Kevin Smith, the filmmaker and professional STAR WARS fan who made his disgust with STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE not so secret in 1999, has given very high marks to George Lucas' follow-up, ATTACK OF THE CLONES.
Appearing in the July/August issue of FILM COMMENT, Smith was lush, if profane, with his plaudits for CLONES, and even revealed moments of the film 'haunted' him and built new levels of pathos into the original STAR WARS trilogy.
"There's something bittersweet about the fall of Darth Vader now," Smith says in the issue, "that hadn't existed before CLONES: had his mother simply died of old age, the guy might never have developed that extreme case of asthma he seems to suffer from in STAR WARS, EMPIRE, and RETURN OF THE JEDI... Which leads to the most haunting moment of CLONES for me: when Anakin breaks down to his puppy love, Amidala, and confesses that he butchered that no-good bunch of sand-eating bandage wearers with his hi-tech Zippo. This scene really resonated with me, because Amidala wears this expression that very quietly says, 'Holy Christ I'm in love with a human time-bomb.' The sad, hopeless look on her face upon learning of his murder spree brought to mind that moment in JEDI when Luke asked Leia if she rememered what her (and his) mother was like. Leia (in what may be Carrie Fisher's finest hour in the original trilogy) reminisced that her mother always seemed sad. Here, nearly 20 years later, we get to see what Leia was talking about."
He even went as far as to praise one of the most maligned aspects of the film, the romance between Anakin and Amidala.
"And that's what worked best for me about the Anakin arc in CLONES: the doomed love affair of Anakin and Amidala. Most of the critics dismissed this as the flick's most ham-fistedly handled aspect, but I thought it played out tragically and beautifully. High marks to both Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, because I completely bought their relationship. He wants her desperately without really even knowing why, as do all teenage boys when they find who they assume is their one-true in high school. And even though she knows this guy is poison, she can't help but fall for him - the little slave-boy that grew up to be a conflicted, impetuous hat tank who insists everyone's giving him a raw deal. In high school, the really hot chicks always went for the massive ****-ups, and eventually wound up married to them. But this marriage doesn't end in small town affairs and divorce; this marriage ends with the girl scattering her kids across the galaxy to save them from their father, who by that point is more machine than man."
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Came across this article while searching for Kevin's review of AotC. For the record, Smith did not bash The Phantom Menace as the author claims. For reasons beyond me, Kevin seems to have liked all three prequels.