A sort of pretty good Star Wars flick...

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2002)

A film with a lot of obvious strong and weak points, AOTC is probably a more dramatic experience than 1999´s "Phantom Menace". Nevertheless the story seems to be getting increasingly overcrowded, with all manner of subplots flying in and out of the main storyline(s). The movie´s most disappointing element is probably the handling of the romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala. Not many excuses can be made for the faux-poetic and stiff interaction we are given here.
Obi-Wan´s detective story concerning the bounty hunter Jango Fett and the subsequent revelation about the clone-army is well-handled. So are the political machinations behind what is to be the rise of the empire.
The movie starts out strong with a creepy assassination attempt against senator(they´ve "elected" a new queen, apparently...)Amidala. Followed by a showy but undeniably exciting car-chase through the planet-city of Coruscant. Going on to a somewhat lumbering middle-section cross-cutting between the Anakin/Padme-romance(dispiriting) and the Obi-Wan vs. Jango Fett story(pretty exciting). And then finishing off with an almost too-cool-to-nitpick all-out war between....well, I better not make any spoilers. You also get to see Yoda like you´ve never seen him before, which I must admit was partly really cool, but also a rather obvious crowd-pleasing gimmick.
The visual effects in the movie are all very rich and flashy. Though it´s impossible not to notice that practically everything in the movie has that plastic-ish CGI-sheen to it... In other words the movie lacks much of the lived-in, deep reality of the old trilogy.
The Star Wars-spirit is still sort of alive, but it´ll probably never again carry the mythic loveliness or dramatic weight of a film like "The Empire Strikes back".