In the 'documentary' that accompanied the home release of "The Phantom Menace," one of the major behind-the-scenes contributors to the making of the film said that he almost cried when he saw the results of the graphic and computer generated images on the screen, how overwhelmed he was at the visions created by electtronically artificial means. He ought to have shed his tears over the emptiness of the plot, the vapid characters, and the annoying propensity of the script writers to give 'alien' characters all but impossible linguisitic affectations.
Many of these problems have been solved in "The Attack of the Clones," the penultimate (supposedly) addition to the Star Wars Saga. Now that Anakin Skywalker is growing up a little, he can begin to exhibit some real-life conflict and concern. He is too much of a whining teenager for my taste, however; his pairing of the exquisitely grown Natalie Portman is almost ridiculous. What she sees in him is utterly mystifying. Ewan MacGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi fares far better than he did in his first outing in "Menace," and Jar-Jar is, thankfully, left in the background only to surface when he proposes the fatal suggestion to the Senate to give unlimited powers to the eventual Great Heavy of the Series, deliciously well-played by Ian McDiarmid. We appreciate most of all the presence of the superb Christopher Lee bringing his decades of experience to a wonderfully evil role in Count Dooku.
What I am most bothered by is the overabundance, once again, of CGI which, while they add positively now and again to the depth of the visuals, more often than not call attention to themselves rather than remain integral components of the story telling that a good narrative film is supposed to convey. We do not really believe that Yoda is somehow 'real,' do we, although the fight scenes he engages in are amusingly spectacular. We do not really believe that there are hundreds of thousands of clone warriors, do we? Similarly is the chase scene little more than a cartoon version of a 'let's get 'em' hodge-podge, Jedi superpowers notwithstanding.
The movie offers an extremely diverting couple of hours, but it needs more depth of character, better script writing, and perhaps a new director's vision in the last installment to bring the series to a successul close.