The Star Wars movies had a significant contribution to the evolution of cinematography and visual effects in general. “Attack of the Clones” may have not received the best movie critic reviews but there is no denying that its visual effects were stunning for that time.
George Lucas preferred to use digital animatics in “Attack of the Clones”. This method was relatively new when the movie was in production, but technological advances made it viable for such a big project. It helped create more realistic environments for the scenes without the use of moving storyboards.
Another great achievement was the collaboration with ILM studio to work on Jar Jar Binks. The work on Jar Jar pushed the boundaries of what could be done at that time. The character is entirely animated but its realism and fluid animations were possible with the aid of skeletal designs and muscles to help create better expressions. The clone army also was a result of visual effects and CGI. The visual effects studio created multiple models for the soldiers and copied them multiple times in a scene to create an entire army. Even if the hardware used to render the scenes was limited in power, the visual effects team was able to produce animations that were way ahead of their time.
For many “Attack of the Clones” does not fall in line with the rest of the original Star Wars movies. The original movies did not use heavy special effects. They relied on prosthetics and created real scenes for the movies. From a technological standpoint, the prequels had access to better technology. In fact, George Lucas risked greatly by “Attack of the Clones” pushing visual effects and shooting the movie only in digital. His decisions actually helped reduce production costs and resulted in a movie that had visual effects way above the industry standards.