A Great film, but only seemed to be getting started!

Rating: 7/10 (17 May 2002)

Well where to start. Firstly I have to say the special effects were brilliant. Everyone will probably know at least a little about the general story line so I will omit that for the time being. With that out of the way, onto some more important factors.
Firstly every little niggling annoyance from the Phantom Menace seems to have been dealt with. Most notable there was a highly agreeable lack of Jar Jar Binks. The film does well at filling in the missing parts of the continuing story line, without giving too much away Anakin's and Amidala's love storyline is good, albeit it drags on a little with only a little substance. The characters are developed well, and you can see little changes in them, for example Senator Palpatine.
There are some awesome lightsaber battles, and the clone battles are fairly good fun. Although the highlight had to be Yoda with a lightsaber (?!!).

There was a distinct lack of any stand-out characters. C3-PO's introduction was the possibly the first piece of Star Wars style humour. I went to see it with a few friends, and we all agreed that although the acting was brilliant, the storyline did seem a little wooden. There was noting there for a StarWars fan that was out of the ordinary, with only one unforeseen twist.
Personally I felt a little disappointed at the end. It was good to see how the characters developed as a view to the entire StarWars saga, but it just seemed like it was churned out to fill in the gaps with few surprises along the way. There was a certain lack of je'ne c'est qua (apologies for my poor French). The special effects were jaw dropping at times, but surely some of that money could have been pushed towards adding a little more to the storyline. I am sure many people will say that it set out what it hoped to achieve, which it does. But i still feel that a lot more could have been done.
In conclusion, go see it. Especially if you haven't watched the middle films exhaustively. It does leave you mouth-wateringly into the third instalment......