Great only because it's Star Wars

Rating: Null/10 (16 May 2002)

SPOILER: Yoda does more than save Anakin and Obi-Wan; he saves the entire movie.
If you've seen it then you understand that comment - if not, go see it.
It seems more and more that Mr. Lucas has become part of the Hollywood Machine, as much as he likes to say that grosses and ticket sales don't matter to him. This movie could have been more than it was, but fell short on many levels, mostly due to a lack of true chemistry on the screen.
Sure, we can all watch A New Hope and laugh at the fuzzy special effects, the models zooming on wires in front of a painted black "starfield" and the corny and sometimes badly delivered dialogue ("I was gonna go to Tashi station to pick up some power converters.") However corny it seemed at the time, there was something in all of the original trilogy films that is sorely lacking in the new ones: emotion and chemistry. It seemed that Hamill, Fisher and Ford actually CARED about their performance and their films. They had to; there was no multi-million dollar fan base to back them. The film depended on them, not a computer generated cityscape, as pretty as it may be.
When Luke and Obi-Wan spoke, you felt the father-son connection between them. When Han and Leia kissed, there was true passion between them, not some trite rehashing of recent Freddie Prinze Jr. films. The characters in Attack of the Clones (AOTC) don't really seem to be enjoying themselves but rather just going through the motions. It appears more often then not that Lucas shot each actor reciting their lines alone on a stage and then spliced them together at a later date with ILM wizardry. I realize that it's very tough to make interesting characters when 90% of the audience already knows their ultimate fate, but that doesn't mean the actors should try any less hard just because the audience already "knows" their character is good, evil, stupid, mean, etc. They still need to make us BELIEVE it, and unfortunately in AOTC that falls short more often than not.
The dialogue, while not quite as pompous as in Ep. I, is still much too prolific. I kept waiting for them to get somewhere with it. True, the action sequences leave nothing to be desired, but I should not have found myself wondering when the talking was going to end and the action begin. The "romance" between Anakin and Padme takes trite to a new level. (Please - rolling in a grass field? "Truly, deeply, I love you"?) George, if you're trying to make more $$ than Titanic, you don't do it by imitating it.
Speaking of imitation, and not that this is a completely BAD thing, but did anyone else notice the blatantly obvious parallels to Empire? There were points when I felt like I was watching that movie instead of this one. (The romance, chase through an asteroid field, Anakin's loss at the end of the movie, the last shot!) Still, I guess there is no law against ripping off your own films...
Ok, enough bad. Beyond the emotionless acting was a pretty fair plot, and I must say that the movie did take the story where it needed to go. The action scenes of course stole the show (How long have we all waited to see hundreds of Jedi fighting with lightsabers?) It goes without saying that Samuel L. Jackson is a BAD, BAD MAN. You walk up to him and tell him purple is a fruity color...I dare you. And while I think there was entirely too much CGI through out the film, Yoda's display of what a Jedi MASTER truly is would not have been possible without it. As I said before, he made it worth the price of admission.
I realize this movie, like Empire, is supposed to end on a sour note, and that everything will be resolved in Ep. III (though not for the better, as we all know) but I hope that Mr. Lucas brings the emotion and the chemistry of the first three films back for the last. Yeah, yeah, we know Anakin is evil, but I want him to act EVIL, without assuming that we already know it. I say "great because it's Star Wars" and that goes a long way, but if I wanted to watch puppets on the screen I'd buy episodes of The Muppet Show. It's too late for AOTC, but maybe Ep. III - quite possibly the most emotional and exciting chapter of the saga - will be allowed to show some of that emotion to us loyal fans.