After a mixed critical reception to 1999’s The Phantom Menace, 2002 brought us the second instalment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy in Attack of the Clones. Skipping ten years forward from its predecessor meant casting a new actor in the role of Anakin. True to form, rather than choose an established actor, Lucas went with the unknown Hayden Christensen to portray this most vital of roles, and the use of CGI increased still further, including even the retirement of a puppet Yoda in favour of an all digitally rendered one. But, wonders Greg D. Smith, would it work?

As more and more systems look to secede from the Republic, under the leadership of Count Dooku, Obi Wan uncovers a secret which may change the entire course of the conflict. Meanwhile, Anakin must confront his own demons, and choose between the life he wants, or the life to which he is sworn.

There’s one scene that most people immediately recall about Attack of the Clones. Roughly two minutes out of nearly two and a half hours of ambitious, convoluted, beautiful, action-packed, flawed cinema that have come to define the entire movie in the minds of almost everyone who saw it. Yoda, confronting the Sith apprentice (and his former Padawan) Count Dooku in a lightsaber duel that sees the diminutive Jedi master leaping and somersaulting around the screen like a hyperactive green flea. It’s a scene that many cite as being laughable, that others cite as being just plain stupid, and I have heard more than once, that it is the point at which a person entirely stopped being able to take the movie seriously.

There’s a reason that one scene has come to define the entire movie in which it sits. Actually, there are several, but the main one can be expressed fairly simply – it’s a movie in which there are far too many things being attempted far too ambitiously for its own good. Where a merely competent or good film would have played to the gallery of Star Wars fans that existed across the globe and given them all exactly what they wanted to see, Lucas attempted to cram so much and in so many odd ways into Attack of the Clones that honestly, it’s a little impressive that it fails to hit its mark quite as comprehensively as it does.

First up, let’s talk about Anakin. Hayden Christensen had the unenviable task of picking up where Jake Lloyd had left off, playing the teenage version of the chosen one. There are probably few characters in modern genre cinema as hated as this version of Anakin Skywalker. Complaints range from the general moodiness and sulking of the character, to the wooden delivery of lines, to the creepy, almost invasive quality of his pursuit of a relationship with Padme.

But here’s the thing – this is a young man who grew up as a slave. He had an odd start in life, and then things got odder when a Jedi knight appeared one day alongside the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Having experienced his first crush at the same time he entered the Jedi order, little Ani was bound to have some issue adjusting. Throw in the fact that everyone, including the guy who originally recruited him, kept saying he was the Chosen One who would bring balance to the force, and then season with teenage angst and hormones and the fact that his new mentor is – while not the same age as him – a lot closer to him in age than perhaps a mentor should be. And we know from Phantom that Anakin is an impulsive creature driven by feelings first and thoughts second. He acts, often rashly, and feels the consequences deeply. Consider all of these things together, as well as what we know he will become in the future, and the real surprise is that anyone expects that he would not be a hot mess of a character.

So yes, he’s moody and sullen, because he’s hormonal and he’s been told for years that he’s the all-powerful guy who will save the universe but he’s being treated as the kid he still is. And yes, he’s awkward and odd when he talks to people because he – the deeply emotional kid – has effectively joined the Order of You Will Have No Strong Feelings, and repression does bad things… plus how many actual friends has the kid ever had anyway? And yes, he’s creepy and odd in the way in which he expresses interest in Padme because she is literally his first crush from when he was a little boy and he’s not been allowed to have any romantic attachment to any other girl since. It’s curious that in a role which is literally the genesis of a monster who will go on to slaughter half the galaxy, a lot of people’s main objections to the way Christensen plays it (and Lucas writes it) is that he’s fundamentally unlikeable. Lucas takes a bold chance with the character, making him exactly what he should be while keeping him the central character of the narrative. Audiences, with the original trilogy seared into their minds, wanted another Luke Skywalker, and they weren’t happy when they didn’t get one.

But it isn’t just an unlikeable central protagonist which hobbles Attack of the Clones – there’s also the insanely convoluted plot. It was bad enough in Phantom when Palpatine/Sidious organised the invasion of his own planet in order to set in motion a series of events that might culminate in him making a grab for the position of Chancellor of the Republic. But Clones takes it a whole other level up, having the man conspire with his Sith apprentice to foment an actual secessionary movement and all-out galactic war so that he can activate some emergency powers, deploy a clone army he’s had developed in secret and set in motion the series of events that will eventually culminate in the foundation of the Empire.

Again, Lucas has the right idea – the origin of conflicts is seldom black and white, and the origin of a galaxy-spanning war, sufficient to destabilise a thousand year-old system of government and cause the creation of an oppressive new order, doubly so. Throw in wizard-knights who can read your mind, shoot lightning from their hands and have a vested order in maintaining the status quo, and you’d better believe you’re going to need some serious foundation to make this work.

The problem is, Lucas is still suffering from that focus issue we mentioned before. There’s simply too much going on in the movie from the point of view of plot, and the viewer is required to do far too much work to make any of it make sense. Thus, viewers switch off, responding only to the visceral thrill of the action scenes and the visual spectacle of the big battles and ignoring entirely the narrative which underpins them.

