Filthy (my favorite movie critic of all time) reviews Attack of the Clones:

"If I hadn't seen the other four Star Wars movies, I would think Attack of the Clones was 90 minutes of shit and 45 minutes of decent movie. Having seen the others, though, I think this one is 90 minutes of shit and 45 minutes of really good movie."

Which pretty nicely sums up what I was thought about it. The rest of the review explains why the movie mostly sucked: Action with jedis and droids good, love story with wooden acting and smarmy dialog bad. Stuff we all knew.

And for the record, I wasn't expecting Aliens, or The Matrix, or even Star Wars. I went into it wanting to see details and backstory in order to fill in all the numerous nooks and crannies I created in my mind as a voracious 10-to-16 year old Star Wars fanatic. I planned on a little pandering to the toy-buying demographic going into it and so it wasn't all that bad. (I filled in the cinematic "dead air" by thinking over the stuff I'd just seen. Like how come Slave I shoots so damn fast?!? You get that ship in any of the Star Wars space combat games, with their stingy energy management gameplay features, and you'd mop up even against a whole raft of B-wings. I'd take on a Frigate with just one Slave I and blow it up for sure. Maybe he drained his shields into his weapons since Obi Wan couldn't shoot back? But what about the chance an asteroid would hit him? Was Boba managing the energy balance of the ship?) Basically, I expected Saturday morning matinee.

I thought Jango was pretty darn cool. To be honest, I wasn't sure I wanted to see it because I was sure that Lucas would "screw it up" somehow. But that would just be my own adolescent conjecture coming back to haunt me. It's Lucas' movie and his universe and he can put Boba Fett's dad in it if he wants to, my made-up Fett playtime as a kid be damned. So yeah, I guess it was nice to see where Boba Fett came from. I just couldn't escape the distinct notion that Lucas threw the Fett family in after the fact. Boba Fett was merely one bounty hunter character out of a lot of bounty hunter-ish characters in Empire -- he just looked the coolest. All the popular fiction said he wore "Mandalorian" (whatever that is) armor, had a shadowy past, etc. We were led to believe that there was once a race/group of people called Mandalorians and that these guys were badasses, with Boba Fett assumed to be the ultimate badass since he was the last one (or killed and robbed the last one -- same thing). Turns out that his dad is the penultimate badass and Boba got the headgear from him. Even Lucas' own web site doesn't get into the details of Boba's origins too deeply (I even mirrored that page in case it gets altered based on Episode 2's events).

I take it as evidence of a manufactured past. Lucas knew Boba Fett was popular and so wrote into Episode 2 not only him, but his father as well. And made his father something of a central character, too. Boba the kid had more lines in this one movie than Boba the badass had in all the Star Wars movies combined. It has to be revisionist history. I mean, where's General Veers' father? What race did he spawn?

It all seemed so tidy. Like Vader being Luke and Leia's father, even though everyone knows that when Lucas wrote and directed Star Wars, he had no idea they were brother and sister. Leia was supposed to be the heroin to Luke's hero. They even kissed and everything. And the Han thing only makes her out to be a fickle trollop later on. What if Lucas had put in a love scene between the two? That would have unraveled 30 years worth of future movie making. One 15 second love scene, 80 hundred billion marketing tie-in dollars gone. Yeeoow, that woulda hurt. I bet Lucas is real glad he decided to add in a shot of a severed arm in order to garner a PG rating for the original Star Wars instead of show a little hanky-panky after a victorious space battle.

Even if there's a decidely incestuous quality about Star Wars, I don't think Lucas should be faulted for it. I suppose when you have to make up the entire fabric of a complete fantasy universe all by yourself, a low thread count is pretty understandable.