In honor of Star Wars: The Force Awakens' release, we're rerunning our series from 2012 when I watched the Star Wars movies for the first time. Read my intro/explanation here, and here are my reviews of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

I found Attack of the Clones to be a much improved installment after the mess of The Phantom Menace, but it remains entrenched as predominantly adolescent fair.  Shoe-horning in characters from the original trilogy doesn't really do much to repair things, either, particularly since too often the logic quickly breaks down.  Something about R2 and 3PO's origin stories continues to bother me (including why R2 has a jetpack in the prequels).  It all just feels a bit too try-hard.  Even though in my original trilogy articles I said I wanted to know more about Vader and the Stormtroopers and Boba Fett, and went on and on about how I loved R2 … well, fans shouldn't always be given what we want!