Middle parts of trilogies are famously hard. Ironically, this fact largely benefits Attack of the Clones. Freed both from the obligation to try to be the first Star Wars movie in sixteen years and the obligation to portray long-mythologized events in a definitive way, it is allowed to simply reflect George Lucas’s vision in a fairly undiluted way. There are countless snarky sentences that follow well from that, but there’s enough that’s at least interesting in that vision to make Attack of the Clones a compelling experience. To praise with faint damnation, it’s a hot mess instead of merely a bad movie.

Where The Phantom Menace was structured around a single protagonist, Attack of the Clones splits its attention between two plots and protagonists. The first of these is relatively expected: The Phantom Menace fairly explicitly set up a progression from Qui-Gon to Obi-Wan such that, just on the basic sense of structure and the Jedi/padawan relationship, you’d expect the mantle to pass on to him. What’s less straightforwardly set up is the ascension of Anakin to the role of co-protagonist. Obi-Wan, after all, was firmly a supporting character, and given the estrangement in the way Anakin was presented in the first film it was entirely plausible that he would simply move to fill that role, with whatever story surrounded him playing out at a slight remove.

Once again we’re in a position where the practically intended audience (i.e. people buying tickets to a Star Wars movie in 2002) and the nominally intended “unspoiled” audience diverge, in that the actual audience recognizes the prequel trilogy as primarily a story about Anakin. But the difference between the positions isn’t as big as it might appear. After all, The Phantom Menace already trained the audience to maintain a certain degree of distance from protagonists, with Qui-Gon never really becoming an audience identification figure. So it’s entirely possible for Attack of the Clones to structurally elevate Anakin to the role of protagonist even as he remains a figure we warily observe instead of investing in. And indeed, for audience members who know that he’s eventually going to fall to the dark side, this is basically where the situation will naturally default.

Which brings us to Hayden Christensen. Like Jar Jar Binks, he is a near universally despised aspect of the prequels. This is certainly understandable, but the fact is that he does an excellent job of playing Anakin as the script presents him. It’s just that the script does not so much go for the default of audience suspicion towards Anakin as it does unambiguously making it clear that Anakin is an absolutely terrible person. Indeed, for all that it’s easy to see why Natalie Portman has a career and Hayden Christensen does not, in Attack of the Clones it’s largely Christensen who has the more successful time of it, simply because all he’s asked to do is to play an abusive and manipulative jerk who spouts fascist rhetoric and literally “m’ladies” his way through his efforts at getting into Padme’s pants, whereas Natalie Portman is given the flatly impossible job of convincingly falling in love with someone who is self-evidently human garbage.…

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Fittingly, this project exists for three basic reasons. First, having subjected everybody to eight parts of Build High for Happiness, it felt like it was time for a nice populist project. Second, I was seized by a desire to watch all seven Star Wars movies and figured “why waste the research.” But third, I was struck by the fact that, as I put it on Twitter a while ago, the bulk of criticism of the Star Wars prequel trilogy is worse at being criticism than the prequels are at being movies. The most common type is of course the brutal and sneering takedown, an approach that usually ends up committing so totally to its brutality that it gives up on making actually interesting points in favor of preening snark. The second is the counter-tendency of contrarian apologias, which are generally better (I’m partial to Rian Johnson’s “the prequels are a 7 hour long kids movie about how fear of loss turns good people into fascists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”) but still suffer from wanting to be in conversation with the Red Letter Media shit, and also from the fact that they’re taking a provocative position at the expense of actually being right, which is fine, but you should be able to do both. Particularly lacking, it struck me, are approaches that actually attempt to look at the whole of Star Wars as it presents itself: a story beginning with The Phantom Menace and continuing through to The Force Awakens and, eventually, beyond. A few exceptions exist – perhaps most notably Mike Klimo’s epic “Ring Theory” series, but for all its admirable attention to detail there’s a maddening sterility to the whole affair, reducing the series to an intellectual exercise.

And so I thought, as someone who readily grants that the prequel trilogy’s pretty crap but is inclined not to think the rest of the series is anything too impressive, I feel like I can offer a take that’s not going to get hung up on the banalities of whether the movies are any good or on arguing for their secret and intricate genius. As far as I’m concerned, Star Wars is a deeply and systemically flawed work that’s nevertheless interesting in its pathologies. One thing I will be doing, if only to force the discussion further away from the banality of comparing the original trilogy to the prequels, is to, as I said, treat the work as presented: a seven part and counting story. This doesn’t mean willfully ignoring the fact that The Phantom Menace came out twenty-two years after A New Hope (or, for that matter that A New Hope wasn’t originally called that), or doing some sort of silly narrative game where we ignore future installments entirely, but it does mean accepting that The Phantom Menace is intended to function as a beginning despite the fact that in practice the entire audience knows that Jake Lloyd’s character grows up to become one of the most iconic villains in cinematic history.…

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