Movie	Extras
Audio	Video

Region 1 release from Fox.

disk 1:
Movie
I won’t even pretend you haven’t seen this movie.  I’ll just get right to it.  The plot revolves around finding an assassin who tried to kill Senator Amidala.  Obi-Wan Kenobi tries to figure out who did it, and Anakin Skywalker protects the Senator, giving both of them the chance to fall in love with each other.  This is where the trouble starts.

The worst part of this movie is the love story – it’s handled very cheesily (even though Mr. Lucas was very sincere about it).  Had it been cut, or the dialogue altered, this movie would have been much better.  The ‘Sound of Music’ scene should have been left out; Anakin’s dialogue about sand being coarse, and Padmé soft should have been cut out, or at least changed.  Come on... I know this takes place in another time and place, but how cheesy can you get?  The thing is we know they’re gonna get together.  Telling us they can’t be in love because of their positions is fine, I understand that.  Showing us that they are in love is fine, we know that by now.  Showing us all that crap between those two things isn’t really necessary, even if it does provide some characterization.  I know a montage would have been out of place in a movie like this, but with an imagination like George Lucas’ I’m surprised he didn’t think of anything better.  It’s a shame it’s not all that well written, because it could have been much better, but as it is, it brings down the movie a whole notch.

The acting is fine, even if a little wooden.  Reacting to imaginary things isn’t the easiest thing in the world, so the empty stares might be explained by that.  The dialogue also didn’t help.  Some of it was just very plain, but the actors generally did a good job with what they had.  Ewan McGregor and Christopher Lee I especially enjoyed watching.  They did a really good job at bringing extra life to their characters.  Miss Natalie Portman is good at playing here role, which is for the most part, not too taxing.  Maybe her acting muscles will be flexed more in the next episode.  Hayden Christensen is fine in the hard role of Anakin Skywalker.  Anakin’s dark alter ego starts to show himself, and he does a good job playing a scared, lonely individual trying to prove himself to people who won’t listen.

Anakin’s transformation from light to dark side is fine, but I personally would have eased up a bit on his whining.  Stating things matter-of-factly would have been, I find, more effective.  Other than that, I don’t really have a problem with this character.  The problem is that we know he’ll be the ultimate figure of evil soon.  How do you go from Jake Lloyd’s Anakin to James Earl Jones/David Prowse’s Darth Vader?  Even tougher is how do you go from one to the other without it seeming planned out?  I generally find Lucas did a good job with that.  We understand Anakin’s between a rock and a hard place.  Mr. Lucas has a way of making events connect in an intelligent way.  The events are already planned out, but they seem to progress naturally in the movie.

The mystery part of the movie is handled very well, I think.  Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor is in fine form here) goes around trying to figure things out, but they get more and more complex the more he knows.  I didn’t know where it was going.  The twists and turns along the way were unexpected and didn’t seem contrived.  It kept me interested all the way through.  Hopefully the unanswered questions will be addressed in the next chapter.

The action was well done.  Both Ewan and Hayden Christensen (if you don’t know what character he plays, go away) do a good job wielding lightsabers, even though Mr. Christensen does seem a big rough around the edges.  The lightsaber fights are intense and exciting.  I especially liked the fight between Obi-Wan and Jango Fett for some reason.  The ‘Gladiator’-ish arena all-out brawl at the end was also very entertaining.  I mean, how can you not like Samuel L. Jackson kicking major ass?  You can’t forget Yoda, either.  He is the best fighter I’ve ever seen in a Star Wars movie.  The computer animators must have had loads of fun doing that fight.  I really hope Yoda jumps to it again in Episode 3.

The special effects are great, but I thought I remembered them being better in the theatre.  I said in my review of ‘Legend of Zu’ (here) that in that movie, the matching of action and CGI wasn’t as refined as in the Star Wars movies.  Well, after watching ‘Attack of the Clones’ a second time, I did see some small errors.  I could clearly see some of the green screen shots, and when someone was riding a vehicle (most notably when they rode those motorcycle-like things) the movement of the background and the movement of the vehicle didn’t quite match up.  One thing that really annoyed me is the lighting.  I found it really bad.  Other than that, the effect are great.  The views on Coruscant and on Kamino are breathtaking.  The chase at the beginning of the movie and the clone factory on Kamino are especially impressive to watch.  The colours are vivid, which only adds to the atmosphere of the Star Wars universe.

Overall a good effort, but not the best of the Star Wars movies.  Four stars may be a bit generous, I know, but I feel in the long run people will get the like it more.  The love story was what brought everything down.  Better writing, or editing, would have helped a lot.  I wasn’t bothered by the running time, though.  At 142 minutes, it’s the longest Star Wars movie there is, but I wasn’t really bored during the movie.  The love scenes were bad, but they provided me with some sort of cheesy amusement.  The other parts of the movie were up to par with the others Star Wars movies: the mystery and the start of the Clone Wars were involving and exciting.  ‘Attack of the Clones’ did a nice job entertaining me, and made me very eager to see Episode 3.  If that’s not the job of a second part in a trilogy, then what is?

