Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002): Assassins, Kamino and an Arena

My Attack of the Clones review is a 2 out of 5, and that’s a notch up from The Phantom Menace but only just. It’s slightly better, but still really bad. The only good thing was the action and the fighting. The rest of it and the whole story was just a complete waste of time. I went in trying to keep an open mind after the last one, and I did get a bit more out of it, but not enough to say it worked. There’s a good half hour in here, and it’s surrounded by two hours I’d happily have skipped.

Below is a full recap of the story, with spoilers, followed by what worked for me (the fighting, and not much else) and what didn’t (almost everything around it), and I can’t help holding it up against the films I grew up on, The Empire Strikes Back most of all, because that’s the other middle chapter and it set the bar a long way up. If you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to stop here.

The story so far: ten years on

It jumps ahead ten years. Padme Amidala is a senator now, and somebody’s trying to kill her, first with a bomb on her ship as she lands on Coruscant and then with a pair of poisonous centipedes let loose in her bedroom, so Anakin Skywalker, now a Padawan under Obi-Wan, gets sent to protect her, and the two of them fall in love. That’s the heart of the film, or at least it’s supposed to be, and a lot of the running time goes on the two of them in quiet rooms and open fields. Anakin is an angry young man here, and he’s meant to be tempted by the dark side, but the film spends a lot of time telling you that instead of showing you. I found it hard to feel anything for either of them. A romance where the woman has her own life and her own decisions, like Mary Jane in Spider-Man, which came out the same month, gives you a lot more to hold onto.

The galaxy is on the edge of a war. A Separatist movement led by a former Jedi called Count Dooku is pulling worlds out of the Republic, and the Senate is arguing about whether to build an army to deal with it. Chancellor Palpatine, the man who’ll be sitting on the Emperor’s throne by Return of the Jedi, looks on in the background, sounding calm and reasonable, and getting more power every time someone panics. It’s a lot of set-up, and it all comes across as talking about things rather than doing them. Palpatine quietly collecting more power every time the Senate panics is a slow conspiracy, and it’s the one part of the film that clearly knows where it’s headed.

Chancellor Palpatine is quietly the most important figure in the first half. He’s the one who’s offered emergency powers by a worried Senate, and of all people it’s Jar Jar Binks, standing in for Padme while she’s in hiding, who gets up and proposes it. He’s also the one who gives Anakin a little more attention than any Jedi does, telling him early on that he sees him becoming the greatest of all the Jedi, and it’s a gentle, friendly moment that’s easy to miss on a first watch. It’s the thread the whole film hangs on, but while you’re watching it’s one more slow, talky bit in a film that’s full of them. I’d have taken a lot less of this and a lot more of the Jedi actually doing things.

Obi-Wan the detective

The one thread I found easy to follow is Obi-Wan’s investigation. He starts with a poisoned dart from the assassination attempt on Padme and ends up tracing it across the galaxy, from a diner on Coruscant to the water world of Kamino, where the cloners have been waiting for him. He finds out there’s an army of clones being grown for the Republic, ordered ten years earlier by a Jedi called Sifo-Dyas who’s supposed to be long dead, and that the bounty hunter Jango Fett, who was hired to kill Padme, is the template for all of them. It’s a good bit of detective work, with Obi-Wan following clues from place to place, and it’s the closest the film comes to the feel of the old adventures.

There’s a nice little scene in the middle of it where Kamino isn’t in the Jedi Archives at all, and the librarian more or less tells Obi-Wan that if it’s not in the records it doesn’t exist, so he takes the problem to Yoda, who’s teaching a room full of younglings, and one of the kids points out that someone must have wiped it from the archive. Then there’s the fight with Jango on a landing platform in the pouring rain, with Jango’s son Boba, an unaltered clone of his dad, at the controls of their ship, and Obi-Wan sticks a tracking device on it before they get away.

But even that falls a bit flat for me. Obi-Wan spends most of the film on his own, away from Anakin and Padme, so the two halves of the story barely touch. When he finally catches up with Jango and chases him across the asteroid field, dodging seismic charges, the fight is fine, but it’s the same kind of flat set piece that the film does everywhere else. It looks great, with some great-looking effects and a huge cast of aliens and droids, and then there’s nobody in it I care about.

Anakin and Padme

Meanwhile the film keeps coming back to Anakin and Padme, in a field of grass, by a fireplace, on a boat in the lake, and the dialogue is so stiff that I couldn’t tell if I was meant to be feeling anything. He tells her he doesn’t like sand because it’s coarse and rough and gets everywhere, and that’s meant to be him opening up to her, and it’s about as romantic as it sounds. Padme’s trying to resist him, and Anakin’s trying to be a good Jedi, and they both fail. He’s got plenty of anger to spare, and you can see the beginning of the person he’ll become, but it never turned into something I cared about. The film wants it to be a great tragic romance, and I just kept looking at the clock.

