Star Wars Episode II - 'Attack of the Clones' Review
If you're a Star Wars fan, and you thought episode II was great, then I suggest you refrain from reading what I have to say about it, as you might find it upsetting...
I feel swindled - I want my money back. According to the Sale of Goods Act, an individual is entitled to a refund within 28 days if the goods are not "fit for the purpose" they were intended to fulfil. The reason I didn't ask for my money back as I came out of the theatre in Finchley road was the sneaking suspicion that the extreme pain of the last 3 hours was exactly what Lucas had intended. Seriously, you can't make dialogue that bad by accident.
Let's be generous and start with the positive points...
- It was in colour
- It had sound
- Yoda fights
- Nice special effects
I'm being a little unfair : To give credit where it's due, the visual impression the film gives lets you know where the production dollars went, but a good film is going to need a lot more than fancy robots blowing stuff up, and the few amazing scenes that really do take your breath away visually only accentuate the truly painful romantic scenes and ham-fisted exposition of the storyline.
The reason I did not enjoy the film (other than when I was laughing at it) falls into three categories..
Firstly, there are some truly awful bits of dialogue. A character will say something so completely out of sync with what you're expecting that all of a sudden, you're back in the cinema, in a room full of other morons who paid money to be there, rather than in the film, experiencing the actions and emotions on screen. Frankly, the third time Obi-Wan calls Anakin "My young padawan apprentice", I perfectly understood Anakin's desire to sock it to him, and was almost surprised when he didn't. Qui-Gon barely got away with it in Episode I, but it works even less here, even though it is eclipsed by some even worse lines that come at regular intervals throughout the film. You have to wonder if the people on the set were so intimidated by Lucas that they didn't dare tell him how embarassing his script was.
Secondly, the romance scenes are bad. From the moment Anakin and Padme are together, I can't wait for the scene to end, so we can get back to what Lucas does well - vast panoramas, interesting new vehicles and lots of fighting.
Finally, and this is by far the worst part of it all, the exposition of the storyline is ham-fisted and brutal. There is little or no subtlety or skill in the development of the story, and we lurch from one scene to another through a series of painfully-explained developments. It almost feels as if the script assumes an audience so completely incapable of joining the dots in the plot that the characters have to do it for you. At various points along the way, something that you understood the first time is explained again, at length, "for the cheap seats".
Will the film be a success? No doubt. The loyal Star Wars following will ensure that a lot of money makes its way back to LucasFilm, and this will ensure the production of Episode III. What LucasFilm and its erstwhile writers will learn from this is that as long as they continue to get their graphic designers to come up with ever more amazing robots and ships, and the special effects team keep doing an amazing job, the dialogue and storytelling can be as clunky and unsophisticated as they like, the film will still make money.
As a fan of the first three movies, and especially the very first Star Wars movie, I am disappointed by a film which satisfies the expectations of a special-effects-driven audience at the expense of solid storytelling. I expected it to be bad - one doesn't go to a Lucas film expecting the level of scriptwriting found in "The West Wing" or "The Sopranos", or the storytelling virtuosity of "Jaws". Nevertheless, an opportunity to write a great film has been missed, and had this film been a worthy member of the series that started with "Star Wars: A New Hope", it would have gone down in history. Instead it is another addition to a stable of Hollywood films the quality of which - barring a couple of exceptions - seems to be in terminal decline.
Let us know what you thought of it - you can vote to the right.
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Posted by nlvp at June 8, 2002 01:38 PM