Who put the dark in the dark side?

Rating: Null/10 (17 May 2002)

When William Holden, in "Sunset Boulevard", said "it's sometimes fun to see how really bad bad dialogue can be", he may have been reading the script for "Attack Of The Clones".

This movie includes such clunkers as
I love you I love you too.
A lot of heavy breathing. The scene that Rick Moranis played out with the little action figures in "Spaceballs" was hotter.
and
"I just killed everbody, not just the men, but the women too, and the children. Do you hate me now?" (No, actually, he didn't say "do you hate me now", it was implied. Yes, there actually may have been something implied in a script by George Lucas. My how he's grown).
One upon a time, "Star Wars" was interesting because it's creator/god had borrowed heavily from thousands of movies he grew up on, especially "The Wizard of OZ", and turned Dorothy into himself (luke), the tin man into a prissy robot, the lion into a big furry guy, added a lot of B-Western stuff, and a bickering love/hate thing, and it was all kind of fun.
Yes, there's still two guys and a girl fighting for good, but the girl isn't very feisty, the young naive guy seems to be having some sort of adolescent hissy fit about what happened to his mother (this is almost interesting in a Psycho kind of way and I'm begining to think I would like to know more about George Lucas relationship with his father and his mother. On second thought: Nah) and the other guy is just earnest (It's important to be earnest, he's a jedi knight, whatever that means).
I'm beginning to wonder what's so bad about the dark side anyway, other than the fact that they're played by Christopher Lee. Are they oppressing people? And what makes the Jedi so good? They're beginning to look like a bunch of elitists who are really little different from the bad guys. Or is this the point?
There is a lot of political theory in this movie. It goes like this:
"I believe that decisions should be made by everybody deciding what's best for them" "But what if they can't agree. Then there should be just one person making the decisions, as long as he is kind" "We call that a dictatorship"
And they said Lucas wasn't deep!
Star Wars has always had the feeling of a big overgrown kid playing with his action figures but at least the original had Alec Guinness, Chewy, C3PO and the Cantina. And it looked different. But now things look mostly the same (only more so), the boy girl love story has more mooning than a frat house movie, the funny side kicks have been kicked aside (Jar Jar's fault, I think) and the Cantina scenes are getting mighty old (oh, it's a diner now. Denny's Of Naboo or something).
I don't know what the bad guys did bad (cloned armies of dark skinned men, I guess) but all it really comes down to is which bully has a bigger army.
Oh, yes , there is the big laser battle at the end. You knew that was coming too. Would it be giving away too much to say that the biggest (actually the only) cheer of the opening night crowd I saw it with