Yes, friends, this is the official kvetching thread for Attack of the Clones. Spoilers welcome. If you don't want to learn about the scene where Suicide Squid saves the Jedi from the evil Dr. Calamari, stop reading now.

The crowd

My local mega-multiplex had something like eight screens showing the film simultaneously at 12:01am last night. As a result, I waited about 30 minutes just to spend $6 on a bottle of water and a "gourmet" pretzel that was ruined by having been covered in butter, sugar, and cinnamon. Can I please just have a normal, ordinary pretzel, sans goo? I probably saw five or six people dressed as Jedi, and all manner of nerd t-shirts. A local radio station showed up and was giving away t-shirts and stickers.

The previews

The audience made its preferences obvious. Advertisement for a Toyota Matrix car? Lame. Advertisement for Nestea? Extremely lame. Previews for Men in Black II, Austin Powers III, Matrix II and III? Excellent. It's the summer 'o sequels.

The movie

I'll start with the good bits. Space battles done (almost) right. Land battles done (truly) right. Light saber fu. Yoda fu. Jango Fett "where does he get all these wonderful toys" gadget fu. Samuel Jackson bad-ass fu. Ewan McGreggor, calm, collected, lethal fu. Natalie Portman clingy shirt with Princess Leia-like hair bun fu. It's all there.

Then, there are all the blatant references to the original Star Wars trilogy. From the oft cited Obi Wan comment to Anakin ("someday, you'll be the death of me") to a cameo appearance of the plans for the Death Star, it's all there, even the moisture farm where we later see Luke in the first film.

But, try as you might, this is a film where you really wish you had some additional commentary from Jim and the robots. Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker was utterly unconvincing. I can hear Lucas trying to tell the boy "you're in love with her, but you're insanely mental about killing Tuskin Raiders; show me the emotion." The results were flat. While Jar-Jar Binks was thankfully reduced to being background player, and Anakin was grown up enough to stop saying "wheee!", Lucas had to add something in for the kids. Enter the junior Boba Fett, flying around with daddy Jango Fett screaming "go get 'im, daddy!" Still, the worst moments are the blasted "romance" scenes on Naboo, or really anything that's supposed to convince you that either Anakin or Padme have even the slightest affection for each other. You really wanted to dub it with dialog from Shaft. Anything would be better than this.

Oh, what I wouldn't give for Lucas to have hired an actual writer to write the prequel for him. Imagine what JMS (Babylon 5, Jeremiah, etc.) or Joss (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) could have done. Maybe we'd actually have a believable descent into darkness for Anakin. If nothing else, we'd have a much more believable political drama for the fall of the Republic.

Thank heavens the Lord of the Rings is at least being done right.

FYI, my favorite quote from a Houston Press review of the film:

There's no reference to Anakin's supposed virgin birth, or midichlorians, or even the long-promised explanation as to why Liam Neeson's dead body didn't vanish like other Jedis' do at death. Several more Jedis die without disappearing, however. There is an explanation as to why the Force-sensitive Jedi can't tell that Palpatine is really the evil Darth Sidious, and it's a stupid one: "The dark side clouds everything." Continuity geeks will of course have a field day arguing about the first wave of storm troopers created here, as they all have New Zealand accents and kick the asses of enemies far more formidable than the gibbering teddy bears who will one day defeat them. But that's a discussion best left to the Internet.

LOL

I heard that Yoda gets hit by a train in the ending...

I saw the 5 o'clock showing tonight (EST).

gripes:

I felt like they spent the first 45 minutes trying to recover from the disappointing episode one. I agree the acting was rather wooden. Occasionally there would be a bright spot where they nailed a scene. That is the most disappointing, because you realize at those times what the movie COULD have been. There were also several times where the digital effects stole from the movie (tsk tsk...they should know better). Even with another screenwriter added on, the dialog suffered badly.

pleased about:

The last 45 minutes was worth the whole admission price. There was some great action scenes and the acting actually improved a little. I thought Christopher Lee did a good job with Count Dooku. He had to remain somewhat emotionless...he's been formally trained as a Jedi. I loved his fight with Yoda -- Yoda kicked some serious arse. The scenes with Jango Fett fighting were good...the cgi didn't interfere there.

