Back again in Star Wars land with the second feature film: Attack of the Clones.
Ten years after The Phantom Menace, we’re back with the boys Anakin and Obi Wan who are out to find who hired assassins to try and kill the former queen, now senator Padmé.
Blu-Ray time, so unfortunately there’s no online website extras like the older DVDs had.
The movie starts out with the classic text crawl. Padmé leaves her ship for a Senate meeting, and her stand-in gets killed in an explosion. The Jedi are tasked to determine who is trying to kill her, and why.
The first high action sequence is with Obi-Wan and Anakin, now master and apprentice. In the middle of the night they catch an assassin trying to take out Padmé, so it is a high speed space traffic chase.
This scene shows just how big the capitol planet of Corusant is. Layers and layers of cities, and a lot of traffic in between the tall buildings.
It seems that the higher up the planet you are, the better off you live, because when they go further down into the planet, they enter a seedy bar with many sketchy individuals. The assassin is killed off by another unknown assassin, and the Jedi are left to pick up the pieces and discover who the mysterious individual is.
Two different plots play out for the majority of the film after this. Anakin is tasked to protect Padmé, and Obi-Wan is tasked with finding the mysterious assassin.
The action and mystery is with the Obi-Wan plot line, while character development is with Anakin. Both are important to a story, so I am briefly going to talk about the journey of each character:
Obi-Wan
Obi-Wan went out to uncovering where the poison dart that killed the assassin came from. For some reason Corusant has a 50’s diner, and the owner is apparently an old friend.
Just look at this greasy four-armed diner owner. He never actually shows up in any Star Wars media I’ve seen afterwards so this is kind of strange he shows up to exposition and then he’s gone.
The diner owner talks about checking out a planet called Kamino, and Obi-Wan heads to the library to research the planet.
The librarian has no idea what he is talking about. There’s no record of the planet, and she boasts that if there’s no record, then it doesn’t exist. Seems very conceited to me, because it turns out there was a record of the planet, but it was deleted.
Obi-Wan does end up finding the planet, and there he discovers a clone army built for the government, and he meets the template for the army: Jango Fett and his clone son Boba.
He follows them to a nearby planet called Geonosis, where he tries to discover his boss and who hired him to help built the army. He ends up getting captured and meets the leader of the opposing government, Count Dooku, formerly a jedi and Qui Gon’s former master.
This is where Obi-Wan’s separate journey ends.
Anakin
As said earlier, a lot of Anakin’s storyline in the movie is not plot-driven, but rather character-driven.
Anakin was tasked as Padmé’s bodyguard, so they went back to her planet Naboo for safety. It was there that a romance was formed.
Anakin is a jedi and Padmé is a senator, so being in a relationship is forbidden so they do not act on these feelings.
Anakin keeps having dreams of his mother, and they turn out to be force visions of the future. They decide to go to Tatooine where they find out his mother has been freed and married to a Mr Lars. His mom has been captured by some Tuskin Raiders, and he goes out to find her.
She dies in her arms, and in a rage he kills everyone there.
A distraught Anakin is comforted by Padmé and they receive word that Obi-Wan is captured by Dooku. They go off to rescue him.
They get captured too, and all three get placed in an arena for execution.
Jedi come to save the day! Mace Windu with his purple lightsaber kills Jango Fett and leaves Boba an orphan.
It’s not enough to fight the huge army of droids, so Yoda come in last minute with the army of clones to turn the tide. Anakin and Obi-Wan go after Dooku. Dooku wins the battle and cuts of Anakin’s hand, but then runs away when Yoda shows up.
The Clone Wars has begun.
Anakin and Padmé also secretly get married.
There was a lot of slow moments in this movie. The action scenes were good, but even writing this short recap was pretty boring for me. I do think this film helped show a bit of the jedi attitude with the librarian scene, and the peaceful jedi are now turned into a military. A big bounty hunter is killed and we saw the leaders of the opposing side.
Overall, I’d give it 6/10.
Alternate Universe Timeline Review
If you recall during my Phantom Menace review, I place a racing game towards the end of it, and I did not play as Anakin in the race matching the film.
Ody Mandrell finished the tournament in first place!
He won 1200 truguts and I still don’t know what that is, but I’m using it as currency.
Because Anakin never won the first race, he never won his freedom and learned to become a jedi.
In this timeline Anakin never left Tatooine and his mom never died, which is great!
I’m not sure how the war is doing, if the clones ever came into play, but none of that matters in this timeline because racing is life.
Be sure to keep updated on my timeline journey, and I will be posting the next piece of media soon! At the time of writing I’m on the next tv show, so I should have two more things to write soon.
Kristopher K. Online 