Lowered Expectations Save the Day

Rating: 7/10 (17 June 2002)

After the disappointing Episode One, and reading so many bitterly negative reviews here at IMDB, I went into "Attack of the Clones" expecting to see a lame movie... and I was pleasantly surprised.
This one ain't bad!
(...but it's not all that great)
There is much to enjoy about this flick. The series returns to its old atmosphere of lively action sequences, bizarre alien creatures, seedy bars full of lowlife scum, wisecracking heroes, and mythic duels between good and evil. The love scenes and political intrigue aren't nearly as long and boring as I was led to believe they would be. The goofy slapstick and lame pseudoscience of The Phantom Menace have all but disappeared. By and large, this FEELS LIKE a Star Wars movie. Sure, the symbolism is heavy-handed and the plot devices are wildly implausible. But the Star Wars series has never been anything more, or less, than B-movie space operas for kids with inflated special-effects budgets. That's why we love them.
But, as with Episode One, we are forced to wonder just how much better this movie could have been had Lucas hired a good director, and allowed his script to be edited by professionals. Christopher and Portman are forced to act stiff and unnatural, and recite some of the lamest dialogue ever written. Samuel L. Jackson is wasted except for his battle scene. As in so many recent CGI-heavy action movies, the pacing is too fast and the camera changes are too abrupt to get a clear sense of the action. But on the plus side, Ewan McGregor has grown gracefully into his role as Obi Wan, and he almost single-handedly makes the story work.
Lucas has stated that current technology has now allowed him to make the movies he always wanted to make... but I can't help feeling that he made better movies when he was restricted by the laws of nature and forced to creatively improvise special effects. Now he just jam-packs every frame of the movie with whatever ideas pop into his head. Sometimes this process works brilliantly, but many sequences are a jumbled, cartoonish mess. Furthermore, the lack of edgy, dangerous, morally ambiguous heroes such as Han Solo and Chewbacca makes the simplistic good vs. evil overtones that we tolerated in the original series become genuinely annoying. This one-two punch of overused special effects and increased character blandness ruined the "Special Editions" of the original trilogy, and prevents the prequel trilogy from living up to our expectations.
Despite all that, I found Episode Two to be reasonably enjoyable. It's worth the time and money to see it on the big screen. And the overall theme of the movie (how the threat of war can be manipulated to turn a republic into an evil empire) is actually quite timely and important.