He was never a *good* writer, but now he's terrible

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2002)

Don't get me wrong: I'm as big a Star Wars fan as *most* people - I have a pretty good understanding of the SW universe, the characters' relationships to each other and all the rest of it. I'm not as dedicated as some, but I still bought my tickets a week before the movie came out, and saw it on the day of release - I was looking forward to it.
Unfortunately, like The Phantom Menace before it, Attack of the Clones, George Lucas's second film in his attempt at creating a prequel trilogy to the original Star Wars threesome of the seventies and eighties, does not live up to the hype.
As you've probably heard, the special effects often look _very_ nice, and that's fine - if that's your kinda movie (think Independance Day), go ahead and enjoy it. But personally, I like a movie's special effects and CGI trickery to *add* to the plot, rather than displace it.
However, Lucas seems to have lost his writing skills over the last 20 or so years. Even though, as even the most hardcore SW fan must admit, George Lucas was never a literary master with his scripts, his skills seem to have gone excessively backwards in the last twenty or so years. Whilst I don't have the script in front of me (and it's been a while since I saw the film), I do remember one line, and it pretty much summed up the corniness of the whole thing; when young Anakin tells Padme (paraphrasing here): "I don't like the sand, it's coarse, not like your skin". Now forgive me, but that's just awful, AWFUL dialogue. And even though that's probably the most extreme example in the movie, it's also pretty indicative of it in the same way.
Not only was the dialogue of AotC bad, but it paralelled the rest of the script - ask yourself what it is that made a Star Wars film Star Wars. For me (and this is obviously just my *own* opinion, but from the other people that I've asked, they seem to agree), it is the battles (duh :) - on ground with a lightsaber, or in space; and the byplay between characters. Whilst there was a very nice battle between Obi Wan Kenobi and Jango Fett (probably my favourite scene of the film), these were few and far between, and Yoda's fight was too laughable to really take seriously. And of the byplay between characters? Probably my biggest problem, amongst others, with AotC - there's so little of it. We get a few amusing lines of dialogue between C3PO and R2D2, and it's pretty damn clear that this is what Lucas does best, so why doesn't he stick with it???????!, but there's very, very little between any of the other characters. In fact, there are only one or two that come to mind, one being where Obi Wan tells Anakin that "you'll be the death of me". Very amusing (to us at least), but so scarce!
Anyway, I've probably concentrated far too much on a few little things that annoyed me to class this as a real view, but I hope you enjoyed my comments so far, I'll try to mention a few things that I *did* like about AotC - really, there were some :)
As I mentioned, the fight scene between Jango and Obi Wan was fantastice, showcasing all the lightsaber work that we came for, and some quite nice cinematography as well. While the film occasionally seemed a little self-concious of the "necessity" (well, I don't think it was necessary, but a lot of other people do) of the film's large spectacle, there were some scenes that were pulled off quite beautiful, and with that touch of SW/George Lucas class - I'm particularly thinking of our first glimpse of the Clone Army. Unfortunately, there wasn't really a lot more that I liked about the movie though - the casting was horrendous (Jango Fett...Anakin...and I was just *waiting* for Mace to bust out his M-16 and "bust a few caps in yo' ass" :), the acting was bad (Christensen, Portman especially, and even Macgregor in parts), the script was terrible and the Star Wars magic shone through on too few occasions, even worse when you saw *parts* of it, but then had it stolen away by Lucas's decision to centre the movie on the relationship between Anakin and Padme rather than have it as the secondary story, as romances have been in previous SW films.

5/10 (Previously, I gave: 3/10 The Phantom Menace 8/10 A New Hope 7/10 The Empire Strikes Back 8/10 Return of the Jedi And, I'm a notoriously hard marker :)