Commentary by co-writer/director George Lucas, producer Rick McCallum, editor/sound designer Ben Burtt, animation director Rob Coleman, and visual effects supervisors Pablo Helman, John Knoll and Ben Snow
This track starts off kind of dry but gets better as the movie progresses.  Like in the Episode 1 track, Mr. Lucas mostly talks about the story and the characters, Mr. McCallum talks about making the movie, Mr. Burtt talks about editing and sound.  Those three are all there from the beginning  The four other guys talk about the visual effects of the movie.  At the start it’s only Coleman and Knoll, but Helman joins in at Naboo and Snow joins once the movie gets to Geonosis.  I preferred the Episode 1 track to this one (it’s actually one of the best I’ve heard), but this one is good enough.  Before I go on, if you don’t want to know the fate of a certain important character in Episode 3 (who isn’t Anakin, everybody what’s going to happen to him), don’t listen to this track until 2005.  Mr. Lucas gives away what will happen to someone in the next chapter of the saga, and I didn’t like that one bit.  Barring that, back to the track’s content.  I was actually surprised to hear that some of the sets were sets and not effects shots – they just looked so fake.  (Contrary to what some people might think, that is not good effects work, which is suppose to make things look real.  A fake looking movie, whether through sets or effect, is not an indicator of good effects work.  I guess the movie is just terribly lit.  It’s very difficult to match lighting to effects work that will be put it later.)  I was also surprised by the fact that they used computers to integrate different takes into a scene.  Mr. Coleman talks about animating Yoda, which was interesting to hear.  Another thing I was surprised to hear was that Mr. Lucas was very sincere in his love story.  It makes me kind of glad he never really did a romantic movie before.  I guess he accomplished what he wanted to do (i.e. make Anakin and Amidala fall in love at least semi-credibly), so it’s not a complete failure as a love story.  He also talks about the references and how the story is arranged.  One thing that really impressed me was the parallels between this movie and Episode 4, like Jengo/storm troopers head-bumping, and the hiding behind an asteroid trick.  It shows George Lucas really thought about the overall saga while making this movie.  The effects stuff is standard, nothing new or exciting, but it was incredible to hear the insane amount of computer work that went into this movie.  Oh, yeah, whenever someone is talking, there’s his name and function on screen.  Seeing as how most of these people were effects people, I don’t really this is completely necessary (if it’s not George Lucas talking, it’s probably about the special effects, right?), but it’s nice enough to do that.

Easter Egg
This is the DVD credits along with a few bloopers.  It only runs about 3 minutes, but is definitely worth finding.  Watching this, I got the impression Hayden Christensen couldn’t run six feet without tripping over something to save his life.  Funny stuff, but too short.

disk 2:
Okay, there are literally hours of stuff on here.  One thing that I like a lot was that they showed many clips from the original Star Wars movies.  They didn’t look remastered, but at least we know they exist.  It’s probably just to get us excited about their eventual release.

Theatrical Trailers and Tv Spots
Just like in the Episode 1 DVD, the extras start with a bunch of teasers and tv spots.  Here they are:
Teasers: ‘Breathing’ (1:10), ‘Mystery’ (1:20), ‘Forbidden Love’ (2:19), and ‘Clone Wars’ (2:32).  The breathing focuses on the Jedi story, and the rest focus on what their title implies.  After this, there’s the ‘Across the Stars’ music video at about 4 ½ minutes long.  It’s pretty much like the video in the first one, where you see bits and pieces of John Williams conducting the orchestra spliced in with bits and pieces of the movie.
Tv spots: This is divided in two categories.  There are 8 ‘Character Campaigns’: ‘Obi-wan’ (0:34), ‘Anakin’ (0:34), ‘Padmé’ (0:34), ‘Mace’ (0:34), ‘Yoda’ (0:32), ‘Artoo’ (0:33), ‘Jango’ (0:34) and ‘Clones (0:34); and there are 4 ‘Action’ spots: ‘Jedi’ (0:34), ‘Anakin’s Story’ (0:33), ‘Biggest Action Hero’ (0:34) and ‘War’ (0:34).

Documentaries:
There are two such documentaries in this section:
From Puppets to Pixels: Digital Characters in Episode 2
I thought a 52-minute 18-second documentary about the post-production creation of digital characters would be long, but I was entertained well enough.  It isn’t as good at the doc on the Episode 1 DVD, though. It walks you through all the steps: animatics, on-set measurements and things, rough work, final animation, then moves on to synching and sound work.  It’s all very interesting, and never really boring.  The editors did a nice job moving the doc along at a nice pace.  It shows the ridiculous amount of work needed to do an effects heavy movie like this one.

