Richard Corliss, feature film critic for Time Magazine, hails Episode II as movie magic, but not without similar criticisms that seems to be making its rounds. From Time.com:

Recipe for a May blockbuster: teen misfit falls in love, disobeys a sympathetic father figure, battles monsters and stumbles toward a complicated manhood. We doubt that the Spider-Man people swapped script notes with George Lucas and his Star Wars: Episode II?Attack of the Clones team; still, the similarities are striking. So, probably, are the eventual box-office numbers. Spidey has quickly scaled the Hollywood heights, but Lucas may be able to ward off this arach attack. Remember, folks: every previous Star Wars movie has been the top-grossing film of its year.

Like the army of clones deployed in Episode II, a gaggle of critics has already spread the news that the picture stinks. It doesn't. It has more action than either Spider-Man or the last Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace. It's gorgeously designed and color coordinated; the god who created this galaxy was working from a very rich palette. In its digital version (Clones will be shown on traditional film in most theaters), the image is shallow but sharp and subtle. If this is the future of movies?at least of epics with visual effects that make the 'plex screen a computer screen?bring it on.

There's nothing deep or emotionally grand about this enterprise, but Star Wars never occupied that part of the cinema spectrum. The series was?and remains?Lucas' elaborate reconstruction of his Saturday-matinee memories and fantasies. This time the energy level is higher, the tempo brisker; a nice sense of doom crawls up the spine of the narrative. The leaden Menace was full of the posturing that two hostile nations engage in while marshaling their forces. In Clones the war breaks out.

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