3. The Anakin Foreboding Is Strong
There are some allusions to Anakin's fate in The Phantom Menace, but none as strong as the ones on display here, which are plentiful and even at times obvious. But that's no matter, because they work so well, are so great in their baleful nature, that they can be as on-the-nose as they like - no amount of patent one-liners are going to disrupt the spine-shiver one gets when you remember that, yes, of course, this man will become Darth Vader, and this is how he became him, and oh my god those people he's with have no idea, the horror...the horror... Whether it's lines that seem throwaway out of context - as when Anakin is "joking" with Padmé about the benefits of a dictatorship - or segments more obviously designed to show his increasingly menacing nature - the slaughter of the Tusken raiders, for instance - the Anakin foreshadowing is a constant throughline within Attack of the Clones, a film which was always going to show the embryo of the Anakin/Vader transformation but one which you may be surprised to find does so so well. Best of all the foreboding scenes is one which Anakin isn't even present in, the one where Yoda and the younglings help Obi-Wan solve the riddle of his missing planet. A scene which should feel redundant (and certainly did at the time) instead becomes pivotal: these are the kind of children Anakin will murder in Revenge of the Sith, and you can't help but feel that their one appearance in Clones has nothing to do with answering puzzles and everything to do with setting the scene for the series' most shocking moment - an idea reinforced by the fact that we don't see the younglings again until they are butchered by Anakin in Revenge of the Sith.