Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones

The second film of the trilogy. The Republic is coming apart. Thousands of systems want to leave and the senate is debating whether to raise an army. There is an attempt on Senator Amidala's life. Two Jedi are assigned to protect her. Anakin is a young man now and has to stay in the same place as her. From there the film splits in two. Obi-Wan follows an assassin's trail; he finds a planet missing from the records and sees an army being manufactured that nobody ordered. Anakin returns to the desert planet to see his mother, and what he does there determines everything in the character's later story. What the narrative is interested in is not love but preparation: the film's real job is to show how a war was ordered and to let you sense that both sides are run from the same hand. The last section begins in an arena and turns into a battle; the series shows a mass engagement at this scale for the first time. It was shot entirely on digital cameras, a first for a studio film of that size; the result changed the texture of the image and was argued over at the time. Most of the sets are blue screen. In most scenes the actors worked in empty space. Its most criticised feature is the romantic sections; the dialogue is weak and the relationship was not found convincing. Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Christopher Lee, Samuel L. Jackson and Temuera Morrison are in the cast. George Lucas wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone watching the series in order. Who it is not for: anyone looking for character; the middle is entirely political and the romance drags the film down.