Customer Reviews

Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones

5 star:		(824)
4 star:		(364)
3 star:		(297)
2 star:		(241)
1 star:		(443)

 

 

After the horror that was The Phantom Menace, which I own for those insomina plagued nights, I knew that I was going to hate this movie. I read the bad reviews and I knew that I'd agree with them. But, I was dragged to see it and I knew that it would be a grim few hours.

This is one case where I'm glad that I was totally wrong. I liked the movie so much that I've been back to see it again. The acting, that many have cited as dry, was appropriate to the setting and the circumstances of the film. I really didn't expect to see cheerful and lively characters in a story about an impending civil war. The romance, although muted, was appropriate for two very young characters who probably have never had much experience with romance to begin with. The middle was mostly talk and no action. I like a film that takes it's time and lets itself develop, instead of assaulting the viewer with non stop action and little plot or character development. I really felt that it was essential to the film to have the characters talk, as this is the installment of the series that starts to explain why Anakin becomes Darth Vader and why the Republic falls. I wish they'd actually developed them a little more, personally.

Hayden Christiansen delivered a solid performance as a moody, confused kid. The fact that he wasn't overly eloquent helped me to believe that the cute kid in PM could actually turn into the nasty guy that I believed was hiding in my closet when I was growing up. Natalie Portman again reminded me why she's one of my favorite actresses. She was able to blend the strong assertive side of her character with an almost maternal caring for Anakin. Ewan McGregor and his dialogue tied in the shame that Obi-Wan displayed in the later episodes toward Darth Vader and the driving desire to rectify his mistakes.

The special effects were dazzling. The seismic charges blew me away (by far the best sound effect that I've heard in a while), the speeder chase was amazing and the set design was just beautiful. And seeing lightsabres glowing throughout an arena was a childhood dream of mine.

There were a few flaws, but overall, it was fantastic.

First, let me say some positives about this DVD:

The image and sound quality are amazing. This DVD is probably the best quality DVD to date. Great for showing off a high quality home theater. Since the movie was shot on digital film, there was almost no ghosting or image quality lost.

Now the negatives:

What made the original Star Wars movies so spectatular was their campy dialog, fake but realistic special effects (even though you knew it was a fake spaceship you still knew it was a picture of a real model). The older Star Wars films were mostly a tribute to the cheesey sci-fi movies of the 50's and 60's. A true space opera, they were classics.

Episode II relies mostly on the impressive special effects to mesmerize and entertain. Acting and story are second to this. The totally cardboard acting of Haeden Christianson is so bad, that it makes you wonder if he should play an emotionally repressed andriod instead of the future Darth Vader. It made me miss Jar Jar.

Oustanding special effects that circumvent the rest of the movie. This movie seems to be made mostly just to fill a quota and to set up the clearly superior episodes 3-6. Makes you sad to see a performer past his prime, and Star Wars is way past its prime.

The great thing about going to a film that has been out for awhile, and that many people have trashed, is that your expectation level is reduced to a normal level of expectancy, which is where it should be to begin with.

Flat out, I thought the film was terrific and that nearly all the criticisms I have read prior to seeing the flick were groundless, inane, and overblown. First, this absurd idealization of the original films is nonsense! They weren't that damn great. They were new & original and breakthroughs, but the stories weren't that hot with the exception of Luke's quest & discovery of who his father has become. There was little great dialogue, and no jaw-dropping performances. There was, thank goodness, Alec Guinness as Obi Wan. The rest of the cast just limboed in under the age limit not to be ridiculous in their awkward teen love scenes. At least the young performers in this film are young! Their awkwardness fits. I always found the byplay between Carrie Fisher & Harrison Ford embarrassing.

Anyway, I'm not going to compare and contrast the two sets of films. The old ones are what they are, the new ones are what they are. I will just comment on all the vitriol heaped on Lucas, e.g., that he is too isolated & out of touch on his ranch (read empire). Well, he may be, but he's also busy inventing worlds & universes out there that I found beautifully realized, detailed, and exciting in this film.

The movie has some slow spots, but they don't last long. There are some eye-popping, stunning and fantastic set-pieces: the chase through the nightscape of the huge city; the great fight on the water planet; the chase through the asteroids; the narrow escapes of the foundry/assembly line; the battle in the arena; the climactic battle with the clones & droids, and of course, Yoda going Postal!

