Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Main Cast:  Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Anthony Daniels, Christopher Lee, Frank Oz, Silas Carson, Rose Byrne.

SPOILER WARNING: There may or may not be spoilers in this review. Read at your own risk!!!

In a world far away, there lives a man with a beard that writes a fairy tale. Eventually he decides to make it into a movie, but rather then start at the beginning, he goes to the middle of the story. Today, this same author decides to do the first three parts of his tale and now we are on the 2nd part of his 2nd Trilogy. Yes, it's Episode II of Star Wars.

It begins with the usual fanfare, but like the last one, the introduction is dull. Talk about a boring piece of text! But it gets more interesting in a hurry. Padmé (Natalie Portman) comes to Coruscant and her ship blows up as she exits it, killing her, or so it would seem. Except that it was Padmé's double. You'd think that the people trying to kill her wouldn't fall for that a second time. It is a rather shocking beginning though.

About half the movie is about an assassin trying to kill the former Princess Amidala and the investigation surrounding it. Senator Amidala is assigned Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) as personal guards. The would-be assassin is none other than Boba Fett's (Daniel Logan (II)) father, Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison). We never really learn who wants the Senator dead, but we can all guess, can't we?

Well, some nasty looking giant grubs with legs get released in the Senator's bedroom when she's asleep. It seems these critters are quite poisonous and seem attracted to sleeping women since they immediately go straight towards her...they also seem to be frightened of robots as R2-D2 awakes and does a quick scan of the room and while he does this the grubs hide. Luckily for Amidala, the Jedi sense her danger as she sleeps and rush in to slash the things...then Obi-Wan jumps out the window because he sees the machine that released the things floating there. Thus begins an interesting chase scene through the "streets" of Coruscant.

I could go on and on about the many interesting scenes, but I'm just going to go over a few of the ones that I liked best.

They catch the assassin in a bar and take her outside where she is promptly killed by Fett. Yeah, he hired someone else to do the dirty work. And by killing her, he seems to run out of weapons because he doesn't bother to kill either of the Jedi. This is dumb, but typical.

So, Obi-Wan leaves Anakin salivating at, err, guarding the Senator while he goes off to find out who hired the assassin. (See, they don't know who Fett is). OK. Obi-Wan goes to a diner and talks to a really cool alien cook who gives him a lead. Then he wanders to the archives and finds out that a planet doesn't exist. So he goes to talk to Yoda and we find out the depths of Obi-Wan's stupidity. Yoda quickly tells him that it was erased and how "troubling" that is as only a Jedi could possibly erase anything from the archives. Uh, right.

Thus, Obi-Wan goes to the planet by using an educated guess as to its position. This is one of the best representations of aliens in the movie. We meet some ultra-slim and quite tall aliens in what appears to be a floating city. There, Obi-Wan learns that a dead Jedi ordered a clone army and that the clones are made off of Fett. What does Fett want in repayment for his genes? Why a normal clone (with no genetic enhancements) of his very own. They enhance all the other ones. So...now you know the origin of Boba, his "kid."

As this investigation goes on, Anakin and Amidala hide out on her home planet and we have to endure Anakin's blatant advances with poor Amidala. Most of his lines come out rather stilted. I don't understand why they chose this actor, because he sounds bad. Amidala isn't much better. And neither one can do a true smile very often. ARRRR!

Anakin is pretty aggressive with his words going on and on about how he's dreamed for her. He touches, he tricks her with fake injuries, he's a jerk! Eventually, his nightmares about his mother (or something) torment him into going to look for her on Tatooine. Amidala goes with and we end up finding out that Shmi (Pernilla August) was got by Tusken Raiders about a month before and is presumed dead.

Well, Anakin can't believe that those creatures would just kill her before he saw her again, and thus he goes hunting for her. Of course, he finds her, strung up and barely alive in a Tusken Raider's tent. This is one of the dumbest parts in the movie and seems to only be there to show Anakin leaning towards the Dark Side. His mom dies right there in his arms and he goes on a killing rampage.

As you can see, this isn't so much a review as a retelling of Episode II from my point of view. If you don't want to listen to it, I suggest you skip to the end and look over my highlights part instead.

Okay. Obi-Wan had a quick fight scene with Fett and then Fett escapes with a tracking device stuck to his ship. Obi-Wan follows him to an unidentified planet (at least, for a while) and sees that the Trade Federation, with those idiots, Nute Gunray (Silas Carson) et al, are at it again, making another huge army of robots with a strange bug-like race of aliens. You see, there's a bunch of star systems that are trying to pull out of the Alliance. This is their army to make sure they can leave. 

So, Obi-Wan gets captured right after sending out a message about what's happening and Anakin and Amidala come to rescue them. Of course, they are captured too and all three of them end up in a large arena, tied to columns awaiting death by dismemberment from dangerous riled beasts. The creatures in this part are pretty imaginative, and while it has shades of the Rancor scene in Return of the Jedi, this is a little better, at least SFX-wise. 

Eventually, the bad guys have to send out a bunch of robots to kill them and instead of this occurring, a bunch of Jedi show up and kick some major tale before about half of them are slaughtered. Then it's the clones turn to rescue them. Confusing, no? Just go see it! 

Here's my highlights in there standard format:

Good Stuff:

Bad Stuff:

Episode II was actually pretty good. As long as you don't go into the movie with a "this is the end-all be-all movie" then you'll probably like it. That mentality pervaded with Episode I and I think that caused a lot of disappointment...also, it just wasn't up to snuff.

However, I didn't give it a high rating because of all the unnecessary violence and the lack of good acting in the movie. They had good actors for the film, but they had a bad director/script/writer.