script beneath his talents), Jango Fett, and a giant rhino-like creature. The creature first charges at Windu, then charges at Fett, and finally there's a spectacularly rousing showdown between Windu and Fett that had my blood boiling. Damn, I wish this film had more moments like that.
The succeeding action sequences don't fare as well, particularly the lightsaber duel between Anakin and evil Count Dooku (played well by Christopher Lee), which is quite a few steps backward from the climactic duel in Phantom Menace. Without the athletic moves of Ray Park, it's basically an eighty-year old man swinging a big stick of light at a twenty-year old, pretty boy actor.
The film's silly title sparked a lot of arguments from defensive Star Wars fans (one friend of mine actually defended the title by saying it was good because it informed us what the plot would be covering) (that is, without a doubt, the lamest reasoning I've ever heard regarding the quality of a movie's title). But Lucas said he named the movie this way as an ode to the Saturday Matinee serials the film was inspired by. Contrasting this with Lucas' Indiana Jones trilogy, it's quite clear virtually all of that series' high quality was the result of Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and John Williams. Lucas proves he can't craft a rousing adventure and not even Williams' rousing score can change that.