Everything else is a waste of time. Anakin and Padme falling in love is meant to be the heart of the thing, and it just didn’t work for me. He goes back to Tatooine after nightmares about his mother, finds out she was freed and married a moisture farmer called Cliegg Lars, whose son Owen and Owen’s girlfriend Beru are living there too, and that she was taken by Tusken Raiders a month before. He finds her in their camp, she dies in his arms, and he kills every one of them, the women and children too, and then he goes back and confesses everything to Padme. Yoda feels it from all the way across the galaxy. I couldn’t get into any of it. I didn’t care about the romance, and I didn’t care about the investigation either.

The only part that worked

There’s a speeder chase over Coruscant earlier on that’s decent, and it’s the first real action in the film. Obi-Wan and Anakin are hunting for the assassin, and Anakin leaps out of a flying car and drops through the traffic of an enormous city, then chases her through the air lanes with Obi-Wan trailing behind, before it all ends up in a nightclub where Obi-Wan cuts off her arm and she’s killed by Jango’s dart before she can tell them who hired her. It’s flashy and fast, and it’s the sort of thing that only digital effects could pull off. I’d happily watch it again, and it shows what the film could have been if it had been a bit more adventurous throughout.

The arena on Geonosis is where I really started to enjoy myself. Obi-Wan, who’s tracked Dooku’s droid factories down to Geonosis, gets captured, and Anakin and Padme go to rescue him, and all three end up chained to posts in an arena to be killed by monsters, and it’s a proper action sequence, with a ton going on and no time to be bored. Padme picks her lock and climbs her post before the creature gets to her, Anakin ends up riding his beast round the sand, and Obi-Wan gets a spear off a guard. Then Mace Windu and a whole bunch of Jedi show up with their lightsabers out, and the droids come pouring in, and it’s the best stretch of the film by a long way. A whole crowd of Jedi fighting at once is something I’d wanted to see since I was a kid.

Yoda, Dooku and a war

Mace Windu takes Jango Fett’s head off in the middle of the arena, and Boba picks up the empty helmet afterwards, which is the one bit of the whole film that got to me a little. When the Jedi are nearly wiped out, Yoda arrives with the clone army, which has been built for the Republic, and the Jedi are saved. Dooku escapes, and Obi-Wan and Anakin chase him down, and Anakin loses an arm in a duel with Dooku. The fight where Yoda takes on Count Dooku was good too, the little green master turning into a blur of lightsaber and flips, and for that half hour I was happy. The fighting is good, I’ll give it that. At least it delivers there. But that’s about all there is to like, and it makes the rest of the film’s problems stand out even more.

Earlier, when Obi-Wan was his prisoner, Dooku had told him that the Senate was under the control of a Sith Lord called Darth Sidious, and Obi-Wan didn’t believe him. Dooku gets away by dropping a pillar on Obi-Wan and Anakin so Yoda has to catch it, and he flies off to Coruscant to hand over the plans for some huge new weapon to his master. Yoda stands watching the clone troopers march onto their ships and says the Clone War has begun.

By the end the Clone Wars have started, Anakin and Padme have married in secret on Naboo with only the droids watching, and I felt like nothing I’d sat through had really mattered. A lot happens in the film and none of it hung together. I wanted more from it, and I got fighting and not much else.

What I made of it

Looking back over it, the problem isn’t the effects or the design. It looks incredible, and the whole film is full of new planets and creatures and huge, wonderful sets, from the rainy towers of Kamino to the red rock and the hive-like spires of Geonosis, and the factory where C-3PO’s head ends up on a battle droid’s body. The problem is that I didn’t care about anyone in it. The first three films had people I’d have followed anywhere, and this one has a lot of people standing around saying their lines. I found the central romance flat, the plot slow, and the story itself, a big build-up to a war that we already knew was coming, a waste of the time it took.

I’ll give it credit for the Geonosis battle and Yoda’s duel, and for trying. It’s a step up from the last one, and a small step is still a step. But I came out wanting a lot more, and I’m not sure I’ll be going back for a second look. Rating: 2 out of 5. The fighting was good, and that’s all I’ve got.

Did the arena battle and Yoda’s duel make up for the Anakin and Padme scenes for you, or did the romance drag the whole film down? Tell me in the comments.