Worse than The Phantom Menace

Rating: 3/10 (20 June 2017)

After the colossal letdown of 1999's The Phantom Menace - the Star Wars franchise's big return to our screen after a 19 year hiatus - I recall leaving the cinema back in 2002 with a smile on my face and an eagerness to see the entire thing again. After all, it had lightsaber duels, dazzling battle scenes, giant monsters, Yoda fighting, and of course, Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) was reduced to little more than a blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo. It seemed as though George Lucas had listened to the many complaints made about the previous film and took these on board when developing the next script. I did see it again at the cinema, and a few more times on DVD, and each time I disliked it more and more. It became apparent that I had blinkers on in 2002, and I was simply relieved that it wasn't the stilted mess it had been 3 years earlier. Yet Attack of the Clones is worse than The Phantom Menace, and by a long margin.
Picking up ten years after dealing with the Trade Federation's invasion of Naboo, the Republic now face a deadlier threat in a Separatist movement headed by a mysterious figure. After narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, Senator Padme Amidala (Natalia Portman) is provided with protection in the form of Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his apprentice, the cocky yet talented Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen). It isn't long before an another attempt is made on the Senator's life and the Jedis chase down the shape-shifting would-be assassin Zam Wesell (Leeanna Walsman), but aren't able to extract any useful information before she is murdered by her bounty hunter employer. At this point, the story splits. Obi-Wan investigates a lead on the whereabouts of the bounty hunter, putting him on the path to remote planet Kamino, while Anakin is assigned to be Padme's personal bodyguard. We already know these two will birth children, so romance is afoot.
Luckily for Anakin, Padme seems to have spent their ten years apart learning how to dress and talk like a real person. Unluckily for us, these scenes of tortured glances and actual rolling through the grass are some of the series' most embarrassing endeavours. Lines such as "I don't like sand, it's course and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere, not like here, here everything is soft and smooth," are spoken with a straight face as if coming from Cyrano de Bergerac, and Hayden Christensen fails to deliver these lines with even a whiff of emotion. Although he's a slight improvement on Jake Lloyd, it's easy to criticise Christensen's awkward performance, but it's difficult to imagine an actor who could convincingly make this dialogue feel remotely natural. The blame lies firmly with George Lucas, a once- great director whose years of tampering with the classic trilogy seems to have blunted his grip on reality. Even seasoned actors like Samuel L. Jackson and Ewan McGregor seem awkward in front of his camera.
The rest doesn't fare much better. During Obi-Wan's mission to Kamino, all we hear about are clones. Understandable, as they are in the title after all, but their importance to the overall story is never really made clear, not to most people outside of Star Wars fandom anyway. Jedi Masters Yoda (Frank Oz) and Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) talk about them too, but they're caught up in their own little sub-plot regarding the Separatists and the shady Count Dooku (Christopher Lee). With all Star Wars films, there's exposition from the very get-go. Attack of the Clones has ten years of history to fill in, and spends a lot of time in council meetings where characters you probably won't recognise discuss politics via some of the most on-the-nose dialogue you're likely to hear. The 15 years since the movie's release, the advancements in CGI has led to its overuse and feelings of numbness whenever a screen is festooned with a computer-generated smack-down, and so the climactic battle in Episode II only adds to the overall sense of boredom and lack of substance. At least The Phantom Menace had Liam Neeson.