State of the Art: The Previsualization of Episode 2
Imagine Episode 1 DVD’s ‘Introduction to Animatics’ piece expanded into a 23 ½-minute featurette.  This is what this little thing is.  It’s interesting enough and keeps your interest.  It shows you animatics of the speeder chase, the droid factor and the clone war, and shows you what they are and what they accomplish.  Rick McCallum, George Lucas, Ben Burtt and a few other members of the staff guide you through these things and make you understand animatics and the previsualization process.

Deleted Scenes
Here you can choose to see the scenes individually with or without an introduction, or play them all, with or without introduction.  There are 8 scenes totaling slightly less than 11 minutes (with an additional 8 ½ minutes or so for the introduction).  The 8 scenes are:
-Padmé Addresses the Senate (1:07 for intro/1:54 for scene).  This is just Padmé talking to the senate about her assassination attempt, and prompting it not to go to war.
-Jedi Temple Analysis Room (0:48/1:03).  This scene is pretty useless, and I’m surprised it was shot.  It’s Obi-wan going to the analysis room to find out where the dart that killed the assassin came from.  It’s the scene that would be played right before the diner scene with Dexter Jettseter.
-Obi-wan and Mace – Jedi Landing Platform (0:52/1:50) is a scene that was transferred elsewhere in the movie.  The insane amount of bluescreen used in the movie actually allows Mr. Lucas the chance to change the place the 2 actors are in.  He changed the platform to the great hall and added Yoda.  Creepy stuff when you can do things like that.
-Extended Arrival on Naboo (1:13/1:50).  This scene only adds background information about Padmé and Anakin.  They only used a small part of this scene in the movie.  I thought it was cute and wouldn’t have minded all of it in the movie.
-Padmé’s Parents’ House (1:31/1:18) is a scene that was cut because it said things we already knew, or that weren’t that important (like the fact that Anakin is the first ‘boyfriend’ Padmé ever brought home, which is understandable; I mean, she was a queen for crying out loud, and then a senator.  I doubt she ever had a social life with those jobs).  It’s a bit cheesy, so I’m glad it’s not in the movie.
-Padmé’s Bedroom (0:58/2:18).  This scene is one of those scenes perfect for a deleted scenes section.  It provides additional information about Miss Portman’s character that isn’t too important for the movie, while at the same time giving additional information about Padmés beliefs (if you can’t adapt, you die).  It’s not really necessary for the movie, but adds useful information for the next time you watch the movie.
-Dooku Interrogates Padmé (0:58/1:00).  This scene was changed by Mr. Lucas when he realized that knowing where Obi-wan was (after being captured) was more important than the mystery of not knowing where he was.  This is Padmé asking Dooku to give back Obi-wan to her.  I prefer what’s in the movie – Dooku talking directly to Obi-wan instead of this dialogue with Padmé.
-Anakin and Padmé’s Trial (0:56/0:37).  If the previous scene was cut then this one surely isn’t necessary.  It’s a judge saying that Anakin and Padmé (and Obi-wan) are sentenced to death by the arena.. battle...thing.

What really makes no sense is that in the production photos there are pictures that were taken when some scenes were shot.  These scenes were subsequently taken out, and don’t appear here, like the one where Padmé and Anakin are riding a shaak together.  I’ve also read about a few other scenes that were shot but don’t appear in here (unless they’re really well hidden easter eggs).  Maybe an extra disk of stuff when the trilogy comes out?  Maybe not.  There’s so much stuff on this disk that I don’t know if there was any more space.

Featurettes
Next up is three featurettes talking about the movie’s main storyline, love story, and action.
-Story: Exactly 9 minutes long.  This talk about the story – what Mr. Lucas tried to do, and what happens in the movie.  If you’ve seen the movie, you pretty much know what happens, but it enlightens you a bit on what might happen in Episode 3.
-Love: A bit more than 9 ½ minutes of Padmé and Anakin’s evolution.  It tells you what happened to the two people in the ten years they were apart, what happens in the movie, and how their lives are affected by what’s going on.  It’s nice enough.
-Action: Slightly more than 8 minutes, this focuses on the action sequences of the movie.  It tells you about the clone war and the lightsaber fights, and how they dealt with hundreds of Jedis fighting at the same time.  The most interesting of the three.