All in all I came out a little encouraged that the entire series isn't shot to hell. They're starting to drift back on track. If they can get some decent line delivery and a good dialog script for Ep III, I think it'll be a good movie.

Almost every scene where someone was talking was accompanied by my cringing. All of the dialogue was awful -- even more so than the last movie. And that doesn't help the totally uninspired love story. It's like George Lucas couldn't come up with a good way for the two characters to fall in love, so he decided that they just were.

There was way too much goofiness. For a movie supposedly attempting to show how a good-natured kid grows into one of the most evil beings in the universe, there're an awful lot of bad puns, stupid visual effects (Yoda's fight scene being tops in this area), etc. It felt much too enamored of itself.

Both of those points are odd considering that a new writer was hired for the script of this movie. So we can't blame George Lucas for that. (And hiring jms for the writing wouldn't be any better, unless you just want long winded expository monologues. And Joss Whedon's voice, I think, doesn't fit the Star Wars movies, but that's very subjective.)

But we can blame George Lucas for the bad acting. The man never has been able to direct actors well. It's as if he just doesn't care. THX-1138 starred Robert Duvall, a man who needs no direction, in its only significant acting role. And similar things can be said about American Graffiti's Richard Dreyfuss and Charles Martin Smith, if not others in the movie as well. But when you get to Star Wars's fairly novice stars Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, you get a couple of fairly bad performances. It probably wouldn't have made it without Alec Guinness and an inspired first starring role for Harrison Ford. (It occurred to me well after the fact that when, in Star Wars, when Obi-Wan flips back his cowl for the first time, that the audience is supposed to go ``Wow! That's Alec Guinness!'', but since it was viewed mostly by kids, that never really came across.) And these last two Star Wars movies are the only other things that Lucas has directed.

But let's not forget about the absurd plot devices and squandered elements. Like the conveyor belt scene that felt like it was lifted from either Galaxy Quest (where it was a parody) or some shareware Apple ][ video game. Or the nearly off-stage death of Jango Fett, the one character that actually seemed to have had some actual character to him (I credit the actor). And Shmi's amazingly conveniently timed death.

Nor should we forget the remarkably bad editing when Obi-Wan was searching for Count Dooku (Couldn't they come up with a worse name? Maybe Count Turd? Count Shitstain?) and Anakin was searching for the Tuskin raiders. I actually had to wait for characters to be clearly shown before I could tell which scene I was watching. There was some other bad editing as well, but that topped the list.

Oh -- and Lucas's much vaunted digital filming seems to have fallen down on the job. I wasn't thinking about it when I went into the theater, but it occurred to me a few minutes in that he was having some really weird film-grain issues. You know what it looks like when there's nudity in a scene in a movie that's being shown on TV that they can't cut, so they zoom in on a non-nude portion of the screen? There are large segments of the filmed portions of the movie that look like that. I realized after a while that it must be because of the digital ``film'' cameras. And, unfortunately, the CGI'd elements are of much better quality, so it looks a little bit like those scenes in Scooby Doo where you could tell that there was a hidden switch because it was colored differently than the rest of the stone wall.

I'm sure I have some more problems with the movie. But the only positive I fell comfortable giving is that the plot is not insipid, even if the script is. Oh, Natalie Portman's costumes were nice, too. (It's interesting to note that it apparently gets pretty chilly in Tunisia every once in a while.)

Roger Ebert: Anakin Skywalker was only a boy as the hero of "Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace." But now he's grown into young manhood in "Episode II--Attack of the Clones," and we can see early signs that he will eventually become the evil Darth Vader. But in this new "Star Wars" movie, he's a hero, assigned along with his mentor, a younger Obi-Wan Kenobi, to guard Senator Padme Amidala, as she leads the Republic in its defense against the rebels.

Director George Lucas is an outspoken advocate of digital filmmaking, and the models, puppets and miniatures of the first three "Star Wars" movies have been replaced in the last two by computer-generated images. The use of computer animation allows Lucas to greatly expand the scope of his canvas in epic shots like this one.

