Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones: Critic Reviews

This time the exposition is so thick that everyone except acolytes may tune out.

Sit back and enjoy fantastic, imaginative visuals.

It starts off briskly with some fantastic special effects and a great high-speed chase but then founders on the shores of bad script writing.

All in all, a far more superior film than its predecessor.

Lucas does not always recognize his limitations. This tends to make films of mixed quality. Still, there is always enough that is excellent to make them worth seeing.

Attack of the Clones emerges looking as bad as if not worse than its 1999 predecessor, thanks to the lame romantic subplot, which is so badly written, directed and performed that it surpasses Jar-Jar Binks as the all-time low point in the series.

Makes The Phantom Menace seem like one long clearing of the throat before Lucas could begin to tell the real story.

The special effects are remarkable, yet somehow numbing, and the film only partly lives up to the promise in the title of Lucas's company, Industrial Light and Magic.

While it lacks the quality of Empire's script and performances, Clones is the most visually enthralling of the series so far.

It is certainly better than the childish Phantom Menace and the final 45 minutes of straight action beat the editing nightmare at the end of the last film.

Christensen is a winning mix of sultry and sulky as the now older Anakin, while McGregor is finally beginning to relax as the mentor who understandably refuses to treat his moody pupil like a grown-up.

The magic has definitely been recaptured.

As convincing a job as they, Christensen, and Lee do, they all end up being upstaged by the jaw-dropping skills of a CGI creation: Yoda (again voiced by Frank Oz), who finally gets a chance to show exactly why he has such a legendary reputation.

The muppet steals what's otherwise an underwhelming show.

Clones is far from perfect, but when it clicks, it revives the old spirit that made a generation become so obsessed with all things Star Wars in the first place.

It's impossible...to dismiss a film with this much stuff: exotic production design, imaginative characters, and a wide variety of digital jedi fu.

It would be easy to say that this film is fantastic and blows away the others, but unfortunately I cannot.

Superior to Episode I -- The Phantom Menace, with its annoying Jar Jar Binks and its dull, galaxy-hopping story line.

Enjoy this film they will.

Alternately excites and bores.

I'll call it nearly good, based mostly on one hell of a last half-hour.

It's no Empire Strikes Back but then you won't have to worry about Jar Jar too much either.

How I wish I could say something other than ho-hum.

You will most likely end up sitting through this latest installment - even if the series has become a shadow of its former self

My God, how wonderful it would be if it just even pretended to not be so commercialized.