Why Critics Savage AOTC?

Cafe Society
1

Why are critics so disgusted with Attack of the Clones? Most reviews I’ve read have savaged it more than The Phantom Menace. At Rotten Tomatoes, it has a general review of 53% rating. while TPM has a 58% positive rating. Even the Cranky Critic, who rated TPM an wonderful $8 value, only gave AOTC a $6.50 rating. Yet most people I’ve talked to say that it is a better film than TPM.

The complaints about TPM were:

  • Too much Jar-Jar. In ATOC, his role has been reduced to almost a “cameo”.

  • Bad dialog. The dialog in ATOC is significantly better to where I could actually believe it was people holding a conversation, not just reading their single line off the script. And Anikin’s attempts at talking to a woman he is attracted too reminded me all too much of my first attempts, as well as Warren’s in “Ed”.

  • Flat acting. ATOC held no "yipee"s, Natalie Portman seems a bit better, and Hayden Christensen did a pretty good job showing what a young, very powerful, Padawan chomping at the bit is like.

  • Childish jokes. No farting, stepping in poop, sticking your tongue out, etc. in AOTC. I must admit, C3PO’s puns were pretty bad; however, I’d rather have the later than the former.

  • Bad pacing. To me, AOTC seemed to flow a lot smoother and didn’t have the waylaid feeling TPM did.

  • Small purpose script. “All this over a trade dispute?” AOTC has a much larger purpose plot and the stakes are much higher, as Yoda states at the end.

  • Not enough sex appeal (believe it or not). Well, AOTC’s Padme Amidala certainly knew how to dress in order to flirt with her friend from Tatooine.

Overall, I’d have to say it was a better film. Of course these are only my opinions, but many others share them as well. Even those with high expectations at theforce.net were impressed and enjoyed the film. Initial reviews were positive, but then the buzz-saws started coming in. Why were they changed so much?

AOTC has been called “critic-proof”; does this encourage the critics to be all the harsher on the film? It’s almost like they wanted it to give it a bad review before they saw it…

2

This film is bad that there really is no mystery about why critics would savage it. If you like the film, that’s fine – I don’t want to trample all over your enjoyment – but let’s face it, your whole defense is that it wasn’t as bad as TPM.

Considering how bad TPM was, this is really no defense at all, but I’m not sure I would even agree that AOTC was an improvement. The pacing was terrible; the dialogue was terrible; the acting was terrible (with the exception of Christopher Lee and, to a lesser extent, Ewan McGregor). The story was convoluted and badly told; the effects were overdone; and the attempts at humor were lame.

The whole experience made me go back and watch my laser disc of STAR WARS (that is, the original version of the film, not the ill-advisedly revised version from 1997), just to remind myself of how well this kind of material was handled by Lucas when it was still fresh and original. What a breath of fresh air that film still seems, even after all these years!

Anyway, there were some good things in AOTC, but you have to wait for the last hour of the film to see them – just like you had to wait till the end of TPM for the light saber duel. The final confrontation with Count Dooku, including Yoda’s light saber acrobatics, was just about the only thing that made me feel I hadn’t wasted my time. Otherwise, the film is pretty much a total washout.

Sorry for being so harsh. I do agree that sometimes critics can have their minds made up ahead of time, and there are certain kinds of films that don’t get a fair shake, but this just isn’t one of them.

3

My point in this was not so much to defend the movie (to say that a movie “is” bad is a matter of opinion, not fact), but to show that even though they say that AOTC is better, in general, than TPM, the reviews are worse, and to wonder why.

4

I agree the critics have been overly harsh on this movie.
It’s a decent enough film, and honestly I think it would have been better not have made The Phantom Menance but instead start the trilogy off with this (with maybe 15 minutes setting up Anakin/Padme’s/ObiWan’s past)

5

I actually quite liked it. Mostly.

6

My experience has been that all of the Star Wars movies are pretty hokey. Going back and watching the original trilogy as an adult, I found that a lot of what I remembered as really cool scenes or lines were a lot snappier in my memory than on the screen; in the actual movie, the execution was often pretty stiff or hammy. (Of course, YMMV.)

If a critic wants to say that the entire series, from Star Wars on, has been pretty silly, well, it’s hard to argue against that. (I like 'em, but I have unsophisticated tastes.) But to argue that Attack of the Clones was bad for a Star Wars movie seems a triffle odd to me. Now, The Phantom Menace was bad even for a Star Wars movie. But AOTC was pretty good (for a Star Wars movie)–maybe not the best of the five we’ve seen so far, but definitely not the worst, and a marked improvement over TPM.

7

Maybe they were harsher on their reviews because this time Lucas has no excuse. For TPM he hadn’t done a movie in a long while, so it was more excuseable. But he has had tons of feedback and money to make it right this time. And, while I do think it’s better than TPM, it wasn’t enough better.

The whole movie seemed like filler to get you to the last 30-45 minutes (which rocked).

8

I think it probably has something to do with the fact that, in TPM, it had been over a decade since the last installment had come out. We all really wanted it to be good. But it wasn’t (to most folks, I quite enjoyed it actually, even though it was the weakest SW to date). Not liking Star Wars changed from a minority opinion to the common consensus. Everyone was chomping at the bit to condemn the film as part of the francise’s downward spiral.

