Prequel Month: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (Dir. George Lucas, 2h 22m, 2002)

It is difficult to sum up why Attack of the Clones doesn't work into a pithy soundbite or phrase. Unlike Phantom Menace, where the faults are plain to seen, slapped across the poster in all their long-tongued objectionable space rasta infamy, the faults of Clones are deeper, more integral, more fundamental. In its tale of the brewing Clone Wars, long exposited from the very beginnings of the Star Wars franchise in Alec Guinness's tales of the hayclion days of the Republic in the opening act of Star Wars (1977), and the budding romance between Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padmé (Natalie Portman), so Lucas' vision should have been of a grand sweeping romance across the stars, of a forbidden love that eventually lit the powder-keg of Anakin's fall to become Darth Vader, and the seeds of rebellion in the form of Luke and Leia

What Attack of the Clones is, however, is a fundamentally broken film, a mess of telegraphed plot lines, CGI slog-fests, terrible dialogue, terrible acting, and some of the most painfully awful romantic scenes in mainstream cinema. It is a cinematic ground zero of the flaws in George Lucas as a director, and Star Wars as a series, a film that, compared to its middle-film siblings (the critically colossal Empire Strikes Back, a film whose long shadow falls almost as much over the franchise as its predecessor, and the divisive if bold The Last Jedi, where Lucas's very cinematic language is torn up in place of something more artistic and strikingly artistic), falls short at every points, with even the sterling performance of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan, and the slow unwinding of the film's key conspiracy doing little to hold back the collapse of this film into early 2000s CGI nonsense. Even when compared to the ineptitude of the other prequel films, even when compared to the rest of the saga as a whole, even when compared to other fundamentally broken instalment of Star Wars, the badly paced, overly fan-service driven debacle of a film that is Rise of Skywalker, Clones falls short.

Here's the thing. We knew this was bad going in. Gone was the rose-tinted view of Fortress Star Wars, this impregnable cinematic mark of quality, second only to the Nintendo Seal of Quality in terms of its reliability. Star Wars was flawed now. Attack of the Clones does nothing to reverse this, and it would only be with the fan-pleasing Revenge of the Sith that the trilogy would begin to turn back into something resembling a solid piece of entertainment. There is, however, more than this to Attack of the Clones. Phantom Menace comes out in 1999, and ends the year atop the box-office; its nearest competitors, at least for family audiences, are Tarzan and Toy Story 2, and even its nearest competitor, The Sixth Sense, is swept aside by this cinematic colossus.

But by the time that Attack of the Clones arrives in cinemas in May 2002, it enters to a far more cluttered arena. Moreover, it goes up again, and loses to, two sequels, in the form of the workmanlike second Harry Potter film, and the middle film of Peter Jackson's spectacular, and medium-changing Lord of the Rings trilogy, which, together with the excellent first Sam Raimi Spider-Man film, push it into fourth place. It remains, at time of writing, the lowest grossing of all the Skywalker Saga films. We knew it was bad. We stayed away. I stayed away. My first watch of Attack of the Clones is on my parents television, home ill from school. I fall asleep midway through the film. Illness or not, Attack of the Clones is dull for eleven-year old me. It's not fun. This from the same child who, in similar childhood illnesses eats up the 1933 black-and-white Frankenstein, the work of Ray Harryhausen, the beginning of my fascination with cinema.

Part of the difficulty of talking about Attack of the Clones is identifying where the problems begin. Jake Lloyd, long (unfairly) regarded as the cause of Phantom Menace's faults, is clearly too young to play Anakin-Lucas is hardly going to wait around as Linklater did for Boyhood for him to grow up. Ahmed Best's maligned Jar-Jar is reduced to bit-parts as are Watto and the Nemoidians. Yet the problems magnify. The badly written dialogue seems to outweigh any of the quips between our heroes, the action scenes are either badly paced, or overstay their welcome by minutes at a time, or descend into computer generated malaise, and the acting is painful. There are perhaps four or five genuinely excellent moments in nearly two and a half hours, none of which even manage to rescue a part, let alone the entire, film, each of which I will come to in time.

The architect of all this, sadly, is Lucas himself. Phantom Menace can be forgiven a little rustiness, a few minor errors here and there in tone or casting or narrative-this is a man who hasn't directed a film in twenty plus years, mostly restricting himself to assisting Spielberg or producing films alongside him. Clones, however, stabs to the very bone everything wrong with George Lucas as a writer and a director. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the romantic scenes between Anakin and Padmé Lucas has never been a director who can write romance-hell, one could argue that George doesn't know how to write women full stop-most of the best relationship in the Original Trilogy, between Han and Leia is either thanks to Harrison Ford's ad-libbing or his tangible chemistry with Carrie Fisher. (Ford himself, of course, has never been the best proponent of Lucas's dialogue, once retorting to the director: "You can type this shit, but you sure can't say it!")

This isn't such a problem in the buttressing Episodes I and III, where the love story is mostly background noise though Christensen and Portman, devoid of having to spout George's garbled romantic platitudes for most of Sith are surprisingly a more romantic, and certainly more believable couple. In Episode II, where this love story is absolutely front and centre, it's ruinous. It's painful to watch two actors who can clearly act in other films talking in overwrought quasi-operatic terms about their love for each other. It's, frankly, laughable in places, as Anakin complains about sand or his breaking heart or any manner or number of things as he and Padmé desperately try to make anything even vaguely believable. It's here that George's other key flaw begins to surface; his direction, especially in Clones is appalling, as great actors like Samuel L Jackson, Natalie Portman and Christopher Lee flounder about, trying their best to make George's ham-fisted mess make sense, to give it, particularly in the case of Jackson and Lee expository weight and gravitas.