All of this is done with seamless and gorgeous CGI work, with new and amusing characters, with all kinds of mean & nasty critters, with a new villain (our beloved Chris Lee) and with a drop-dead beautiful Natalie Portman (sorry Carrie) and a young Anakin who has a nasty temper and has committed a war crime already. And Ewan McGregor makes a nice young Obi Wan.

The look of the film is fabulous (I saw it in digital) and the inventiveness and immagination throughout is phenomenal. I ask his critics: what else can Lucas do? He cannot make it all new & never-seen-before again. He is presenting a complex story of how an individual and a society can turn to the "dark side". The groundwork for this story made Phantom Menace slow-going at times, I agree. But the pace is accelerating.

Lucas presents us with fabulously imagined worlds & creatures, done with meticulous care. He has this film filled with mind-boggling action scenes. He stretches the capability of the technology with each outing. It's enough. Works for me.

This film is so awful, I could write a full-length thesis paper about it. What's amazing to me is how many Amazon reviewers acknowledge faults in the movie, and still praise it with five stars.

Attack of the Clones is Star Wars for the Attention Deficit Disorder generation. Lucas has overstuffed sequences with frenetic visuals, hoping to distract viewers into thinking they're entertained, desperately trying to compensate for the lagging, flabby plot and woefully inadeqate characterization. It's really more of a glorified video game than an actual film. Wonder which demographic likes Attack of the Clones the most? It's mostly 12- to 21-year-old boys who grew up on Nintendo, PlayStation, and X-Box. Unfortunately, busy special effects alone do not a great movie make. Frankly, the visuals aren't even that great. There was no show of Force at the Oscars when Attack of the Clones lost the Special Effects trophy to Lord of the Rings.

The biggest flaws in this film center around the scenes between Padme and Anikan. First of all, the dialogue is atrocious, with wooden actors delivering hackneyed lines and cliches at every turn. Honestly, this stuff wouldn't even fly in soap operas. Why should we excuse it in a multi-million dollar movie? Secondly their "love" story has no believability, and doesn't develop naturally. Annakin is portrayed as a snotty, arrogant, obsessive boy with a violent temper and psychotic tendencies. So, what exactly draws Padme toward him? Plot contrivances are often awkward or totally head-scratching. Jango sends Zam who sends a droid who sends worms, to kill Padme? And what's with the title? Attack of the Clones? What attack? The clones don't show up until the end of the movie, when they are dispatched to *defend* the Jedi. I will grant the film one star for interesting cinematography and costumes. Also, the fight between Jango and Kenobi is well-choreographed. But give more praise, I can not.

Most disappointing of all, this film is totally devoid of the magic infused into the original trilogy films. Maybe Lucas should have enlisted Lawrence Kasdan, scripter for *two* of the original trilogy movies, including the most critically-lauded, Empire Strikes Back. Lucas is now trying to do everything himself. He wants total control of the universe, but somewhere during his 10-year-plus hiatus from movie-making he lost his edge. Someday twenty years from now, another director will remake the Episodes 1-III. But it will be awhile. Good Star Wars prequels are still "far, far, away..."

