Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. This movie is just straight up not that good in my opinion. I said how I didn’t like The Phantom Menace in my last review, but at least that movie had its own positives that at least somewhat made up for the negatives. This one just doesn’t really have that at all. I’ll start off with the positives, which are few and far between. All of that starts with Obi-Wan Kenobi who’s still an amazing character that is played perfectly by Ewan McGregor. Jango Fett is an interesting side antagonist that is played decently and provides some entertaining action scenes. I still really like Padme’s character as Anakin’s love interest and she has her own really cool moments in her own way. Another massive plus on the character side was the lack of Jar Jar Binks, who was one of the worst characters Star Wars has ever created.
The main villain in this movie is Count Dooku, who was formerly in the Jedi Order and was following orders from Darth Sidious, who at this time was a mysterious figure trying to overthrow the Republic. I was a fan of Dooku and thought he was a different and somewhat unique villain who also played well. Darth Sidious was also a cool “in the shadows” type of villain. Another good note on this movie was the use of Yoda and him being involved in some action scenes which was pretty cool to see. However, the amount of good characters were not enough to save this movie from some very bad writing and a boring plot. Also the poor acting from Hayden Christensen who played Anakin Skywalker didn’t help this movie at all but it wasn’t nearly the biggest problem. This movie just didn’t seem like it had a real goal of what it wanted to be and it really hindered the end product.
I always rate the Star Wars movies and shows and I rate them based on 10 things in the movie. Those things are: action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this movie a 60/100, and the only things that slightly brought the score up were the cinematography, characters, and ending. The ending was pretty good and set up the 3rd movie in the prequel trilogy very well. However, to me that’s all this movie felt like, just a stepping stone to get to the next movie.