Web Documentaries
I’ll go here as I did in the Episode 1 DVD.  I’ll name off the different parts with a brief description of their content.  In all, they add up to about 63 ½ minutes.  ‘Here We Go’ (625) talks about, well the beginning of production and the choice of digital photography over film; ‘Wedgie ‘Em Out’ (437) is the evolution of the design of the Jedi starfigher Obi-wan uses; ‘We Didn’t Go To the Desert to Get a Suntan’ (611) talks about the location shooting for the movie; ‘Trying To Do My Thing’ (424) is Hayden Christensen and others talking about Hayden and the huge responsibility he has portraying Anakin Skywalker; ‘A Twinkle Beyond Pluto’ (537) is sort of like the ‘a day in the life of an assistant director’ thing from the Episode 1 DVD, only this one looks at a day in the life of an extra; ‘It’s All Magic’ (503) talks about the visual effects of the movie and how they prepare for them on set; ‘Revvin’ It to the Next’ (516) talks about the sound of the movie, and how important sound is to a movie; ‘A Jigsaw Puzzle’ (511) is about the models they built for the movie; ‘Bucket Head’ (517) is a small feature about Jango and Bobba Fett; ‘Good to G.O.’ (511) talks about the action scenes; ‘P-19’ (450) talks about the many, many costumes Natalie Portman wears and the inspiration behind them; and finally ‘Reel 6’ is a 6 ½-minutes feature about, well, reel 6, where the battle in the arena takes place.  Personally, I preferred this thing to the ‘From Puppets to Pixels’ doc.  You get a better view about the making of the movie.

Dex’s Kitchen and Still Galleries
Still Galleries part:
There are 3 galleries:
-‘Exclusive Production Photos’.  Like in the Episode 1 DVD, this is a great batch of pictures.  From beginning to end, the pictures can be had with or without captions, and track the film’s production.
-‘One Sheet Posters’.  This is a bunch of promo stuff that was put on buses and billboards and things.
-‘International Outdoor Campaign’ is a whole bunch of posters from around the world.

Dex’s Kitchen part:
‘Films Are Not Released, They Escape’ is a 25 ½-minute mini-documentary talking about the many, many layers of sound used in movies.  It has Ben Burtt talking about how he acquires sounds, how he transforms and layers them, and how they’re all put together.  It tracks the production sound, the foley stage work, the sound effects work, the ADR, and finally the final mix.  It truly is insane the amount of work put into some movies.

‘Episode 2 Visual Effect Breakdown Montage’ is only about 3 ½ minutes.  I always find these things interesting.  It’s a kind of before-and-after montage of effects work.

‘R2-D2: Beneath the Dome’ is a 6-minute mockumentary tracking R2-D2’s career from the early 1970s through to today.  It shows that he’s not on too good terms with Richard Dreyfuss.

Easter Egg
I only found one in here.  It’s just a few promo ads disguised as fake website ads that were posted on campuses around the United States.
 

Well, that’s it.  Even more stuff that in the first episode’s DVD.  Tons of stuff on here.  Anything you need to know about Episode 2.  Totaling everything on disk 2, you get over 4 hours of stuff!  With the commentary track, that total jumps to about 6 ½ hours of extras.  This is a really great set.  Hopefully, the Episode 3 doc will be a bit better, but hopefully the quality and quantity of the rest will be the same as in here.  George Lucas, my hat’s off to you a second time.

Audio
(Changed on 4/1/2003 because I heard the movie in all its Dolby Digital-EX glory.)  The sound is just incredible.  The THX-certified Dolby Digital-EX track is awesome.  All the speakers are used extensively, and all are used to great effect; in big rooms, you have the faint echo of the voices coming in the rear speakers; on Kamino, the rain is constant, even in the rear speakers; on the ‘Sound of Music’ scene, the birds sing everywhere… well, you get the point.  This is quite impressive.  All the insipid dialogue is heard very well (and the more I listen to the movie, the more insipid I feel it is, by the way (‘I wish I could wish away my feelings’?  Something else, anything else, would be better).  The constant score comes through all the speakers and is well balanced with the dialogue and the sound effects.  The sound effects come through all the speakers and provide for some very nice directional and sound effects.  When the movie is done with the sappy love story and the action starts, things get quite dynamic.  That zero-sound bomb was such a treat.  All the details are perfectly clear.  Say what you will about the movie, but the sound is nothing short of incredible.  Unlike the movie, I have no problems whatsoever with the sound

Video
2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen.  I’ll say right off the bat I don’t like DV.  I feel it looks fake.  In the theatre this movie simply looked awful.  The picture in here is better than I expected.  There are, obviously, no dust, grain or scratches anywhere in the movie.  The colours are beyond vivid.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen better separation than in here, and I didn’t notice any compression artifacting.  So perfect transfer, right?  Eh... It looks funny to me.  I thought the picture wasn’t as clean as some other movies I’ve seen.  I just don’t like the look of DV, so that’s probably why I’m overly critical here.  To be honest, it’s better than I thought it would be and it’s nice to watch the visuals, but at the same time I’m also hoping the resolution in the Episode 3 cameras will be much better.  Take that into consideration when you evaluate my evaluation of the review of the video.

1/1/2003