Star Wars: Ranking Every Film From Worst To Best
7. Attack Of The Clones
You probably don't love Attack of the Clones. I get it, you've seen the memes, the "I hate sand" stuff for years. But just humor me for a moment, hear me out.
Following the divisive reaction to Phantom Menace, it again would have been all too easy for George Lucas to just fold and give audiences what they thought they wanted. Instead, he made something that built organically upon Phantom's foundation; a Greek tragedy that painstakingly traced the trials and tribulations of the man-who-would-be-king, Anakin Skywalker.
The way Lucas reverse-engineered these prequels to not only feed into one another with setups and payoffs across several films, but also to intrinsically build to and enrich the thematic work of the original trilogy is something truly special. Again, it's the kind of film only George Lucas could have made and it is all the richer for it.
It also sees Lucas taking his boundary-pushing, innovative setpieces even further. The opening chase sequence on Coruscant is something straight out of a Hitchcock film and its delightful to see Lucas clearly having such a blast orchestrating it. Similarly, the humungous Geonosis-set finale is the longest setpiece of the saga to-date and sees Lucas building upon each layer of conflict in exceedingly interesting ways.