Yet, out of this comes the great hero of the franchise, Ewan McGregor. McGregor makes Lucas's dialogue work, makes Obi-Wan the true narrative thread throughout the prequels, makes even poorly chosen and bizarre stylistic choices such as the 50s-esque diner Obi-Wan has to go to for clues to the queen's mystery assailant work. Moreover, in the middle of this unpleasant trudge of a film, where every other actor feels dour or miserable, McGregor is having fun. Certainly, the film gives him the lion's share of the narrative, and the most to actually do as his quest to find the culprit for the attempted assassination of Padmé leads him from a conspiracy to hide the planet on which a weapon used to dispatch her would be murderer came from, to his arrival on said planet to find an even bigger mystery, and the titular clones waiting

But McGregor goes further. Much as Guinness added a theatrical quality to Obi-Wan's exposition in the original trilogy, so that the warrior hermit felt, despite his actor's misgivings, like a rounded character, a survivor from a faded golden age, so McGregor delivers lines that would ring hollow from other actors with aplomb, even as his co-stars fumble about in the dark, whilst some of Lucas's clunkiest lines are delivered in pithy one-liners. Whilst the other great exponent of the campier side of Star Wars acting, where this great space opera is given the suitably operatic scale of acting, Ian McDiarmid remains a fleeting set of appearances, they are all memorable, culminating in one of the best single scenes of this otherwise sorry mess, as Palpatine reluctantly takes the mantle of war leader, with furrowed brow and portentous dialogue, on the behest of the Senate, and the wheels are set, irrecoverably in motion for the fall of the Republic.

These moments, though, are few and far between. The opening sequence, which culminates in a harrowing bomb blast that leaves Padmé’s body double dead, and hammers home that this is no longer a safe and united galaxy is a suitable prologue to what could have been a darker film as the republic begins to disintegrate, but its more grounded reality, its downbeat goes nowhere, and Padmé is soon zipping from planet to planet as whim takes her, Anakin in tow. Their first meeting is an excellent piece of physical acting from both McGregor and Christensen, as the shy Anakin is brought back face-to-face with his childhood sweetheart, his body language hunched, his hands inside his robes, but the dialogue is clumsy, too many words said in a scene that needs but a few.

At the centre of this all is Christensen, the centre of the Prequel Trilogy, its star. Christensen can act; the Golden Globe nomination for Life as a House (2000) and subsequent critical acclaim for the title role in Shattered Glass (2003) prove it. When Christensen does not have to speak, his acting is superb; the Tusken Raider massacre is a stunning, disturbing and utterly electric piece of acting, in which Christensen does not say a single word, letting the flow of his changing expression explain everything as he succumbs to vengeance. Even in the romantic scenes, especially in the build-up to their supposed execution at the hands of the Separatists, when Christensen doesn't speak, and when Portman is leading the scene, or when the film simply lets narrative rather than verbal storytelling do the work, the quality of the scenes grows tenfold.

Unfortunately, he then has to open his mouth and deliver more Lucas dialogue, and if any actor is failed by Lucas's rustiness as a director, it is Hayden Christensen. As a result, in Lucas's hands, the future Darth Vader, the hero of the republic, the best pilot in the galaxy is reduced to a complaining wilful child, Christensen trying his best to make his role empathetic, a portrait of a stunted young man whose master is inexperienced, whose emotions run him, who is reckless and impulse. It's easy to imagine a more competent version of this trilogy to show an Anakin growing in power and confidence, or slowly developing into a tragic figure, ruled by regret and the weight of expectation. We get this, to a degree in Revenge of the Sith. What we get here is a mess.

And nowhere is this better seen than in the vast stretch of action finale from Geonosis's arena to the colossal battle that kicks off the Clone Wars to a showdown with Christopher Lee's Count Dooku. It is a slog, as one action set piece bleeds into the next, as CGI droids and clones do battle on a colossal scale in a spectacle that means nothing and is little more than cinematic shock and awe, that frankly feel and look and have the gravitas of a bad video game cutscene as colossal tanks and vehicles and spaceships crash across screen in proto-Bay mayhem. Worse, this film has no idea what to do with Lee, does not give this gourmand of scenery from Ealing to New Zealand anything to chew on to deliver one of his great wryly camp performances, and by the time he goes up against flailing CGI muppet Yoda in a duel whose coolness has rubbed off quicker than the finish on Lucas's two Golden Raspberries, he's all but checked out of the film. 

This, in short, feels like Clones in miniature, a film that has no ideas. No idea how to use its actors, no idea how to make its central love story work or be believable, no idea how to pace itself or make its slow burn focus on corruption and political intrigue work other than on planet-hopping happenstance, where complexity-one cannot help but roll ones eyes at the overwrought chain of murderous Chinese whispers that leads from Sidious's orders to kill Padmé to a robot sent by a shapeshifter doing the deed via poisonous worms that some have come to laud as the film's complex look at Star Wars' dark underbelly. The ideas it has got are either poorly executed, poorly thought out, or simply go nowhere.

Clones is a disaster of a film. Lucas realises this, soon after its release, and in its wake, Revenge of the Sith is an over-correction, a homeward lap stuffed to the gills with memorable moments, characters, and fan homages. If Phantom Menace has weathered the storm of 20 years of re-appraisal, then Clones never stood a chance; for McGregor's efforts, for the bubbling political intrigue, for the spectacle, all of it is washed away on a tide of mediocrity, as the architect of the saga completely loses the plot. On every single level, aside from Obi-Wan's enjoyable romp of a detective quest across the galaxy, Attack of the Clones is a disappointment, a romantic epic that contains not a smidgen of romance, nor any true sense of scale in a film that remains the single worst outing in the Star Wars saga.

Rating: Avoid.