Pavlov's Dogs You Are, if you liked this.

Rating: 1/10 (18 May 2002)

In order to understand why people are saying this is "The best since Empire" over and over again, you have to understand that they are all suffering from Pavlov's Dog syndrome. I had a conversation with some younger guys at work the other day and they actually said the following about Attack of the Clones, and about movies in general. I quote: "If a movie has a sucky story and bad dialogue, it can totally be saved by great special effects. Good special effects can make any movie great!"
At first I was shocked that anyone could make such a statement, then I realized that hollywood is blowing the whistle and these guys are salivating. In this society of style over substance, there is a built in audience for horrible summer movies like Clones, who will ignore everything bad about it just to gett to the 'money shot'. This movie is more like Star Wars Porn than anything else, and if I had a remote control in the theater I would have skipped the chatter and gotten right to the Jedi on Jedi action.
As Yoda might have said when he still had a talented screenwriter, "special effects do Not a great movie make". In fact having to sit through special effects sequences involving characters you do not care about is tedious, and makes a movie seem even worse.
Attack of the Clones is a mish-mash of a film with ripped off sequences from dozens of other movies, from 6th Element to Empire Strikes Back, it has absolutely no story at all, no acting at all, and to top it all off they had to get Amadala's wardrobe from Britney Spears closet.
I won't bore you with any details from this film, I'm sure you'll go to see it and be bored by the details in person. But basically there is no emotional center to the movie, and no one for us to relate to or care about. In the original series, that character was Han Solo. They wanted us to care about Luke, but we didn't, we cared about Han because he was cool, and a normal guy. Part of the reason we don't care about anyone in clones is because no one is a normal guy, they are all wizards in robes with mystical powers. Fun to watch maybe, but can you or I really relate to them? Well we asked for an all Jedi movie, and we got it. But no one expected it to be this bad, this boring or this uninteresting.
Till we stop rewarding movies like this with no substance, we are likely to get many more just like it.
2 of out a potential 100