About as bad as the first one - LUCAS HAS LOST IT

Rating: 3/10 (18 May 2002)

Man, George Lucas has really forgotten how to make good movies...
You can't just use special effects to make a good movie, you need good actors, good acting, good dialogue, and a good story with interesting characters. The original series had Harrison Ford, Alec Guinness, Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, Anthony Daniels; they were all very gifted actors playing interesting and memorable characters. Episode II lacks all of the above. Even the special effects aren't that great.

My first beef with the movie is that just like in Episode I, Lucas feels the need to insert big weird alien creatures that look worse than the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. It reminded me of those old black and white movies like Land of the Lost, where the cavemen fight those fake dinosaurs... it's too obvious that the actors are fighting cartoon monsters that were drawn in after the movie was shot and it's not very convincing (and I saw this in a *special* DLP screening of the movie). And the fake alien characters in the movie, like Jar Jar, are really stupid looking and for some reason speak with Jamaican accents and spanish adjectives.
Some of the scenes make you wonder if George has lost his mind and has developed some dementia from his years of seclusion at Lucas Ranch. What is a '50s diner doing a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away? Well, there's one in the movie and Obi Wan stops by to have a cheeseburger, served by a droid waitress chewing gum and sounding like she's from New York.
Another big problem is that it seems like Lucas is just patching together a movie by biting off the original series... almost every scene from the original Star Wars is replayed in Attack of the Clones, from Obi Wan sneaking around the Death Star to Luke and Leia almost falling off the retractable platforms (Anakin and Natalie Portman almost fall off similar platforms in a factory). Lucas also tries to recreate the chemistry between C-3PO and R2D2, and fails miserably. C-3PO is reduced to spouting stunningly stupid one-liners.
And finally, the acting in the movie is subpar, Lucas skimped way too much on actor's salaries cuz he hired a bunch of B-list actors for Clones and spent all his money on special effects that aren't even that impressive (except for Ewan McGregor who is good in every movie he does). The love story between Natalie Portman and Anakin Skywalker was way too contrived. Natalie Portman is pretty to look at but her lines are so corny that they make her character totally unbelievable as anything but a sappy pre-teen in puppy love. And the new Anakin is not much better than the stupid kid from the first Episode.
All in all, I can't really say the movie was a disappointment because I wasn't expecting much after seeing the god-awful first Episode Phantom Menace. The movie brings nothing very new or exciting to the series and is totally forgettable except for remembering a couple of the especially stupid scenes to laugh at. Even the music is unoriginal and uninspired, man, even John Williams has totally lost it, him and Lucas are just too old.