8 Things You Learn From Rewatching Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones

7. The Anakin/Padmé Relationship Still Feels Creepy

Within two minutes of seeing Padmé for the first time in a decade (and for the first time since he was nine years old) Anakin has remarked how beautiful she is in front of a room full of people, and it's damn awkward. Maybe it's Hayden Christensen's delivery and general smugness (which, in hindsight, kind of works for his character - sometimes), but everything he seems to say is toe-curling, and, as in the Phantom Menace - but for different reasons - his relationship with Natalie Portman's Padmé is just plain strange. It doesn't help that Portman imbues all of her similarly cringeworthy dialogue with a sincere earnestness that makes her young-woman-in-the-throes-of-a-love-affair shtick believable (her speech before they enter the Petranaki Arena is particularly heartfelt), because it only amplifies how misjudged the Anakin side of the relationship feels in comparison. (It also doesn't help that she might be the most exquisitely beautiful woman who ever lived; a Goya painting come to life - but I digress). As we'll see later, when the Anakin/Padmé dynamic is told visually, it can be stunning (not including the part where the lovers literally roll around in the grass, about which the less said is better), but when they are forced to spout Lucas' as-always awful dialogue, it is becomes mawkish and hackneyed.