Not so bad as all that - except, perhaps, in the effect it will have

Rating: 6/10 (17 May 2002)

Spoilers follow.
Unlike "The Phantom Menace", this one contains scenes that COULD have been great. The scene on the ocean planet in which the long skinny aliens calmly tell Obi Wan that the army of clones he ordered (and has no knowledge of) is coming along nicely - that had something going for it, surely. (I'd even go so far as to say that it's the stuff of great cinema.) Or the scene in which Annakin exacts revenge on an entire tribe. Remember, for instance, how chilling, how painfully constricting to our sense of hope, another such scene was in "Lawrence of Arabia"? And if THIS is the explanation of why Annakin became evil, it actually makes sense. Most of the psychobabble we'd heard from Yoda over the course of the past three pictures was as cretinous as it sounded, but that using the powers that set one above one's fellow creatures for the specific purposes of revenge is particularly dangerous; now THAT we can believe.
And, to be blunt, there's nothing wrong with the story. Nothing.
Nor is George Lucas's direction nearly as bumbling and ill-judged as it was in the previous film. Nor is this film nearly as bad as the previous one.
And yet...
While the story's not bad, the script is terrible: there would be far too much expository dialogue even if it were written with the slightest sense of wit or style, which it isn't. If there are even more lines that fall leadenly on the ground than in "The Phantom Menace", this is simply because there are more lines - but the reason doesn't matter; there ARE more lines that fall leadenly on the ground. None of the actors know how to make them do anything else. This time I AM inclined to blame the actors, to some degree; I know that few people could do much with the wretched material Natalie Portman was given, but many other actresses could at least have done something. Look how well Christopher Lee acquitted himself; as, half of the time, did Ewan McGregor. And when I said that the explanation given for Annakin's fall into evil was plausible, I spoke loosely. There's no one explanation. More than half a dozen are given. He thirsts for revenge, he thirsts for power, he resents Obi Wan's leadership, he is in love and must hide the fact, he blames the Old Order for the fact that he couldn't save his mother, he trusts the wrong people, he admires the efficiency of dictatorships, he wants to cheat death ... it's as if George Lucas doesn't quite trust any one of these theories, and so he half-mumbles as many of them as possible, whenever a break in the action allows it - and the result, of course, is that none of them ends up sounding very convincing. (Another result: Annakin was actually more sympathetic as Darth Vader than as the bratty teenager he is here.) And while George Lucas's direction is no longer terrible, it's still flat. He hasn't regained his sense of when to cut, and he still compensates by editing his footage into shreds. We don't get a good look at ANYTHING. That's what really kills the scenes (and there are more than just two of them) that could have been great.
Perhaps there were contributing causes of death as well. Chief among them is the LOOK of the movie. This is the first serious all-digital production in history. Oh, there've been odd movies like "Dancer in the Dark", but they've all had such grey, indistinct, watery, ugly images that I presume they weren't even TRYING to compete with film; "Attack of the Clones" clearly is, with curious results. In some ways it's much more real. Although some of the effects (in particular, the creatures, which are very badly animated indeed) are just as bad as before, there's no longer a clash in appearance between the CGI and the real footage; EVERYTHING has the same not-quite-there pastel look. And when I left the cinema and started to look at real objects again it struck me that the experience of looking at the real world is much, much more like looking at digitally recorded images (when the level of resolution is high enough) than it is like looking at film.
That's what I dislike. It's the freshness of the film image, the fact that everything looks just as it does in real life and yet different, sometimes magically transformed, that's half the joy of looking at the screen. Digital pictures are just no fun to look at. After two hours, I was longing to lay eyes on just one rich, saturated colour. (What's worse: when I stepped outside, into a gorgeous autumn afternoon, I found that the digital images had temporarily robbed me of the ability to spot such colours even there. Silver nitrate images, by contrast, SHARPEN our ability to see rich colours in the real world.) Perhaps digital photography is best suited to black and white.
Whether or not digital photography will remain inherently inferior, as it is now, remains to be seen. What I fear most is that the deadening experience of looking at digital photography as it is now will prevent us from being able to improve on it - perhaps even prevent us from WANTING to improve on it. If, as is frequently said, "Star Wars" changed cinema forever, and for the worst, I can readily forgive it; "Star Wars" is a good film. A great film. But if a mediocre non-film like "Attack of the Clones" ends up destroying cinema altogether ... that, I cannot forgive.