In space, no one can hear you groan

Poor George Lucas: For him, the whole galaxy is a town without pity. He approaches the love scenes between Anakin and Amidala with unsheathed embarrassment. Clearly, he can't wait for them to be over so he can get on to the cool stuff, much of which he's stolen from other movies anyway. (A city of roadways floating parallel to one another on many different levels is lifted straight out of "The Fifth Element"; there's a major battle, complete with bloodthirsty beasts, derived straight from "Gladiator.")

There's one special-effects scene in "Attack of the Clones" that qualifies as fun: A light-saber duel between Dooku and that little whippersnapper Yoda, who's about one-sixth his size. When Yoda swings and sweeps through the air, jabbing and slicing at the stringbean-elegant Dooku (even when he's playing a dud of a character, Lee can't help but look elegant), the movie gets a momentary jolt of energy. The sequence works because it shows us a Yoda we haven't seen before, moving in a way we never imagined he could -- it's a bit like seeing Kermit the Frog ride a bicycle. In that one sequence, Lucas creates a believable reality for a beloved and well-known character that teases and tickles our imagination.

The rest of the time, though, "Attack of the Clones" leaves us constantly hoping that with the next scene, something exciting will actually happen. The story is chopped up into dozens of tiny, episodic bits; they're supposed to move the action along rapidly, but they only serve to make the movie feel like an elongated cheapie toy train with too many cars for its weak engine to pull.

What's more, Lucas has never met a stereotype he didn't like. Jar Jar Binks, his dreads dangling and his patois pattering, makes a few brief appearances. (For what it's worth, the preview audience I saw the movie with hissed when he came on-screen and cheered when he left.) We also get another chance to see the crooked moneylender we first met in "The Phantom Menace," the guy with the insect wings and the big, hooked nose. This time, he has apparently sold Anakin's mother down the river. But we know he's not supposed to look Jewish or anything because, as everybody knows, Jews don't have wings.

Scene after scene, "Attack of the Clones" looks, sounds and smells bad. Portman and Christensen (the first of whom is incredibly talented, and the second of whom at least had a fighting chance in "Life as a House") bumble about awkwardly, trampling over their own and one another's clumsy lines. (Portman's outfits are a consistent disappointment: Whose idea was it to put her in that chintzy Courrèges-by-way-of-Target stretch outfit for the climactic escape scene?)

"Attack of the Clones" is the ultimate betrayal of the two high points in the "Star Wars" series: It's such a far cry from the giddy, Saturday-afternoon feel of the first "Star Wars," and from Irvin Kershner's somber, completely enveloping "The Empire Strikes Back," that it hardly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath.

What no one wants to admit is that modern fantasies like TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books have rendered the ever-more-convoluted machinations of the "Star Wars" franchise irrelevant. (I'd also argue that the first installment of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" series stole the thunder of "Attack of the Clones" months in advance.) Both "Buffy" and the Harry Potter books relate directly to real life, instead of taking place in a sterile, self-contained universe. Both have done a much better job than the "Star Wars" series of creating a rich and complex mythology and, most important of all, they've given us characters we genuinely want to care about.

Lucas, on the other hand, has created an imaginary universe that pretends to fuel our imaginations even as it seals them off: He doesn't want our imaginations to soar, because then they will no longer be in his power. That's why every plot detail in "Attack of the Clones" is so neatly planned out and controlled. This is a fantasy with no poetry in it.

Which explains why barely a frame of it stuck with me after I left the theater. For some moviegoers, the two-hours-plus of "Attack of the Clones" may qualify as fun. But what I loved best about it was running, almost literally, from the theater afterward: I can't remember ever feeling so glad that a movie was finally over. Lucas may have held my imagination hostage for two hours, but reclaiming it afterward wasn't hard at all. The Force is always with us. It lives, even when George Lucas tries to bludgeon it to death.

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