It’s a whirling dervish of plot and development, a seeming reaction to the frequent meetings and pacing issues which plagued The Phantom Menace.
It’s an experiment which doesn’t get quite the time it needs to become familiar and thus accepted because Clones doesn’t have time for anything. Like A New Hope, it is both old and new at the same time. At the same time, because of that choice, it is something unlike anything around it. It’s perfectly in line with the found art aesthetic of the series, grabbing bits and pieces from other milieu’s and sticking them in place, though this is by far the most archaic bit to have been directly translated. The central sequence of Attack of the Clones, young Anakin’s protestation of love and desire to run away from his duties with (now) Senator Padme, is a direct lift from Chrétien de Troyes and his contemporaries. He is also the focus of Lucas’ largest stretch of language style and deepest dive into romantic tradition, which throws audience expectation even more off balance. Just as with younger Kenobi, he turns out to have less gravitas and more issues with his judgment than his middle-aged version, which automatically throws audience expectations off balance. It also introduces adult Anakin Skywalker, a character until now only really known as his armored alter ego. Intending to pinpoint the cracks in the galaxy’s society - and through them the cracks which seem to appear in all societies for similar reasons - Clones delves into the organizations which make up the world, which can and does mean more meetings and more meetings about meetings. Made on a compressed schedule, necessitating bringing in co-writer Jonathan Hale and bringing in lots of ideas as well, Attack of the Clones is all over the place. It’s a lot, and a lot of something which hasn’t been part of the mainstream (at least not in the way its depicted) for quite some time.
It also means a young knight tempted to turn over his ideals for worldly gratification and classical attempts at courtly woo. On one level that means a lone Jedi tracking a mercenary across the universe playing verbal and physical cat and mouse, fighting monsters in a giant arena and battling enemy armies. It takes ahold of the idea of futuristic knight errantry as the motivating narrative instrument and displays it in its purest form. On the one hand, it continues developing McGregor’s Kenobi into something closer to expectations of what is younger self would be like, as well as the Jedi Order he is a part of. Most of this is a logical extension of both the experiments with style and language from The Phantom Menace and the deeper influences of the medieval romantic tradition.
It’s no wonder the film comes across as so schizophrenic. It has to maintain its experimentation with language, color, sound, and design while also incorporating some ideas from the previous films (something the first film did as much as possible to avoid) and close the narrative gap between the two stories. The transition film from the ‘throw everything out/subvert expectations’ wildness of The Phantom Menace to the original trilogy bridge that is Revenge of the Sith has to do a lot, maybe more than any one film really could. Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones In the run-up to the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and the end of the Skywalker Saga, we will be taking a look back at all of the Saga films and re-evaluating them and their legacy as a whole.
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