What a God Awful Film

Rating: Null/10 (21 October 2005)

My room mates asked me last night if I wanted to watch this on their home theatre system and, though I hadn't seen The Attack of the Clones, I said yes, and was actually looking forward to it -- for about 20 minutes. Had I gone to a theatre to see this, I would have been royally ticked off; indeed, I might have stormed to the box office and, under the new policies, demanded my money back.
The production values are, as always, fantastic. Likewise the special effects and CGI work, etc., etc., usw. Ian McDiarmid does an incredible job, given the circumstances, as does McGregor and Portman. The less said about Christianson the better. Unfortunately, you don't have a good script, you don't have a movie. Period. Full Stop. End of story.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the end of the story. I had no emotional engagement whatever with anything happening to anyone because there is simply no heart to this film. *It's funny; in its way, the central conflict in this film -- indeed in the entire epic -- is precisely the same as that in LORD OF THE RINGS, the inevitable corruption of power; timely AND timeless, one would think. But this miserable excuse for a script, unlike even the cobbled-together script for LOTR, is about as shallow as it gets, with absolutely nothing lending any depth whatever to what is NOT a shallow subject. It's film-making by the numbers with the only colours available black and white with a few not very subtle shades of grey in between.* I watched the whole thing and had acute physical AND mental dyspepsia by the end, something that happens to me when I've seen a truly, truly dreadful movie, and, when it was over and one of my roomies said AOTC was even worse, I could only sigh with relief I missed it.
Hilariously enough, my other roomie, who collects films, was actually sighing with regret when asked if he was going to buy it. "Yes," he said, "but only for the sake of completeness of the collection." Me? I'd take the entire collection of STAR WARS films he has and put 'em up for sale on eBay, because, now we know what Lucas considers an appropriate ending, I don't care anymore at all -- and in 1977, I walked out of the theatre three feet off the ground. How times do change. . . .