That looks sensational, but the surprise is, "Episode II" bogs down in too much dialogue. Apart from one big action sequence, the first hour is mostly stiff and banal, without any wit or excitement. As for the images, Lucas shot "Episode II" not on film but on digital videotape with a new digital camera made just for him by Sony. Nineteen theaters [nationwide] will be showing it in digital projection. Everyone else in about 3,000 other theaters will see it transferred to film, as I [originally] did. [Ebert later saw it in a digital version, which he thought looked much better.] I saw the movie on a very big screen, which was not kind to the digital process. Scenes looked fuzzy, action was often unconvincing, and alien creatures sometimes lurched as awkwardly as in 1950s sci-fi pictures. The trailers on the Web curiously look sharper and brighter.

Richard Roeper: Well, I thought there was a visual texture to "Episode II" that surpasses not only "The Phantom Menace," but the first three "Star Wars" films. The blending of human actors, costumed creations, elaborate sets and those digital effects was nearly seamless. This is a great-looking movie, with distinct planet environments, sweeping astral landscapes--and even outer-space rainstorms.

And it's not just the backdrops and the explosions that are more impressive--it's the non-human characters. The Yoda of "Attack of the Clones" is so expressive and mobile that he makes the old Yoda look like the sock puppet he is.

The cast is also uniformly strong. It's not easy acting opposite robots and blue screens and imaginary Jedi masters, but Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson and Natalie Portman are more than up to the task. I really liked the love story between Christensen and Portman, even though I couldn't quite figure out how he aged more than a decade, while she looked pretty much the same as she did when he was a little boy. But that's a minor quibble, I liked this movie a lot.

Ebert: OK, now we disagree about the visuals, so let's put that to one side, there is not one line in this movie that you can quote with any pleasure. It is the most banal script I have ever read! It's just all about exactly what the plot requires him to say in any given moment. And the love story is just dead in the water.

Roeper: I don't think it's dead in the water at all, you've got. ...

Ebert: I didn't feel any chemistry between them, and as for the things that they say, those are ancient ancient tired tired romantic cliches from a thousand thousand other movies!

Roeper: Well, this is a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. So maybe they invented these cliches. ...

Ebert: Gee, that's a great idea.

Roeper: ...And then Shakespeare got them from there.

Ebert: Oh, wow.

Roeper: First of all, Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen are great-looking actors, and I think they have a wonderful chemistry together. I like their loves scenes together.

Ebert: They're both like sticks. ...

Roeper: I don't think they are at all.

Ebert: ...They just kind of stare at each other while [saying] "I love you, but I mustn't love you." Oh, come on, and then the rest of the dialogue all about what's happened before and what's going to happen next. What's happening in the Empire, what's happening in the Republic.

Roeper: OK, you know what, you go through all five "Star Wars" movies, and there's a lot of that sort of sci-fi Western and outer-space dialogue. It's corny stuff, and there's a lot of fortune-cookie wisdom from Yoda.

Ebert: Yeah, but why can't somebody in this movie have something interesting to say and say it with wit and style and flash? The actors are all dialed down, none of them seem excited enough to be who they are.

Roeper: I disagree with that as well, and I think there are some witty exchanges between Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen. You know the apprentice and the master, that sort of thing. And it's a fun approach to the "Star Wars" story. This movie does not take itself as seriously as "Phantom Menace" does. And I think, you want to go back to the visuals, I think it looks great!

Ebert: Oh, well, I don't think it looks great!

Roeper: I think it looks great!

Ebert: You take Yoda--now you like this Yoda better than the other Yoda?

Roeper: Yeah, and you know what, go back and look at that other Yoda. That other Yoda you can practically see the guy crouching underneath the set with the little Yoda puppet!

Ebert: The other Yoda never looked like a sock puppet and not only did he not look like a sock puppet, but Lucas has said that he tried to make this Yoda look like the Muppet Yoda so you wouldn't. ...

Roeper: Only more expressive.

Ebert: No.

Roeper: And there's this whole "Crouching Yoda, Hidden Dragon" thing that's just...

Ebert: You like the fact that Yoda turns into an action figure now with his light saber?

Roeper: I think that that is a scene [with Yoda] that "Star Wars" fans are going to absolutely love, I loved it.

Ebert: It's totally out of character for him.

