Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones: The Best of the Prequel Trilogy?

Last Updated on October 3, 2023

For a lot of us, Star Wars: Episode II- Attack of the Clones was a movie we were cautiously optimistic about. The dust had settled on The Phantom Menace by this point, and most of us chalked up the movie’s faults to two things – Jar Jar Binks and Anakin Skywalker being a precocious child. In the next film, Anakin would be a young man, similar in age to Mark Hamill when he played Luke in Star Wars: A New Hope. We all had high hopes that Hayden Christensen’s performance would be one of the definitive ones in the saga and that the film would brilliantly reveal Anakin’s dark side and what made him Darth Vader. However, it turned out to be a mixed bag, with Christensen’s performance controversial, George Lucas’s dialogue mocked, and the digital photography (it was one of the first films shot digitally) considered ruddy. Over twenty years later, following the sequel trilogy, the movie was re-assessed, and many think it stands as the best film in the prequel trilogy, as it planted the seeds for the Clone Wars, Ahsoka, and more.

Notably, the movie also contains the first fight scenes for old-school Jedi masters Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) and Yoda himself, with his lightsaber duel with Christopher Lee’s Count Dooku bringing down the house at every early screening the film had back in 2002. While many mocked the dialogue and the times Hayden Christensen’s eyes seemed to go dead every time he looked at a CGI character, it’s a movie that holds up better than you think and has some classic moments. In this instalment of Star Wars Revisited, we dig into the second movie in Lucas’s epic prequel trilogy and see how it holds up nowadays.

This video is written by Eric Walkuski, narrated by Shawn Knippelberg, and edited by Adam Walton. Do you think Attack of the Clones holds up? Let us know in the comments!