Star Wars Saturdays: Why "Attack of the Clones" is also good, actually

"May the 11th be with you" doesn't sound as good

On Saturdays, we’re going through the entire STAR WARS saga in episodic order, a series that will include a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the second film in the prequel trilogy, ATTACK OF THE CLONES. Enjoy…

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones

2002, Dir. George Lucas

Composite based on notes written February 3^rd, 2018 and October 25^th, 2019, and incorporating excerpts published September 19^th, 2011

Except for periods of my life where peer pressure won out and I felt compelled to mock it, I have always liked Attack of the Clones. It came out when I was nine years old, and I absolutely loved the film’s creatures and landscapes and action, its visual expansiveness and immense, detailed world-building; I will not deny that part of the appeal was also because seeing Natalie Portman here was the first time I remember having a crush on a movie character. As an adult watching it now, I still greatly enjoy it, sometimes for the same reasons – the world-building is just as exhilarating to me now as it was then – and sometimes for new ones: There is more good character work going on here than the film typically gets credit for, and as the middle chapter in the fraught political narrative that is the Prequel Trilogy, the film is also thematically fascinating, constructing a story where the triumphant actions of the heroes is in every way planting the seeds of their own downfall, as individuals and as a society. There is so much interesting stuff going on here, and if you really can’t get past Hayden Christensen being kind of stiff occasionally to see what is valuable, I pity you.