Not enough of a Clone of what came before for us to hate it, but still lacking a certain something.

Rating: 6/10 (19 July 2019)

The Star Wars series sputters and stutters into a second prequel here, in the form of "Attack of the Clones"; an entry which probably improves slightly on the opening episode, but still seems to fall short, often on the basics, for it to feel like it is a proper piece of mythical story-telling.
Indeed, after having appeared to alienate audiences with a saggy narrative involving both diplomatic disagreements and political strife in 1999's "The Phantom Menace", Lucas is back and daring to re-tread relatively similar ground in his telling of a detective story about why a group of aliens might want to break away from a thousand year old galactic union to form a rival power-block. Told parallel is a more grounded love story between a bourgeoning male autocrat and the queen of a tropical planet which, because it involves that whom we know will become Darth Vader, is probably slightly more interesting, although is not powerful enough to carry the film alone.
Suffice to say, Lucas doesn't quite hit either strand out of the park; you wait, patiently, for the spark, urging them both on to get there, but neither quite make it. By the end, the characters feel too much like action heroes, and do not feel like flawed people with problems and emotions.
Obi-wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) are back, ten years after the events of Episode One, and have been brought in by the Jedi council to protect the returning Queen of Naboo, Amidala (Natalie Portman), who is in a metropolis to help prevent the break-up of the Republic - something being brought about by the aforementioned alien solar systems who are leaving en masse. We're told that voting "to form an army" is the solution to this.
The film opens with the assassination of somebody close to Amidala and omnipresent in the first episode - an attempt at distancing the film from "Phantom Menace", perhaps? The Queen suspects somebody called Count Dooku (Christopher Lee), but the rest of the characters dismiss this, so seeding doubt in the minds of the audience. Remarkably for this kind of story, the actual villain does not appear until the final act. Following a second assassination attempt, whereby a hitman oddly hires a hitman amidst the clever backdrop of neon signs that invoke iconography of the sleazy and shady, it is seemingly accepted that Amidala leaving her home was a mistake and she is carted back with Anakin, despite nobody actually thinking he is up to the job. Kenobi, meanwhile, hunts for the origin of these assassination attempts.
Refreshingly, the film does not come to a grinding halt like the last episode once everybody decamped to Tatooine. Kenobi's strand, in the spirit of the more popular Star Wars entries, keeps moving and encompasses a series of action scenes, one of which is a neat hand-to-hand combat sequence in a terrific rainstorm upon a flight platform with smoothed-out edges going all the way down to a watery grave. One other sequence in this strand involves a spaceship chase which heads into an asteroid belt, something C3PO stated in "V" was practically suicide, but hey-ho. Surely when you chuck a tracking device onto another spaceship, that means you don't have to fly so close to it... I suppose it's good for an action scene when you do, though...
Unfortunately, none of it really amounts to anything particularly immersive. I think the conflict was supposed to radiate out of this strand, but there really isn't any - when we finally meet the villain, his ideas actually sound like common-sense: what if there IS a force of great evil, undetected, destroying the Union from within? What if this incognito clone army IS needed to fight off the true enemy? There is a terrible moment when Kenobi, unbeknownst to the bad-guys, overhears precisely what he needs to hear in the form of a plot, purely for the benefit of the film's progression, as the villains congregate to discuss details they would all have already known by now. The scene is needed for the benefit of the audience because it wasn't set up properly in the first act.
The other half, as stated, is a little more substantial. Where Kenobi's strand is full of special effects and green-screen technology, and is telling a cold, hard story of investigation, the segments involving Portman and Christensen's characters' love story is about emotions; blooming feelings and unfolds amidst the beautiful true-to-life backdrops of Italy. While this contrast works better than it has any right to, the tale itself just doesn't quite blow us away; Amidala's behaviour is inconsistent, maintaining that, as a senator, she cannot get involved with a Jedi one minute, but is seemingly happy to strip to some leather nightwear in a warmly lit bedroom scene with him the next.
Meanwhile, whilst their political views seem to clash in a later scene in a meadow, her response to Anakin's newfound love of the violence which came with an act of revenge seems to sit quite easily with her. While the dialogue is generally pretty bad ("A poisonous dart!"), one decent aspect of this strand is the emphasis on how Anakin feels for Amidala through what he says: the feelings of sickness and the missing her, etc.
Alas, and already worn down by a coliseum battle, a worthy-enough climax in itself, the film creeps towards a final fight which, despite its impressive choreography, isn't actually about anything other than said choreography. I think the difference between these prequels and the original trilogy is the fact the first three unfolded during a time of war, so were quite easily afforded a sense of conflict: Empire v Rebels might be simplistic, but it is effective. Here, the conflict is either interior, which means working damn hard to bring about something of some substance, or is with characters (trade organisations; faceless Counts, etc.) which are just not very threatening. "Clones" works in places, but too often feels like not very much.