Stop Pretending You Like This Awful Movie
Ivy vs. Star Wars, part II
Posted 09 Dec 2019
To whom it may concern: I get that you have complaints with the new films. An argument could definitely be made that they’re soulless corporate cash-grabs. But for the love of god, stop trying to use your dissatisfaction as an excuse to rehabilitate the prequels.
* Not the first time, anyway
Seriously, have you watched this film? Have you watched it? Say what you like about The Last Jedi, but it never bored me*. Attack of the Clones is probably the most tedious space opera ever made, dull to its very core with cardboard characters, no-stakes action sequences, and meaningless plot meandering. Its dialogue is appalling. The parts of this film that were drawn exclusively on Lucas’s imagination are irredeemable.
The actors, who have very little decent material to work with, are completely unable to salvage anything. I have no idea of Hayden Christensen is a good actor or not, because all he does in this film is make pouty faces and say idiotic things like “I hate sand,” which poisoned his career so badly that he’s never appeared in much else.
You know what’s a better film than this? The Room. Or Troll 2. Because those films may be incompetent, but they’re funny. Padme replying to “you’re so beautiful” with “that’s only because I’m so in love” is bizarre, but not in a funny way. The Room seems like it was written by a Martian with a very misguided understanding of how human interaction works. Attack of the Clones dialogue, on the other hand, is just the blandest, most watered-down version of whatever the scene requires. It’s a love scene, so just make them say the word love a lot, and the other words don’t matter.
Actually pretty much all the dialogue could probably be reduced to a single summary word without losing any nuance. Just have Obi-Wan going around saying “clues, clues, clues” and Palpatine saying “evil, evil, evil.” Anakin can cycle between “love” and “grumpy” depending on the scene. But we can’t have that, because that sounds like it would be funny.
And have I mentioned that this film makes no goddamn sense? This film makes no goddamn sense. It starts with an assassination attempt on the queen and within the first twenty minutes it’s not about that anymore, and never will be again. It’s like the plot gets distracted by any shiny object that goes by and never manages to backtrack. This was probably the beginning of the “setpiece-driven” films that plague our cinemas today, but Lucas failed to create any kind of logical throughline that might unify the disparate sequences.
Probably the best argument that one could rally in this film’s defense is that it’s George Lucas’s personal vision, while the new films are assembly-line products. That may be so, but if all of George Lucas’s personal visions were this atrocious, I guarantee you that no one would know his name today. A film isn’t automatically good just because someone wanted to make it. Furthermore, I take issue with the basis of this argument, since the prequels have often been accused of being ILM effects reels more than films, but that’s beyond the point. The point is that bad films are bad regardless of intent.
This film is awful. It is so bad that it beggars belief. It mystifies me that anyone can, with a straight face, say that The Last Jedi, which at least had likable characters and a comprehensible plot, is worse than this. They’re deceiving themselves on purpose, and deep down I think they know it.