Roeper: It's not totally out of character for him! That's part of his skills. He's not just this brilliant philosopher, he's also a Jedi warrior!

Ebert: Listen, if you're Yoda and you have the Force. ...

Roeper: He's a Jedi master.

Ebert: ...If you encompass the Force, you don't need no lightsaber!

Roeper: You do when you're going up against another Jedi dude who's also got super-duper mind powers!

Ebert: You've just got to go like this [makes a mind-reading gesture]. You're Yoda, nobody can stop you.

Roeper: Well, he was being stopped mentally, so he had to go to the physical stuff.

Ebert: OK.

Roeper: It's a lot of fun, and there's a lot of great action sequences.

Ebert: OK, well, I'm sure that a lot of people will agree with you.

Roeper: I hope so.

Ebert: OK.

Yup, that pretty much sums it up. Ebert is trying to make sense out of it, and Roeper is taken in by the eye candy.

I still think JMS could have done a better job with the writing. If nothing else, he could come up with a much better outline for the major plot developments, and somebody else could fill them in. Say what you want negative about Babylon 5, but it never had cute kids, dorky aliens, or inconceivable galactic politics. Likewise, B5 never had scenes that seemed designed solely for video game adaptations (e.g., Padme trying to avoid the metal stamping machines).

Likewise, B5 never had scenes that seemed designed solely for video game adaptations

Anyone else feel like this was the only reason Episode I had that pod race scene, so that they could put giant pod racers into the arcade and several games out onto the consoles?

But we can blame George Lucas for the bad acting.

I'm told that he gives only two directions: "Faster" and "More intense".

I enjoyed the film, but I agree that the acting was wooden. In my theater, one particularly woodenly-acted line actually elicited peals of laughter from the audience:
"Are you all right?"
"Yes, I'm all right".

And I agree that Lucas can't tell a love story to save his life. I don't think he even understands love. I can't see why Amidala fell for Anakin, there's just no motivation there. I could almost buy it if it was a pity thing, but if so, they could have made it more obvious. My wife brought up the point that all of Lucas's kids are adopted, and he can't maintain a stable relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Now we see why.

However, with all of that out of the way, I have to say that the last scenes in the movie were incredible, and were worth the entire experience. The worst lines get uttered right before the movie gets good (Amidala declaring her love for Anakin before going into the arena). From the moment they're hauled out into the arena, after that, the movie completely and utterly rocked. It was a complete feast of action and visuals that blows away anything else ever put on screen.

As for the first half of the movie, well, the speeder chase through Coruscant was pretty cool, and the Jango Fett fight was cool, but the rest of it could have been binned.

Actually, he can't bin the rest of it, as it was all necessary exposition. At this point, I'm hoping he's all out of exposition by the time he writes Ep3. Everything is set up now, he should just get to the action in Ep3.

So what is going to happen in Ep3 I wonder? I see the following things that need to be resolved:

- We need to see Palpatine refuse to give up his emergency powers and declare himself emperor. We've already seen the setup for this.

- We need to see the Death Star get built.

- We need to see the plans get stolen.

- We need to see how Luke and Leia get hidden from Anakin.

- We need to see Anakin's descent into the dark side.

- We need to see the Jedi realize they've been backing the Wrong Horse all this time and get wiped out in the process (with Yoda and Ben going into hiding).

- We need to see why Ben chooses Tatooine as his hermit hideout. I'm figuring it's related to delivering Luke to the Lars family. As far as Yoda is concerned, I assume he just likes swamps.

- We need to see how the rebel alliance gets born out of this conflict. For a while, I thought Dooku's separatists would become the alliance, but it's made clear in the end that this is not going to be the case.

- We need to see why Threepio and Artoo's memory gets erased so that Threepio doesn't remember who-owns-who by Ep4.

- We need to see this asinine Midichlorian thing explained.

- We need to see the "Jedi can merge with the force" thing explained (why didn't Qui-Gon do it, etc.).

- We need to see why Vader can sense Luke's presence across a planet, but can't sense that Leia is his daughter when he's in the same room torturing her for the location of the rebel base.

