Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones Review

Somewhere inside this is a competent detective story: a bounty hunter, a cloning facility on a rain planet nobody remembers commissioning, a republic quietly buying its own executioners. Christopher Lee gives Dooku the courtly menace the script cannot write for him, and the reveal that the clone army was ordered a decade in advance is the sharpest piece of plotting in the prequels.

It is buried under a romance that consumes the middle hour and does not contain one exchange a person would say aloud. Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman are both capable actors asked to deliver lines about sand and rolling through meadows against green screen, and neither survives it. The decision to shoot entirely on early high definition video was historically significant and visually disastrous, flattening skin tones and giving every composite a weightless glow the film has never outgrown.

The Geonosis arena finale throws three monsters, two hundred Jedi and a somersaulting Yoda at the problem, and the sheer volume of computer generated bodies drains the tension rather than raising it. Only the Kamino sequences, rain on chrome and long empty corridors, look like a director still making choices rather than filling a schedule.