Oh my God! It is indeed the Dark Side!

Rating: 1/10 (23 May 2002)

*Minor Spoilers* (But I'll try to avoid revealing anything major).
I finally went and did it. Saw Attack of the Clones on the opening night in Strasbourg. I was a bit scared before going in - after all, Phantom Menace was a really flawed movie and I feared for the future of Star Wars.
Ten minutes into the movie, I was rejoicing. The opening Coruscant scenes and the "where's the assassin?" plotline was quite good and seemed more in tune with the original trilogy. Lucas was definitely back on track.
Not too long after this, the fate of Star Wars was sealed. It became really bad after the promising introduction. Boring love scenes, horrible dialogue and a mishmashed plotline that tried to cram nineteen movies into one and failed miserably.
Lucas has forgotten one simple rule: The audience have to sympathize with and care for what happens to the lead characters. He fails at this. There's just too many impersonal fight scenes, too much CGI and way too many locations, names and inane plot twists for the audience to do anything but look at their watches.
What was great about the original movies was the fact, that you were IN the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon, you understood the villains, there were few but well-planned locations that you'd remember and the plot was mythical in scope.
In attack of the clones you have two thousand locations all randomly thrown together. You have a love story (that is very predictable), a revenge story, a clone story, an evil villain (who pops out of nowhere) story and it is all too much and too impersonal for the audience to ever get sucked into the action. Add the too-perfect CGI feel to everything, and the movie comes away looking like a boring computergame. The fight scenes bothered me the most. There are just too many big CGI battles without a clear "thread" (yes, even combat needs a plot) and just too many aliens and thingies flailing about. The Amidala action scenes are just hillariously stupid (the desert scene, where she falls from the airspeeder anyone?)
I weep for the Galaxy. George: Do the story, let real writers do the script and for God's sake: let a real director take charge!
2/10 - and that only becaus Jar Jar only made a cameo appearance.