Everybody saw it. And if you didn't see it, you heard about it from your friends.

I've discovered that opinions on Star Wars movies don't matter. Everyone has their own, and no one will waver once they've made up their mind. That said, I'll still review it.

I liked The Phantom Menace. I know a lot of people who didn't. I don't think it quite lived up to the hype, and it certainly couldn't compare with Episodes IV, V, and VI, but I still liked it.

And I liked Attack of the Clones even more. Again, I know a lot of people who didn't.

Every complaint I've heard on the subject can, unfortunately, be traced back to one source—the script. The story is excellent. The story is the logical progression in what we know has to happen before we can meet up with Luke on Tatooine umpteen-to-twenty-odd years in the future. It's the way it was written that has Star Wars fans everywhere ready to hang up their lightsabers.

The action was, as in the original Holy Trilogy, fantastic. Lucas was smart enough not to make the same mistake he made in Menace, and the giant, climactic, end-of-the-line final battle was continuous and coherent, rather than a conglomeration of four different fights all going on at the same time. The plot had enough mystery and familiarity to keep us interested. But the dialogue…I never thought I'd say this, but someone needs to take George Lucas' typewriter away. He can keep his camera, as far as I'm concerned, but please make him hand the writing over to someone else. The most passionate scenes are featureless, and even the anger and hatred that Jedi are supposed to be so wary of are only kicked into high gear by a surprise rendition of the Imperial March (most likely the greatest piece of film music ever).

Most fans agree that The Empire Strikes Back is the pinnacle of Star Wars-ness, the height that all other sci-fi—in fact, all other of any genre—movies should aspire to. It was spread about before the release that Attack of the Clones was going to be close, that it was going to have that same darkness, that same edge. And it really didn't. It tried. It tried really hard. But a movie is only as good as its individual elements, and no amount of lightsabers can make up for bad dialogue.

On the upside—90% less Jar Jar! Though I question Gungan wisdom (which I didn't have such a hot opinion of to begin with) in making him a representative in the Republic Senate, at least it keeps him on Coruscant and out of the action. The comic relief is taken out of his computer-generated hands and put back into C-3PO's, where it belongs. Threepio is, as usual, prissy, rigid, and sometimes excruciatingly punny, but we're used to that from him; we like it. And R2-D2 is, in my opinion, one of the finest movie characters ever made. What an actor! He never says anything, but we're always happy to see him. And at what point did some sadistic mechanic take away his leg-jets?

Hayden Christensen "lucked out" and got the unbelievably thankless role of Anakin Skywalker, all grown up. Let's face it: no matter who played Anakin, half the fans in the world would have been upset, so the use of a relative unknown was wise. I recently saw him in another movie, Life as a House, and I was surprised. He was good. Another point against the dialogue of Attack of the Clones, which had him sounding like a robot leaning toward the Dark Side. But, he's handsome—even with that orangey-fake tan—he's brooding, and he's someone you could conceivably buy Natalie Portman having the hots for.

Natalie Portman as Senator Padme Amidala is pretty much the same as Natalie Portman as Queen Padme Amidala, only without the whiteface. She's beautiful, she's diplomatic, and she's got enough guts that the audience will see her where her future daughter's chutzpah came from. If anything, Padme is a little bit too like Leia for my taste. Unlike Anakin, the dialogue is not so much to blame here as the costumes. It seems to me that if she was trying to head forbidden romance off at the pass, she wouldn't have shot Anakin down in a dark room by a roaring fire, wearing a black leather corset. And it was my understanding that Tatooine is supposed to be a desert planet. Padme seemed a little chilly to me—and to anyone else who followed the arrows conveniently provided on her shirt. The wedding dress, though, I'm quite sure, is even now being copied all over the world. I'd kill for that dress.

Obi-Wan, much to my disappointment. is almost incidental in this film. He's a plot device to lead the audience to the titular clones. He's reserved enough that Anakin seems reckless; he's Jedi-esque enough that Anakin seems clumsy and half-trained; and the only line you really remember him saying when you leave the theater is the foreshadowing joke, "You'll be the death of me." But in all fairness, this movie is about Anakin and Padme, and Obi-Wan, is, in fact, incidental. Ewan McGregor channels the spirit of Sir Alec Guinness just as well as he did in Menace, and I, as usual, can find very little fault with him.

We had the good fortune to see a whole lot of Jedi this time around. Everybody wants to be a Jedi, deep down. If someone asked you what color your lightsaber would be, you wouldn't even have to think about it, would you? Jedi are cool, so cool that Shaft can have a purple lightsaber without being made fun of by the other Jedi. I don't know if it's true, but I've been told Samuel L. Jackson wanted a purple lightsaber so he could pick himself out in the big melee scenes. Now that's thinking ahead.

The villains are villainous, as all good villains should be. Ian McDiarmid as Chancellor Cos Palpatine (Did you know he had a first name? This is what the IMDB is for!) works a crowd better than anyone I've seen, and the inclusion of old-time favorite bad guy Christopher Lee as Count Dooku is pure genius. Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison) is cool enough that the only real detraction from his character was how blatantly his son Boba was shoved in our collective moviegoing face.

The beauty of The Phantom Menace was that what seemed to be a completely unimportant trade dispute became, on later reflection, a big, giant deal that paved the way for Palpatine to become Emperor. The similar revelation of Attack of the Clones that hits you on the way home is that the "good guys" in this movie are going to be the "bad guys" later. That wonderful, timely, incredibly fortuitous clone army's uniforms need only a little whitewash and some helmet work to be Stormtrooper outfits. Right after you notice that, you begin to realize that the same man is in charge of both sides of this conflict, and it makes you hunger for the next installment, if only to see how Palpatine pulls that off.

In total, I give Attack of the Clones three and a half asterisks. It doesn't have the wonder of A New Hope, the darkness of The Empire Strikes Back, or Ewoks. Well, I'm thankful for the lack of Ewoks, at least.

But a far better review, I think, was given to me via a late night phone call from my mother:

That might be the best reason to go see the movie, all said. Yoda kicks ass. It's worth every cent you paid, and every minute you waited on line at both the ticket booth and the concession stand, just to watch a tiny green can of two-fisted, monkey-style whoop-ass get cracked open on the head of some poor, unsuspecting Sith Lord. And it answers the question of why nobody just kicked that stick right out from under him.