not up to par but worth seeing

Rating: Null/10 (12 June 2002)

Say what you will about George Lucas, you have to give the guy credit for setting himself a difficult task in `Star Wars: Attack of the Clones' (and I do mean beyond trying to deliver a film that will meet the almost impossibly high expectations of his millions of fanatical followers). By choosing to place Anakin Skywalker front and center as the story's main focal point, Lucas does what few others in this business are willing to do  which is to risk making a crowd-pleasing epic without a likable central `hero.' After all, since this film is a prequel and not a sequel to the original trilogy, we all know that this brooding young man will end up turning into the irredeemably evil Darth Vader. Of course, Luke Skywalker fulfilled the requirements of conventional hero for the original series and even Han Solo, though he was a bit of a rogue and a scoundrel, always allowed his virtuous side to break through when the chips were down. Anakin, though, for all his internal struggles in this film, is predestined to go over to the Dark Side (certainly in the next installment). The pre-knowledge the audience is privy to from our acquaintance with the later chapters gives the film a kind of poignant sadness at times - or at least it would if Lucas had done a better job as both writer and director in bringing it out. Unfortunately, the dialogue is so poorly written that Anakin comes across as little more than a petulant, peevish, moony-eyed schoolboy most of the time  hardly either the `greatest Jedi knight' we keep being told he has the potential to become nor the future Hitlerian dictator we know he will one day be. His romantic, puppy-love interludes with Senator (former Queen) Padme Amidala are embarrassing at best. We have indeed come a long way from the fun love triangle involving Luke, Han and the feisty Princess Leia.
In fact, that seems to be the basic trouble with this film, as it was with the previous installment, `The Phantom Menace.' Somewhere along the way, someone drained all the FUN out of `Star Wars.' The first three films seemed so fresh, so adroit, so light on their feet. The prequels, though they are not without interest, feel bloated, top heavy and devoid of any real conviction or excitement. One cannot fault Lucas, I guess, for becoming overly fascinated with his matted backgrounds, computer graphics and special effects, but it does no one any good to have all that hardware whirling by in the background when the action in the foreground is so banal and uninteresting. Even the set pieces here  a flying car chase through a crowded city that defies all known laws of physics, a cluttered battle scene that takes place in a gladiatorial stadium  don't get the adrenalin pumping in the same way that the space battles in the original `Star Wars,' the race through the forest in `Return of the Jedi' or even the pod race in `The Phantom Menace' did. And I will reiterate a comment I made three years ago about that last film. Why is it that, in a movie with `Star Wars' in its title, are there virtually no outer space battle scenes in this picture? Is that really too much to ask?
A few other problems plague the picture. R2D2 and C-3PO, whose one-sided bantering lent such charm to the original films, have become virtual extras in the story by this time. And since the rest of the script is so entirely witless, the few moments they have together stick out too much as obvious (and not very effective) attempts at comic relief. No longer do these two uniquely nonhuman characters feel like an integral part of the action. Even worse, the once endearing Yoda, with his annoyingly inverted sentences and his never-ending string of sanctimonious pearls of wisdom, has, quite literally, become this movie's Jar-Jar Binks (who does appear but in a much more limited role). The acting by Hayden Christensen (Anakin), Natalie Portman , Samuel L. Jackson and Ewan McGregor (a young Obi-Wan Kenobi, and who is going to believe that McGregor will mature to become the distinguished Alec Guiness?) is serviceable at best, as the performers have been put there basically to deliver the stilted dialogue and serve as foreground for the upstaging special effects.
So, after all these complaints, is `Attack of the Clones' worth seeing? Surprisingly, the answer is `yes' and it really has nothing to do with the special effects. The reason this film is worth seeing is because Lucas has undertaken to pull off something virtually unique and unprecedented in modern cinema. He is attempting to tell a complete story over the span of six different movies. Even when we can see how the film isn't coming together the way it should, we can't help but plug into the narrative development itself. Because we know how it will all end up, we want to see how the missing pieces of the puzzle will fall in to place to give us the complete, total picture. So even if each individual installment doesn't exactly carry us away, there's enough interest in the vision itself to keep us coming back for more.