The third act is its strongest, but themes could be explored more deeply and Anakin's character and romance is shallow as a baby pool

Rating: 4/10 (23 November 2019)

Attack of the Clones is a more boring version of The Phantom Menace with a considerably better ending. The movie revolves around Anakin's character, which is a real shame because he's one of the weakest points of the movie. He's a young padawan with considerable potential but is also an angsty hormonal teenager. We don't get any legitimate character traits during the movie, just obsession with Padme because she's pretty and a couple ham-fisted lines about how he's actually pretty into dictatorship. Subtle. There's no development or multi-dimensionality to his character, and his relationship with Padme couldn't be more dull or predictable. I honestly don't even know if Christensen gives a bad performance, because the cheesy and underwritten script he's given does seem to portray him as a dull angsty teenager, so if that was Lucas' vision, Christensen killed it. Portman as Padme, on the other hand, was a frustratingly flat performance where the script did give her more room for emotional variance and development. She's one of my favorite actresses of all time and her performance in Black Swan is still my favorite performance of all time, but after giving her a pass in The Phantom Menace because she's undercover, her flat line delivery and lack of physicality was a letdown. She doesn't sell the internal struggle of what to do with Anakin, doesn't really sell either the pretending to not like him or actually being in love at the end, and doesn't sell being a relevant senator. Love Portman, frustrated by her performance especially given how she could've elevated many of the dull parts of the movie.
Setting the romance aside, the action sequences are good and the clones/Jango plot is an exciting one. The idea of the mechanics of war being fundamentally altered by the mass-scale cloning and robot production is a great one, and I wish they had delved deeper into moral implications of cloning for soldiers and the technological challenge in optimizing the soldiers or droids. Figuring out what's going on with the clone army and Jango is interesting, and how it ties into the political uncertainty more broadly was fun to puzzle out and also a simple, satisfying solution. I'd like a lot more from Palpatine - he basically continued on the path from The Phantom Menace - only gets a couple scenes, but clearly is playing a brilliant political game for consolidation of power. Seeing more detail of his maneuvers and seeing growth from his plotting in the last movie would be nice, but I'll take what I can get of him. There's plenty of great material in the political and technological wars, but they are thematically underdeveloped and pushed aside by the lifeless romance plot. The visuals are still good, and the action scene in the arena is very good, but it's hard not to be frustrated when you know a good movie is hidden in there but 80% of the time is filled by cheesy and dull dialogue.