I think these last three points will be somehow related. I'll bet that Yoda takes Obi-Wan off to explain some deep secrets of the Light side of the force, and shows him the "merge" trick. This must somehow be related to Midichlorians and bloodlines in such a way that all of those things get wrapped up neatly.

Comments?

Anyone else feel like this was the only reason Episode I had that pod race scene, so that they could put giant pod racers into the arcade and several games out onto the consoles?

No. The Podrace was there for the same reason the Coruscant speeder-chase was in Ep2: To break up the monotony of an hour of exposition.

The Podrace was there for the same reason the Coruscant speeder-chase was in Ep2: To break up the monotony of an hour of exposition.

Oh, God, don't get me started about that ridiculous pod race.

Here we have a race so important that the entry fee is the equivalent of a star ship -- surely a multi-billion dollar value. And this race is contested and won by an eight year old kid who designed and built a racer out of parts from a junk yard.

Right. And my next-door neighbor's third-grader is going to win the Indy 500 on her father's lawn tractor (she'll have to remove the cutting blade to get it through pre-race tech inspection). A movie is supposed to be about enjoyment through suspension of disbelief, but nobody over the age of 10 could possibly suspend enough disbelief to lose himself in that scene.

I haven't seen Episode 2 yet, and I won't see it until it comes out on network television because after Episode 1 and what I have heard about Episode 2, I certainly wouldn't spend a nickel to see it sooner than that.

Has it occurred to anybody that these movies (in some contrast to the original three Star Wars movies) are aimed squarely at a 10--12 year old audience?

tanstaafl.

I won't argue your technical points about the pod race, but damn, it was a great scene. Wonderful tribute to Ben-Hur except with more action and visuals. I really liked it.

Of course, suspension of disbelief is the most important part of enjoying any piece of fiction. But for me, it's not technical details that make me lose my SoD. It's simpler things like the actor's dialogue didn't get looped in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, so the entire time, all of the apes sounded like people lisping through rubber prosthetics. I mean, that movie had the best ape make-up ever put on film, and it's completely wasted because they don't take a couple weeks to re-record the dialogue. I would have totally BOUGHT the apes in that movie if it weren't for the lisping through the rubber. What were they thinking?

And yes, these movies are aimed at youngsters and teens. But every time a new Star Wars film comes out, I'm 12 all over again...

"But every time a new Star Wars film comes out, I'm 12 all over again..."

Good call.

Truth is, I liked EP1 and I loved EP2. I agree the acting wasn't great, but I don't care. The acting was terrible in the original movies but I don't watch them for the acting. If we had great acting the movies wouldn't feel like Star Wars!

I had more fun watching these last two movies than most movies I have seen in the last few years (that had better plots and better acting), and that’s why I go to see them. I must have seen EP4 twenty times, and I don't think I ever once watched it once for believability, acting, or social commentary.

Although I'm not the first to say it, all of us who grew up with Star Wars take the thing way to seriously, and it was never meant for that.

All this being said, LOTR is a book that is more than just fun and the bar is much higher for a movie made in its tradition. Fortunately (in my opinion, though many disagree), I think they succeeded very well in this and I am more excited about the "Two Towers" that I have ever been about a Star Wars movie.

whada bout the lameness in which c3po's head gets switched with the badguy droids head? I can already see the toy on the shelf in the store "c3po with interchangable head!" I'm still confused as to how a person can have their hand pounded in an industrial press, get a plate of 2 inch thick steele slapped and riveted over it, and in the end pull out all of their digits unharmed.... WTF???

Okay, I think the C3PO head switching was cool and funny. I enjoyed it.

"This is a drag" - r2d2 dragging c3po's head
"I'm beside myself" - r2d2 stops at c3po's body

I would rather have 10x more lines like this than 1 second of jar jar, or the yoda-cum-mortal kombat scene. At least r2d2 and c3po are meant to be cheesy whereas that fight scene is meant to be serious and comes off like a saturday morning cartoon.
I think Lucas has been smoking monster crack rocks to think the digital yoda looks even close to the live puppet. Worse yet he seems to think flying yoda doing double flips and floating through the air is believeable when he normally walks with a cane. If he can do all that floating and flipping crap why doesn't he just fly around all day like superman instead of worrying about hobbling around?
And my final rant, why is Lucas releasing the prequels fairly quickly on DVD (well only EPI so far) when the originals are still not available on DVD? That really pisses me off.

