My 14 year old brother’s theory: “If Attack of the Clones is really bad, they probably won’t make another one even if it makes a lot of money cos no one’s going to see Episode III if everybody hated the last two consecutive movies.”

So young, so naive.

I’m seeing Attack of the Clones with him tomorrow night. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it – my expectations are low, but every time I see an ad for it on tv, I get all “Oooh! Lightsabres! Robots! Spaceships!”, so hopefully the film will be enjoyable as far as that goes. I’m pre-disappointed, so I won’t be in denial about its quality as I was with The Phantom Menace after I saw it the first time.

I am very happy with how the Cassandra storyline ended in NXM 126. Perhaps part of why I’m not very interested in Attack of the Clones is because I know there’s no way it could possibly touch the pure geek excitement that came from anticipating the ending of that story, and my satisfaction in how Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely pulled it off. The ending turned out pretty close to how I imagined it would turn out, but the execution was something I just couldn’t map out in my mind in advance, which is rare for this sort of fiction. Normally I can predict the conclusion of sci-fi/superhero stories just from having read so many over the years.

Without saying too much and spoiling things for those who might not have read it yet, I do want to mention that the scene with Cassandra in the school room with Charles and Jean is one of my favorite scenes of all the visual fiction I’ve ever seen. Brilliantly conceived, perfectly illustrated.