Except it wasn’t, really. Lucas fixed what was wrong in TPM and then some. It was still quite hokey, but so was the original trilogy (part of its charm, IMHO). This time, however, the critics were ready to jump on what they tried to look past in TPM.

9

Well, the beginning had lots of action and stuff, then they did some plot, and got back to the action with lots of jedis and light sabers at the end and it was really cool when Anakin got his arm chopped off.

That’s the reviews I heard in the parking lot on the way out.

10

I haven’t seen AOTC, so I can’t and won’t offer any opinions yet as to whether it’s good or bad. But, just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I’ll tell you first where I stand on all the movies of the serties:

“Star Wars/New Hope”: Great.

“Empire Strikes back”: Even better

“Return of the Jedi”: Okay. Fun, on the whole. But it was pretty obvious Lucas and the cast were uninspired, and it was probably time to put the franchise to rest.

“Phantom Menace”: A few good fight sequences, but mostly a yawner. And the dialogue was unforgivably clunky.

That said, why do so many critics now take such glee in ripping AOTC to shreds? I have two theories, one complicated and one simple.

Theory #1:I think it’s because most critics hate what they believe George Lucas and Steven Spielberg did to the movie business. As good as “Jaws” and “Star Wars” were, they had an effect that critics hate- they created the Hollywood “summer blockbuster” mentality. In the critics’ minds, the 1970s were a great era for film, an era in which innovative filmmakers were making edgy, hip, subversive films. But when “Jaws” and “Star Wars” raked in hundreds of millions of dollars, studios stopped making hip, cutting edge films, and started making more and more mindless summer action films geared mostly to kids.

Critics still hold a grudge against Spielberg and Lucas for that, and I think that’s why they rarely miss a chance to snipe at those two directors, even when they do great work.

Theory #2: When a typical, average bad movie comes out, critics don’t feel a need to rip it to shreds. A standard, ordinary thumbs down is enough. But when a summer blockbuster from a Lucas or a Spielberg comes out, a mere thumbs down isn’t enough to put even a dent in the box office. People will ignore ordinary bad reviews, when a “Star Wars” episode comes out. So, a critic may feel compelled to go overboard, to call it the worst movie ever made, to exaggerate, to get downright insulting, just to get the reader’s attention.

Tepidly bad reviews from Roger Ebert or Leonard Maltin may be enough to doom an ordinary film at the box office, but if Ebert or Maltin hopes to hurt a “Star Wars,” he has to get VERY negative indeed.

Mind you, after seeing “Phantom Menace,” I KNOW that Lucas is quite capable of making a real turkey. For all I know, AOTC may really be as awful as some critics are claiming.

11

In other words, there’s a entertainment-to-production-cost ratio? (Production costs being one sign of an attempt at a blockbuster.)

R = E/C

So that while the entertainment value of any two films may be relatively equal, the film with the higher production costs will result in a lower value review?

Or would hype be a better ratio?

R = E/H

12

The “cost effective” theory is a pernicious one, but it is not limited to snobby critics. There are many fans of low-budget exploitation and cult movies who seem to think that they’re favorite films are better because they cost less.

I’ve made this point in print before, but perhaps it bears repeating: This kind of reviewing makes sense on Broadway, where the lavish shows charge higher ticket prices, but it doesn’t make much sense for films, when anyeone can get into a matinee screening for a few bucks if they don’t want to shell out $14 a pop to see a brand new film at the Arclight Cinema in Hollywood.

13

Skott- actually, no, my point wasn’t that critics factor in “entertainment-per-dollar-spent.”

Rather my point is this: when a critic dislikes a film, obviously he WANTS very much to hurt it at the box office, to convince people not to see it. And when a small, unhyped bad film is released, i’ pretty easy for the critics to snuff it.

I mean, if a low-budget comedy starring Rob Schneider comes out next week, and it’s not very good, critics WILL trash it, but not with much venom. Roger Ebert will give it a thumbs down, but he won’t go on and on and on about how awful it is. A low-budget comedy is likely to fail at the box office on its own, and critics generally won’t see the need to break out heavy artillery. A simple “thumbs down,” a simple 1-out-of 4 stars, a simple “it stinks” review is enough to turn “The Animal 2” into a flop at the box office.

But some movies have so much advance hype, such a built-in audience that critics don’t have much power. There were people buying tickets for AOTC months before the movie was even released. There were people camped out to buy tickets. Even people who hated “Phantom Menace” will usually admit they plan to see AOTC at some point.

Under the circumstances, if critics just give AOTC mediocre reviews (which, I suspect, are what it probably deserves), peope will ignore the critics, and race to see the movie. So, if a critic hopes to derail a blockbuster, he may feel a need to go SUPER-negative, to trash it, to call it a total bomb.

14

The thing is that the movie was supposed to be centered partly on the budding romance between A and A, and the reasons for Anakin’s descent into Darth Vader. This particular sequence of events was performed poorly, and compares badly to Willow and Tara in the last few episodes of Buffy this season. Joss Whedon and the writers at ME, critics from Kitten aside, outdid George Lucas in that department.

I also hear some unusuallly good buzz about J-Lo’ new movie Enough. It could be a possibility that potentially the ultimate chick flick can outdraw two all-timer blockbuster action flicks on Memorial Day weekend.