Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

Essential on plot and the weakest of the nine. It carries the information the whole saga turns on, which is where the clone army came from and who ordered it, and it delivers that inside a film whose central relationship does not work.

The romance is the problem and it is not a small one, because half the running time is given to it. Anakin and Padmé are written in a register borrowed from 1930s melodrama, delivered without the conviction that register requires, and the dialogue on the Naboo lakeside has become the most quoted bad writing in the franchise. The film also asks you to accept a courtship that includes a confession of mass murder, and then moves on.

The conspiracy half is much better. A detective plot in which a Jedi investigates an assassination and finds an army that has been growing in secret for a decade, commissioned by somebody already dead, is a real story, and the scene where Obi-Wan is politely shown around a cloning facility by people who believe he is the client is the best in the film.

It was the first major studio film shot entirely on digital cameras, and the trade-off is visible: enormous sets that could not have been built, and a flat, weightless image in daylight. Watch it for the war's origin and tolerate the rest; Revenge of the Sith is the payoff.