Is this movie for real?

Rating: 5/10 (3 June 2002)

Attack of the Clones seems to be a movie in which George Lucas is starting to get desperate. He has to start inventing up the plot so that the nothing much going on "Phantom Menace" will eventually line up with the original "Star Wars".
George wants to stick so much of the explanation into this movie in order to have everything make sense that he glances over so many things, along with so much verbal explanation of the whos and whys that he needs a Episode 0 to get things straightened out.
His absurd attempt at promoting his characters to such high levels is at it again. Making Jar-Jar a senator in this movie is ridiculous, even worse off than all the earlier Star Wars movies where commoners like Han Solo gets promoted to some celebrated figure.
Why have a history of Boba Fett? He is just a not so significant bounty hunter later on with no grudge against Jedi masters. He would have gone and captured Jabba the Hut if the stake was high enough. It just seemed the whole cloning of Jango Fett and Boba Fett seeing his father getting killed is there for the dramatics, like we really care since Boba Fett dies off inconsequentially in Return of the Jedi.
Plus his transformation of non-politically correct days of Star Wars in which there is a planet ruled by a King or Queen to the current politically correct view of elected Queen with term limits. What is he making up? Does anything make sense? And even if the Queen was elected, how in the world did the citizens elect a child to be a Queen? How does Princess Lea become a princess later on? Does Padmé Amidala gets re-elected as Queen of Naboo before giving birth so the child gets the Princess status? Or does she get re-elected much much later on, allowing Lea to inherit the Princess title upon election? The whole thing is absurd.
How did it take Luke Skywalker something like a few months to become a Jedi Knight powerful enough to defeat Darth Vader while Anakin Skywalker seems to have been training for 10 years and he is still a dimwit?
Every special effect concept seems to have been ripped-off. The speeder chase scene from Fifth Element, asteroid scene from his prior movies, coliseum scene from Gladiators. The final attack scene was so generic that it didn't need ripping off from anybody.
Now Yoda is a super warrior? With the facial expression, flexibility and agility of a super being. There is always an assumption that Yoda, being a creature with the flexibility and expressibility of a hippo, is all mind over body, but this movie just tears apart the image of a Yoda that has been established for so many years. All for the sake of a jumping bean fight scene. People say he is younger here, but I mean how would being 50 year younger, compared in The Empire Strikes Back make a difference when he is closing in on a thousand years old.
As for the CGI, besides having way too many in which it detracts from the movie? It seems that they want to show all the details of the creatures that they frequently ended up looking hyper-real, not matching the rest of the human characters then are with.
I could go on forever with George Lucas' inability to tinker with the story at the expense things making sense in the later episodes. But I will leave it at that.
OK, on the movie itself. The whole middle section of the movie almost put me to sleep. The whole Anakin/Padmé scenes together were wooden, with absolutely no chemistry. Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker, was a joke, he is either in full rage or in medicated/lobotomized mode. George Lucas should spend less time inventing strange creatures and more time writing a better script/directing a better movie.
This whole make things up as you go along concept just doesn't work. That man George Lucas just can't think in linear terms or get his story straight. Imagine if he wrote and Directed Memento. Nothing would make sense.
Score given is pretty low, and I might even revise it to a lower rating later on.