I think you're in the minority here. Everyone else I've talked to just loved the kung-fu Yoda.



And Lucas is waiting to release Ep4-Ep6 on DVD because he wants to personally supervise the production to make sure they're totally perfect and they have a great bunch of new special DVD features. While he's making Ep1-Ep3, he just doesn't have the time to do it.

Sure sure, now he says that. Before it was that he wanted to wait until all the films were released. Well, I see the entire current production schedule as simply a way to maximize profits. There isn't anything about the artistry in it.

Think about it. The movies are being released juuuust far apart enough to release the movie, have it die out in theaters, release the DVD/VHS, and have those sales die out. Then another movie comes along. This, after all that stuff about not releasing the first three on DVD. The format was pretty set before he started working on EP1, so he had plenty of time.

Just watch, the 4th Indiana Jones movie will probably be out on DVD before the first three. Maximize profits. Anyway, I'm probably wrong about this, but that's what I'm seeing. I'd be happy to see a quote from good ol Lucas on the subject

Oh well, it doesn't really matter to me. I'm not even sure I'm going to see EP2. Just the idea of Yoda doing that stuff sounds so stupid to me. I'll look forward to renting in and watching the last hour or so, as you said Tony. I've heard the action at the end was good. And I can see the Matrix trailers online

Just the idea of Yoda doing that stuff sounds so stupid to me.

When you actually see it on the screen, it's not stupid, it's quite cool. Or at least that's my opinion.

I thought the Yoda fight scene was the best part of the movie.... it kind of answered the question that had rattled around in my head since empire strikes back "how could that lil frickin muppet fight?"

Well, when you get the DVDs of the original trilogy, at least they'll be those awful ``Special Edition'' versions. God, I hated those. Of course, I saw them all in the theater, as I will with the next SW movie; I'm just a sucker, I guess.

(I've got the original originals all on laserdisc, fortunately. Nyah!)

I thought that that whole scene, especially the actual fight, was one of the worst parts of the movie, in a movie filled with awful parts.

I think that the problem with Star Wars is that we saw the original ones when we were young. Because of this, we are nostalgic about them. I bought Star Wars on VHS when it finally was available at an affordable prices and the novelty of it wore off very quickly. Everyone wanted to punch Luke for being a whiney brat and we just turned it off. The Ewoks are annoying on a recent viewing too. All in all, I think all of us give Lucas too much credit for the original movies and expect a "masterpiece" from him when he has never made on in his life... Are they entertaining? Yes, but that's it.

I disagree. I watch SW and ESB all the time. They're great movies. They have a lot of heart, which is mostly what's lacking in the recent ventures. Now, there are a lot of other problems with the later ones, but it mostly comes down to the fact that they don't really have the same feeling of grandeur that the original ones did. Just consider the fact that he tried to explain away the Force in pseudo-scientific terms.

One quick thing that just occurred to me is that the originals (mostly because of technical constraints) weren't able to show everything that's going on, so the movies were centered around a few very important but fairly small events in the plot of the movie. That let our minds fill in the blanks and create a massive universe. But in the newer movies, he tries as hard as he can to show us everything, and in doing so, reduces the size of what's going on, even though he actually shows us more, because we really get the impression that that's it; we're seeing everything and there is no more.

(Edit: Oh -- and I don't expect a masterpiece. I just expect an entertaining movie. And I haven't seen one from him in the last few years. This one was even less entertaining than Ep1, to me.)

Well, when you get the DVDs of the original trilogy, at least they'll be those awful ``Special Edition'' versions.

I'm hoping that they'll take the time and restore the original versions of the SE scenes, and allow us to choose from the DVD menu whether we want to watch the SE or the original.

I know, it's probably a false hope, but a kid can dream, can't he?

I know, it's probably a false hope, but a kid can dream, can't he?

You will like the Special Edition! It's your destiny! Feel the anger...

the conveyor belt scene that felt like it was lifted from either Galaxy Quest (where it was a parody) or some shareware Apple ][ video game

Or Chicken Run.

Peter