No to Digital Special Effects

Rating: 6/10 (23 June 2002)

Good not great movie but what I'd like to comment upon are the digital special effects.
In my opinion they don't cut it. What made the original 3 movies so memorable was the "realism". We all remember that mile-long ship just after the end of the rolling opening credits. It looked real as did just about every imaginary item in the three films.
I felt in watching "Clones" that I was watching a super sophisticated video game. Except for the desert of Tatooine every other landscape looks phony. The cities look like drawings from a sci-fi magazine not real places. That waterfall in the open country is beautiful but also unreal. Same for the Amidala's home world and most of the vehicles.
I hope Lucas realizes his mistake to rely solely on digital trickery and returns in the third film to a mix of digital and more traditional models/real objects. It's clear that digital effects still can't do the job by themselves.