It may be debatable to many and especially with a franchise like Star Wars, its always going to be subjective to whatever a person’s taste is, but from an objective cinematic and storytelling level, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones is by far the worst one ever made. When Phantom Menace didn’t give fans exactly what they were hoping for after such a long time away, Lucas was hesitant while writing the script for the follow, but after several drafts and ideas were throw out, he finalised it and released the film in 2002, and while it was given credit for its increase of action and still producing flashy pretty visuals, the criticism were still the same as before except this time even more apparent and even more disastrous. Set ten years after the Phantom Menace, the now teenage Anakin Skywalker (played by Hayden Christensen) and his master Obi-Wan Kenobi (played by Ewan McGregor) are tasked with protecting now ‘’senator’’ Amidala (Padme) (played by Natalie Portman) after several assassination attempts. While Anakin guards Padme away on Naboo while the two develop ‘’romantic feelings’’ for each other, Obi-Wan is directed to a cloning planet where an entire army is being created for Republic to use in their side of the war. Through this, a plot is discovered that Count Dooku (played by Christopher Lee) a former Jedi is planning to use these clones to win their side of the war and its up to the two jedis to stop him in his tracks. For a follow-up to an already pretty bad movie, this movie not only is equal to its previous in terms of story, characters, and writing, but it actually goes further down the rabbit hole of commit the horrible crime of being incredibly boring.  While Phantom Menace at least had a cool looking climax and a few nice locations, there is nothing in this movie that it worth watching; for necessity to the story or for any scene of enjoyment.

This film had any even harder job of creating a story because unlike Phantom Menace which had a limitless sky of interesting possibilities and stuck with bad material, this film had to follow up this terrible material that offered nothing interesting, creative, or adult. The writers and Lucas seemed to take the audience’s opinion to heart and tried to redeem a lot of the elements that people didn’t like about the first one, which means scenes with Jar Jar are MERCIFULLY short and the film features more action sequences and sci-fi battles. With that said though, all it does is smother the already weak story with excessive action instead of remedying the terrible narrative. Instead of making the world more interesting, the topics and themes more understandable and the characters more relatable, it still keeps a heavy focus on the boring politics, hints at interesting concepts yet never follows through with them and kept the characters as underdeveloped and uncharacterised as they were previously. This movie is incredibly dull as well as uncomfortably long; being over two hours long, it fails to feature anything that makes that length feel meaningful and just an excuse to pad out a complete wasted story, so when the film’s climax begins, its doesn’t only very completely unearned because the plot point was only brought to light in the last 40 mins, but the remaining time did nothing to build upon anything that was worth the audience’s time and attention. It can try to feature more of the stuff people like about Star Wars but without a purpose behind it, its equally as useless.

The characters in the original trilogy were simple archetypes but with the future movies came improved acting and more interesting things added to them to make them more than just their archetypes. These characters do not even reach the realm of archetypal, they are just one-note individuals at best; they have no depth, complexity, intrigue, connect-ability or even that much likeability, they are action figures by every meaning of the word. Obi-Wan is just a bunch of one-liners, Yoda is pretty dull and lacks that sense of charming goofiness that people liked about him, Padme is just the women for Anakin to fall in love with, and the villain is introduced way too late and leaves no impression character wise. The only one that feels like he could be an actual character is Anakin which makes sense as he would later become incredibly important to Star Wars later on, but that still means that he’s only two attributes are incredibly whiny teenage brat or creepily horny teenager. There feels like an attempt to make Anakin complex, but its written so poorly and told in such a boring way that it does not feel like it adds to anything that would come later in the story. The acting from pretty much everybody is incredibly stilted, unnatural, bland and lifeless making the already terrible dialogue either hilariously painful, laughable or just forgettable; Hayden has a really bad delivery, Portman sounds like a spoiled little girl throughout the film, the two absolutely no chemistry with each other, even Samuel L Jackson is boring and bad in this film. The only two that delivery their lines okay are Ewan McGregor, who truly does feel like a young Alec Guinness, and Christopher Lee, whose character is completely forgettable, but he sells most of these terrible lines quite well.

Much like the last film, the fans were not overly happy about the abundance of CG implemented areas within the prequels and missed the authenticity that came with the original trilogy. The plus side to this inclusion was that it led to some great looking locations that could be shown off much more because they were not hampered by real life sets and locations. The environments in this film are a bit duller in color to the previous film but they still look pretty pleasing to look at for the most part and even some of the locations were they actually shot real footage at look pretty interesting as well. But with that said, with every alien planet and design that they create to try and look different, they will also contain areas and creations that look distinctly-not Star Wars like a 1950s canteen. While the CG areas look okay enough, the creatures it shows off do not look especially good particularly Yoda who goes from a real-life puppet to a CG one. The action in the film is a bit more prominent but with the lack of care that went into WHY they were fighting, every fight meant nothing outside of clanging action figures together. Probably the only fight scene that was memorable was the final fight scene with Yoda, which was pretty silly in its own right but at least offered audiences something different and seeing this tiny green gremlin fight is pretty cool to see. The music has some nice moments like a specific motorbike sequence but does not offer up much else outside of that. The writing is still incredibly confused; mixing boring adult-like talks of politics intrigue and rules with childish one-liners and terrible romantic dialogue, but thankfully it doesn’t reach the same levels of terribleness as it did with Jar Jar, though there are still a few groaners here and there.

Attack of the Clones is the first Star Wars movie that people were actively afraid to go watch because of how they were tricked previously and its hard to not imagine why. This movie does not offer anything that fans will really care about and newcomers will not be exposed to the proper Star Wars material because of how much its been dumbed down. For kids that grew up with this franchise, its perfectly good that they like it and are absolutely allowed to like it, but when the only excuse for liking this movie is because you grew up with it, it says a lot about its content. This and the Phantom Menace could easily be skipped; people could go straight to Revenge of the Sith and not miss a thing because these two films offer nothing that impacts anything later on in that film. It just stands alone as a terribly told, horribly acted, childishly written, bland Star Wars movie. If someone can get into this movie fine, but over the entire course of this very rocky serious, through all its recent ups and down, This is easily one of the darkest periods in Star Wars history.