Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002, DVD)

The first thing to get out of the way is that George Lucas is really a fine film-maker. That needs to be got out of the way right at the start, because I haven t had a good laugh in days. Fine, he had his little run, but it was far more because he came out with the right thing at the right time (and marketed the hell out of the whole affair), than anything to do with actually being good. I liked Star Wars fine, The Empire Strikes Back was actually pretty good, Return of the Jedi was alright. Could we maybe move on now?


At the barest level, Attack of the Clones has a somewhat interesting plot. I ll warn you that I may spoil something for you, but the idea of spoiling things in this movie is not one that I consider real . If you can t see absolutely everything coming in this movie, I don t feel that I should be held responsible. Let s just face it, you have other issues.

The bare bones plot has an assassination attempt on Princess Amidala (who is now Senator Amidala) lead to an investigation that reveals the creation of an army of clones. We are also led (by the nose) to another threat on the Republic, and in the end, the army of clones comes to the rescue. Of course, the clones have been created such that they blindly follow whatever orders they re given, and they are permanently loyal to the Republic. Unfortunately, as we all know, the bad guy is actually running the Republic, and the clones look rather like stormtroopers. Well, there we go. It s not so bad at that. It's given to us in such a way that suggests that if we were any more stupid we would forget to breathe, but it's not that bad.

Unfortunately, that is actually the entire plot of the movie. Nothing else, of any real relevance, happens, and you get to watch it at all at mind-numbing pace.


The problem is that George Lucas hasn t even the slightest clue how to get from point A to point B. The movie is, in effect, about eighteen minutes long (though in another way it s somewhere around four days long). We run through a nice ten or so minutes at the beginning where things aren t at all bad, and the last few minutes give us a pretty cool battle scene, and a nice light-saber fight featuring the bouncing, silly (though cool) blur that is Yoda. Everything between those two points is meaningless, horrible filler that leaves you checking your watch ten times a minute.

Worse, virtually the entire movie is... umm... borrowed . At first, when you are just settling in for the movie, and the thought occurs to you that this is some sort of Blade Runner meets The Fifth Element scene, you don t pay much attention. Once the boredom that is the movie gets a good hold on you though, it becomes a game. It is, without question, more interesting than truly paying attention.




Ahhh, here s the aliens from A.I. , and look we also have the ones from Buckaroo Banzai . Okay, that s straight out of The Dark Crystal , and that s actually from Return of the Jedi . That s cheeky, taking your own stuff. This scene sort of reminds me of The Princess Bride . Really? How do you mean? Because the shot there looks exactly like the picture on the cover of The Princess Bride ? Errr... well yeah. And look, he pretends he s hurt so that she ll come over and he can laugh, and they can roll around in the grass. Yeah, but that s not from anything exactly, or it s from lots of things, I guess, but it s just stupid really. Ummm... oh, right. Yeah, but look! He just threw a Spidey tracer on that ship. Oh, come on, you re reaching now. It s just a homing thingey, and that s not exactly something you can say came from anywhere in particular. Well..., but it was sort of spider shaped. Well, yeah but that s nothing compared to shutting off the engines of your ship and hiding in/on an asteroid. I mean, does that sound familiar or what? Hey, look, it s Saruman. Now you re being silly, it s just the guy who played Saruman. I m being silly? Are you watching this? Besides, he acts just the same.






Worse still, it s simply not a movie at all, it s a video game. While Episode 1' included the meaningless filler that was pod racing (or whatever) for no other reason than the really great game we could make out of it, Episode 2' decided to just chuck the whole thing and make the entire movie fit this same bill. We dance our way through thrilling moments that just scream of video game. Flying the little car through the crowded city, dodging, diving, jumping onto other cars . Maneuvering through the factory that threatens to smash or boil us at any second. Sneaking around the lair of the dreaded bad guy. Between bits of action, we see the video game... I mean movie... go to the cut scenes of people flirting with each other, or flying to distant planets, or who knows what. And, just like any other video game, during these scenes we are frantically pushing the square button or hitting enter to try and skip past to the next bit where we get to fly, or kill, or shoot.


With the possible exception of Christopher Lee (as Count Dooku/Darth Tyrannus - hey Darth Tyrannus, that s a good one eh?), and Ewan McGregor (sort of), everyone in the movie is absolutely horrible. This is, more than any movie I ve seen in years, an absolute model of what it means to not act . I have to admit, however, that it is hard to lay the blame on any of the actors. They just don t have anything at all to work with. The dialogue is so bad it rivals several RPGs that were translated to English from Japanese by people who had only a cursory familiarity with the language. The plot, apart from anything but the biggest picture, is laughable, and I think all the actors know it. Most of the better actors in the thing appear to just be wondering how they got roped into this.

Sure, Natalie Portman (Amidala) is awful, but even she has shown that she is better than this. Hayden Christensen hasn t exactly proven himself much, but he has at least shown that he can be something better than horrible, which he is here. It s hard to even call him horrible with a straight face, because in this movie we are given a Lord Darth Vader that we can t help but conclude is borderline retarded.

Most especially, the dialogue between Amidala and Anakin/Vader, and indeed those scenes in their entirety, are straight out of some early afternoon (read After School ) drama (read Special ). In fact, I feel I have somewhat insulted a certain group of writers there.


We get such a mess of a film here, that there is no sense in trying to judge it. Frankly, I would have to get some evidence that George Lucas was being serious before I could make any real attempt to do so. To really watch the movie is a chore in so many ways it is almost impossible to relate them all. At some point, everything that happened only served to irritate me more. We have those classic Star Wars transitions, except that we only have them now because Lucas doesn t have any idea what else to do. We also get to explore, in some detail, the character of Jango Fett, and we get to see a good deal of the gadgetry that made Boba Fett such a cultly popular character. As you might expect though, even this bit feels off. As though it was just thrown in because there was some sort of poll that revealed that people wanted to see more Boba Fett, and so we stuck it in whether it worked very well or not. Though to be fair, if we could have just the Jango/Boba Fett part, we'd have a somewhat more interesting movie.



The movie is quite nice to look at. There are some pretty cool scenes of spaceships, landscapes, battles, etc. Even the characters are pretty nice to look at, I suppose. In every other conceivable way, the movie is far below the standards of any given Final Fantasy game, made-for-children television, and probably a fair number of home movies.

It s not even that the plot, dialogue, and characters are bad exactly. It s more that they simply aren t. They just aren t there at all. The movie is like a sort of vacuum with little bits of bright light flashing about marking the path of things getting sucked into the void.

Apart from the fact that Yoda finally gets to move, there isn t a single redeeming quality to this.


The story goes that the next movie in the series is not coming out until 2005 for the simple reason that there are other movies of the same or similar genre that are coming out between now and then that don t suck. No one would have to try hard at all to convince me of this idea, and if it is true, it s the only thing George Lucas has done in more than ten years that made a lick of sense.