It is doubtful that any movie in the history of American Cinema faced as imposing a wall of negativity at its release as the one that loomed before Episode II. To say that a large percentage of viewers had a bad taste in their mouth because of Episode I is an extreme understatement. I defended 'Phantom' as "not as bad as" people were saying. Sure I wanted all 'gungans' to die horrible deaths, especially Jar-Jar, but we had all the story elements plus some ingenious characters. At the end of its run I had decided that despite errors in canon and the abominable comic relief, I liked the film and 2002 was way too far away. As we got closer to the release date, I started to worry that all the comments about the whole franchise being trashed may have some merit. What if this one was an awkward disaster, flailing even further into the swamp of failure than the first? I intentionally didn't look up any synopsis or look for any spoilers; I wanted my reaction to be raw and immediate, based on what I was taking in. So it was that I found myself in line opening night; midnight showing, of course. I didn't really have any hope in mind one way or the other aside from "please don't let it suck". As I was standing there, I overheard a snippet of conversation from some youths who obviously had done some advance research, and one of them said "Oh yeah that's right! We get to see Yoda fight in this one!". For a few seconds, I didn't hear anything after that. Hold the phone. We get to see Yoda........fight?? OK, all thoughts of gloom and disaster are jettisoned. Is that a flicker of Optimism? Maybe so. We're seated. Down go the lights. Drum roll. "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." Fanfare. We're off. It's all urgency, action, and an overarching sense of danger and chaos. Whoa. I've seen this 'look and feel' somewhere before. Maybe it's too early to tell, but George may be back on his game. We've got crazy things happening left and right. Alliances are being forged and broken; acts of war and treason are being committed. Holy crap, there are more Jedi on the screen than I've ever seen before! And then one of the most memorable film sequences I've seen in my whole life. It's a desperate fight, and the good guys have exhausted almost all their energy. Death seems certain, and destruction is inevitable. Why are we looking at a doorway and floor? Why- hey a shadow...why is it familiar---? Holy crap. The theater erupts. I'm gripping both arms of my chair so hard it hurts, staring bug-eyed at the screen. I've got tears in my eyes. Judge him by his size does Dooku?? This is going to ROCK!!! There is a sustained explosion of whirling, twisting light onscreen. I hope the theater manager will be understanding and send me a bill, payable in installments, for whatever I might do to this chair. Whoa the pillar!-oh....my....word. It's wrapping up; we see huge ships, and battalions of white-clad soldiers stretching to the horizon. Where have we seen those before? The March swells. It's over. I'm sitting deflated in my chair as the masses file out, talking excitedly. I would like something to drink and a listing of showtimes immediately please. Well done, George. Well done.

Okay, I didn't love Episode 1, but I don't think there was a solid plot to it and Lucas was just trying to introduce the characters. However, Episode II is great. Everything a Star Wars movie should be. We get to see Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala fall in love, the Clone Wars begin, Anakin become darker after the death of his mother (which I think was the best acted and most powerful part of the film), and Chancellor Palpatine slide closer and closer to ultimate power over the Republic.

Most of the complaints you'll hear are from people that grew up watching the original trilogy, not people below 18. Lucas wrote this the same way that he wrote the first three, with cheesy dialogue and "simplistic" characters. With Star Wars, it is a fun time with underlying deep tones, but it is NOT the Godfather, Star Trek or other movie series made especially for adults. Almost all the complaints of bad acting, cheesy dialogue and simplistic characters could be applied to the original trilogy as well.

Ultimately a very good film. It's not the best movie in the series, so it should get a 4.5, but I couldn't dare give it a 4.

Having spent nearly all day reading approximately a third of the 600 odd reviews of this movie, and seeing only one decent plot summary among them, I would, very quickly, like to remind any future reviewers who read this that we are here to review the movie itself and not each other's reviews. That said, a quick run down of the plot:

As the movie opens Senator (no longer queen) Padme Amidala returns to Coruscant for an important vote in the Senate over whether or not to create an Army of the Republic to assist the increasingly overburdened Jedi Knights in their defense of the galaxy. Amidala is opposed to the move, since she feels that a standing army would invite war rather than prevent it. For her trouble, Padme receives an assasination attempt from an unknown source. Palpatine, in his usual snake-oil style, claims patriotism, and demands, against Padme's wishes, that she be protected, and that the assasin be found. The Jedi council confers, and dispatches Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker as her protectors. Anakin realizes he is in love with Padme, and tells Obi-Wan so, which is why it is so mystifying that he makes the decision to leave the two of them alone together on Naboo while he fulfills his further assignment of discovering the source of a Clone army, ready and waiting for the republic, supposedly ordered ten years previously by a Jedi Council member thought long dead. (But honestly, who didn't see *something* like this coming from the moment they kissed in Episode I?)

Enough of that, I don't want to spoil everything.

Favorite spots:

Padme--Now it makes sense why Luke can defeat Vader in Return of the Jedi (trust me, the arena scene explains a lot--Sister's doin' it for herself! Yeah!)

Yoda--again, don't look at the spoilers of other reviewers down the page...just...trust me.

Lucas has done it again, with perhaps the greatest episode yet! I know for my part I enjoyed this one better than the original trilogy. Buy it!

I really liked the movie in general but some of dialogue was unnatural or too formal. So as my title says, I try to accept it, even though I believe it needs improvement. A possible reason for Anakin and Padme having too much formal dialogue (as I would put it) is that they both grew up very fast.