And those action scenes pop. This is a gloriously pretty film, which actually holds up fairly well to modern standards, certainly better than its predecessor. The chase through the airborne highways of Coruscant; the cat and mouse of Obi Wan and Jango Fett both on Kamino and through an asteroid field. The massive, Indiana Jones-style caper through the droid factory. The enormous arena battle and of course the opening battles of the Clone Wars. All of it is rendered in glorious colour and detail, bowling along at a rapid pace and giving the viewer oh-so-many ‘wow, did you see that?’ moments that it’s hard to keep up.

Unfortunately, between those scenes, Lucas works overly diligently to hammer home his plot points, and because there are so many, and they form such an intricate, Machiavellian level of interacting factors, they become obtuse. Simply put, Attack of the Clones’ plot could easily have been the subject of a trilogy all of its own. Instead, it rams all that content, all those developments and influences, into one movie which means that some pertinent details suffer and others are simply lost.

Take the clones on Kamino and their origin. Who is Master Sifo-Dyas? Why did he order the clones in the first place? What criteria were used to pick Jango as the template? Who is Jango? At what point did Palpatine become aware of the Clones? Is Dooku aware of the Clones? And so on. What we do know is that Palpatine clearly is aware of the Clones. We recognise Jango’s surname, and the name of his clone son, as well as the appearance of his ship and armour. All the pieces fall into place to move the plot forward, much like in A New Hope, with all the background facts and answers to questions like the above simply glossed over. The problem is that A New Hope is set in the middle of a war and is a story about that war. Clones is part two of the story of how that war happened – how a peaceful, galaxy-spanning republic got changed into an Empire – which means those details become important, unless you’re planning on doing a prequel trilogy to the prequel trilogy (and now that Disney owns the franchise, who knows?)

On top of creating this whole set of circumstances to lead up to the Clone Wars and all the awfulness that will follow, the movie tries to shoehorn in other stuff on top. So we see that the Death Star has already been designed by the Geonosians, and Dooku runs off with the plans presumably to give them to his Master, Sidious. But hang on: Why did the Geonosians design it? What special expertise did they have? If Palpatine had access to this design then, why wait another couple of decades before actually building it? Why introduce this plot element at all in a plot that’s already pulling itself in a dozen different directions at once, between the Separatists and the machinations of Palpatine and the trials of Anakin and the assassination attempts on Padme and so on and so on?

Lucas, at some point in the creative process of this film, clearly struggled to find the balance between incorporating elements that would tie it to the original trilogy and creating a new mythos. Rather than try to forge a path that added in appropriate bits of both, he tries to hammer in everything including the kitchen sink and it ends as a botch. So we get the whole ‘Shmi marrying into the Lars family but then getting kidnapped and brutalised by Tuskens so Anakin can go and kill them all’ arc, which mainly serves the purpose of making Anakin an angrier and scarier person, tying off the loose end that is Shmi and introducing us to the Lars family so that we can sit there and say ‘Look! It’s Owen and Beru!’. The problem is that this is just another pile of plot jammed in amongst everything else again. Anakin’s slaughter of the Tuskens seems justified because they’re nasty pieces of work who kidnap and torture innocent women minding their own business. Lucas – tragically – then tries to inject a moral ambiguity into the scenario by having Anakin tearfully confess to Padme that he slaughtered them all ‘even the women and children’. It’s a pointless exercise in performative cruelty that overcooks the character – he’s messed up, we know he’s messed up. Had he simply received word from the Lars that Shmi had died, and been bound to do nothing by his Jedi teachings, that would have been a far more effective (and narratively economical) way of adding this splinter of conflict into the character’s mind.

Ultimately, Clones feels bloated – worse than Phantom – with an array of characters, half of whom don’t feel needed, and too many plots, subplots, and subplots of subplots adding up in too short a space of time. It starts to feel almost like Lucas is lost in his own mythos, not quite sure of the details of what he wrote before and trying desperately to link back to half-remembered details while also trying to create new ones. The result is a film that – to most audiences, not willing to give it enough benefit of the doubt – is defined by what many feel is its silliest moment.

And that duel is silly – if you aren’t invested in what’s going on. When you really think about it, of course Yoda had to have had something that set him apart. He is the most respected and powerful member of a martial order of knights who keep peace in the galaxy. He’s also only a couple of feet tall. I have no issue believing that his manipulation of the Force is such that he can use it to hurl his body around the place at will (and that’s clearly the explanation given how immediately he reverts to tired and hobbly once he’s saved Obi Wan and Anakin and Dooku has scarpered). The question is why so many who saw it did and continue to have a problem with it. The answer is simple – they’d been lost by the movie a long time before that, and with no investment, they weren’t willing to do the mental work.

Attack of the Clones is a beautiful mess – trying too hard in some areas, and not hard enough in others. It thoroughly nails its lead character, but buries him in a soup of too many subplots and unnecessary distractions that undo all the good work that’s done. And criminally, it asks for its audience’s trust, then sends viewers home without half the answers it promises. As popcorn fun, it delivers, but this leaves it falling short not just of the expectations of its fans but also of the very aspirations the movie itself holds. It has the loftiest ambitions, but to paraphrase Obi Wan, it only achieves them in its own mind, my very young apprentice.