5. Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Attack of the Clones was no The Phantom Menace. It is deeply flawed, badly acted, poorly written, clumsily directed and intensely boring, but it was a very small step in the right direction after The Phantom Menace. For starters, there is only a minimal role for evil personified in Jar Jar Binks, presumably because George had sold all the merchandise he needed to off the back of the first prequel and it stars Christopher Lee as Count Dooku in one of the greatest bits of casting in the whole series. To describe Hayden Christensen as wooden does a disservice to rocking chairs as he strains to deliver the most simple of lines without squinting or tilting his head awkwardly. His romantic relationship with Natalie Portman's Padme is damp, cold and puzzling as they hardly have the fire and pasison of Romeo and Juliet. There is so much talking throughout Attack of the Clones, much of which doesn't develop the plot or deepen the characterisation, much of it is about politics and like The Phantom Menace it plods and it plods trapped forever in dormant exposition. The highest point of the film comes at the very end, after the completely uninteresting battle of Genosis and the anticlimactic beheading of Jango Fett. It comes when Yoda gets his big moment opposite Christopher Lee's sinister Count Dooku. They have an intense, ferocious battle, though low on emotion as you know Yoda lives, it is high on cool as fans have waited for decades to see Yoda unleash his lightsaber. The film has none of the style or wit of the original trilogy, being as timid and lifeless as Christensen's acting. Attack of the Clones feels a lot longer than it is and the flat delivery of everything from the direction to story makes the whole thing incredibly banal, save for a few highlights that mostly involved Christopher Lee.