We see Anakin in Ep.1 beyond his years as a boy and taken away from his mom to start his Jedi training because he's the *Chosen One*. Big load on anyone's shoulders. Padme was queen and now senator. Can you say, no personal life? I say this because I like giving people the benefit of the doubt and I understand that movies should be watched with an open mind instead of often exagerated expectations.

Someone else critized Natalie Portman's acting when she didn't react strongly to Anakin's slaughter of the sandpeople because it was horrible and over-exaggerated justice, which took him one big step towards the dark side. It would be believeable to say that Padme would think, in light of his mom's death and Anakin's anguish, they all deserved to die because they're a menace and a threat to peaceful people. On top of that, it wouldn't be appropriate to start scolding Anakin at that moment for killing all of them. She is a skilled negotiator and knows when to hold her tongue and when to speak.

I get frustrated when people become harsh critics of decent movies because most of the time they fail to understand characters' motives, the movement of the plot, etc.. In this case, Ep.2, we have dialogue that was stiff at times and given to young actors who did the best they could with it. I'm sure Sir Alec Guiness would've done a better job with the same lines but he's got decades of life and job experience over Hayden. Cut the kid some slack and try to enjoy the movies people. Just assume that Anakin spends too much time with fixing machines to know how be smooth with the ladies. HAHA!

Lastly, yeah Jar Jar was annoying but that doesn't mean he shouldn't exist! The Star Wars movies aren't a perfect universe where no annoying people ever exist. People should realize that you need to watch a movie not as a person in a theatre but as if you were a bystander in the story. Immersing yourself in the movie and not being critical allows you to enjoy the movie a lot more. Accept Jar Jar for what he is, an annoying character, but don't go wishing how the movie *should've* been. If everyone would do that you'd have a million different Star Wars movies. Accept them for what George wanted to portray and stop whining. :)

Episode 2 is everything I hoped it would be and more. The story shows us the turmoil in the senate, the believable relationship between Anakin and Padme, Anakin's conflict with the Jedi and it also has many subtle and prominent connections to episodes 4-6.

This episode also has a lot of treats for fans. Namely Jedi and Bounty Hunting action. We see more of the Jedi temple, we see a spectacular battle involving more than a dozen Jedi in a small area (something we've never seen until now) and the pinnacle of it all is of course, Yoda. Yoda looks great. His character is very well done in this outing. Plus, we get to see him fight, which is a real treat and great fun to watch. Seeing Jango Fett in action is like fulfilling every Star Wars fan's fantasies about what Boba would've/should've been doing in 4-6. We never really saw Boba do much. But Jango goes all out. We see him fly, shoot and use all kinds of gadgets. His space battle with Obi-Wan in the debris ring is spectacular (this is where THX sound really pays off) Episode 2 leaves Star Wars fans satisfied in many areas.

I was lucky enough to be able to see Episode 2 the way it's meant to be seen, on a digital screen. Digital projection is absolutely wonderful. The picture is crisp, no scratches, dots or dust. It's like watching a DVD on a huge screen only 10 times better. Digital projection combined with THX sound makes for the ultimate experience. It is my advice that you make the extra effort/time to find and get to a digital theatre near you. If you really care about seeing this movie in the best way possible, it's certainly worth the trouble.

This movie is not only a more than worthy entry into the Star Wars saga, it represents nothing less than the very future of Cinema.

This is a movie that you MUST see as Lucas intended; on a massive screen with digital sound... but even more importantly, in a theatre that is projecting it digitally.

The visual images in Attack Of The Clones, when projected digitally, are awe inspiring. The colors are so incredibly rich and the detail is breathtaking. It's like watching real events through a window, almost like being there. With digital projection there is no juddery movement when the camera pans, and there are none of the imperfections that come with film such as dust and scratches on the print etc. All that is there is a crystal clean, amazingly vibrant image.

As for the movie itself. It pretty much rocks. Sure some of the acting is wooden, and the script is a little lifeless sometimes but that really doesn't detract from the story itself, plus there are so many things that make up for the "minuses" that you almost don't notice the so called flaws.

This is a dark movie, far darker than Empire Strikes Back and it's actually quite chilling to see Anakin begin his descent into the dark side.

ATOC is thrilling, exciting and stunning to watch and the action scenes are easily the best ever in the series. This is just what Star Wars should be. Fantastic Entertainment!