Star Wars: Attack Of The

27 May, 2002 by John Hawkins

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Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones ‘Mini-Review’: I’m not the biggest “Star Wars” fan that you’re going to run into. I only thought “Star Wars” was “OK” when I was a kid and after watching them again as an adult I thought they aged badly. On the other hand, except for Jar Jar’s incomprehensible nattering I enjoyed “The Phantom Menace” quite a bit and was looking forward to seeing “Attack Of The Clones.”

I caught the movie yesterday and I found it to be a disappointment. The first half of the movie seems intolerably long, especially in the scenes where Anakin puts the moves on Amidala. I mean some of it is so lame that it’s almost a parody of itself. I mean listen to this line that Anakin popped off….

“I don’t like the sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating–not like you. You’re soft and smooth.”

That’s getting close to the “your father must be a thief because he stole the stars and put them in your eyes” level of bad pick-up lines.

There is a lot of action in the 2nd half of the movie but a lot of it feels forced, like it was stuck in the script because Lucas felt like “Geeze, we haven’t had any action for a while and we desperately need something here.” Irritatingly enough, what I think would of been the most interesting action scene in the movie (involving the Tuskan Raiders and Anakin), was cut down to almost nothing. That’s a shame because it was one of the few scenes in the whole movie that didn’t have the feel of filler. My impression of the movie was that Lucas had to advance the plot to get to episode 3 and this whole movie was just the method to do that, not a story worth telling in it’s own right.

Last but not least, I didn’t really care about any of the characters. Anakin is sort of a temperamental jerk, Obi-Wan is bland, Amidala feels like a pale imitation of Princess Leia, and you really don’t get to know any of the other characters well enough to care one way or the other about them. It’s hard to even really find “good guys” in the movie. I mean the Jedi are really clueless dupes (you’ll figure out what I mean), the “Republic” reminds me of a fascist UN, and the “separatists” seem to be shady characters as well. Since the story and the characters aren’t that compelling and we already know roughly how it’s going to turn out (since this is a prequel), I’d have to give the movie a “thumbs down.”