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Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Ed Humphries

After a three-year hiatus between installments (and, some might argue, a nineteen-year wait for a decent film), George Lucas can relax. He can be confident in the notion that the constant stream of hate mail will finally ebb now that the world, and his faithful fans, have taken in the epic grandeur on display in his latest chapter of the Star Wars saga: Episode II: Attack of the Clones. The Force is indeed strong in this one.

Before I proceed further, I?ll clarify my feelings on Star Wars. I'm an ardent SW fan, but I've never been in love with Star Wars. I find the first film to be as clunky as one of those lumbering AT-AT?s, yet endearing. For my money, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) stands as the way to make a mythology. Star Wars owned a great deal of my childhood real estate and it is a series I am fond of. I look forward to each subsequent installment. At the very least, the fertile imagination of George Lucas has always proven to be a great place to visit.

I certainly was not one of the masses to hurl stones and clog the Skywalker Ranch servers with a steady stream of threatening e-mail when Jar Jar uttered his first ?Mesa? following the release of 1999?s Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. My benevolence can be attributed to a series of liner notes, drafted by Lucas himself in the Star Wars VHS Box Set released in the early 90?s. In a few short paragraphs Lucas offered his impetus in creating Star Wars. Simply put, he saw a generation that had grown old without the benefit of fairy tales and myths to call their own. This he attributed to the changing complexities in a swiftly moving, modernized world. Vietnam had changed everything. With the Star Wars series he was attempting to provide future generations with their own personal enchantments. Having been born in 1972, and consequently having fallen asleep at the Drive-In during my first viewing of Star Wars in 1977, I was heir apparent to this mythology.

So with The Phantom Menace I indulged in the chance to revisit my youth and live within this fantastic world for a few more hours. I refused to engage in any debate on ?the apparent madness of King George.? If Lucas could provide me with a few characters to journey along with, and populate his canvas with all manner of otherworldly critters, both creepy and comical, then I could certainly gloss over the stiff dialogue and flamboyant excess (Mr. Binks, I am staring somewhat in your general direction, although unlike my brethren, I do not hate you, I merely enjoy you in smaller doses). I can only attribute the outrage Lucas received as a shared arrogance on behalf of the audience. Just because they had grown up, they had expected the films to mature as well.

Lucas should have it easier this time around. For one thing, many of Phantom Menace?s detractors swore off ever padding the Lucasfilm coffers again, although at press time, Attack of the Clones reports a $116 million haul in its first weekend, so ?mesa think? the legions of the scorned have shrouded themselves in their finest Jedi regalia and attended screenings incognito (multiple times). More importantly, Lucas has delivered a film which starts off well - only to grow bolder and more confident as it reveals itself. The final 45 minutes alone, featuring a stunning series of battles and some suprising and crowd-pleasing ties to the original trilogy, should restore the faith of even the most jaded Jedi.

Attack of the Clones begins with the same political intrigue that enveloped the last film . It is ten years later. Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), apprentice to Master Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), has spent the time training under Obi-Wan and fostering his connection with ?the Force?. Following a series of assassination attempts on the life of Senator Amidala (Natalie Portman), an investigation begins which eventually leads to forbidden love, ominous stagings for interplanetary warfare and the seductive stirrings of the Dark Side.

From a technical standpoint, Clones is absolutely amazing. With Lucas and his artisans at Industrial Light & Magic, that?s to be expected. If Hollywood budgets must continue to inflate, it?s nice to see the money on screen rather than in the actors? stock portfolios. While some of the planetscapes return from Menace, Lucas and his team have concocted several new settings which drop the jaw and entice the imagination. The storm tossed waterworld of Kamino and the arid, sunsplashed Geonosis (which plays host to the climactic opening salvo of the Clone War) are particularly impressive.

We live in the digital age. For the most part, effects which were once handed via intricate model design and stop-motion animation are currently composed and crafted within an I-Mac. I have heard complaints from some corners that Clones, which was shot by Lucas on high-definition digital video, is wall-to-wall CGI (computer graphic imagery) and that it shows. Again, I defer to the collective arrogance of an aged audience. To those detractors, I offer this suggestion. Find an old VHS copy of any of Star Wars film, pre-Special Edition. The effects work is not as seamless as you may remember. Those films were as manufactured as anything you see today, and if you look with a more critical eye a viewer can easily detect numerous flaws. A smudge of Vaseline lies below the sandspeeder, barely containing the illusion that this ?hovercraft? is soaring above the desert sands rather than running on wheels along a track. The thrilling space battles against legions of Tie Fighters are decidely less crowded than we remember, with each streaking spaceship framed by a light blue image, pinpointing exactly where the model is projected against the rear matte-painting. The point is, audiences back then looked beyond these flaws. Sharp eyesight took a backseat to unbiased imagination. The wall-to-wall effects in Clones are, to my eyes, flawless.

Attack of the Clones is certainly not without its stumbles, nor is it the greatest Star Wars film. As I mentioned above, The Empire Strikes Back occupies that throne and likely will forever. The biggest problem I have with the film is the handling of the love story. Beyond complaints of clich? dialogue, wooden acting and a lack of a manner genuine chemistry, the major error in presenting ?When Anni Met Padme? is that important details are left out. The two fall in love as quickly, and in as contrived a manner as possible, because the events of the first trilogy dictate copulation. With one film left to go for Anakin to enjoy wedded bliss, father twins, encounter temptation, embrace true evil, observe the death of the Jedi Order and rise in power as Lord Vader, love and marriage must come quickly in a very crowded film. Regardless, one does not go to Star Wars looking for Titanic, and at best, the love story remains a sub-plot, probably best left to the side.

As far as performances go, Hayden Christiensen does provide a better-than-expected turn as Anakin. While saddled with some clunky lines and a few ill-conceived temper tantrums, his perfomance does get better as the story becomes more personal. A crucial seqence midway through the movie, where Anakin returns to the desert planet Tatooine to investigate the sad fate of his mother, provides the character and the film with much needed complexity. Anakin?s actions, while justified, are chilling; Christensen portrays rage convincingly when Lucas finally unleashes the shackles.

More impressive is Ewan McGregor?s growth in the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Sidelined in Menace, McGregor is given a lot more to do in this installment. It is Obi-Wan who uncovers a sinister scheme in a mysterious corner of the galaxy. The sequences on this strange world of Kamino have a haunting quality that hints at some very dark times to come. McGregor?s characterization of Obi Wan is assured and mature. Maybe it?s the beard. He does a great job of crafting a character which uncannily conveys the essense of the late Alec Guiness, who originated the role of an elder Obi-Wan in the original trilogy. McGregor gives the impression that this character truly will grow into that elder Ben Kenobi.

The other performances are serviceable. That includes Portman?s Amidala. Horror-veteran Christopher Lee, who is spending his sunset days enjoying a career resurgence following his role as Saruman in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, sketches sinister shadings in the role of fallen Jedi, Count Dooku. His role is relatively brief, designed to foreshadow fearsome villainy in the next (and last) installment.

Credit Lucas with this: he achieves what he struggled to attain in Menace. He coaxes the film?s most satisfying performance from a synthespian, offering up a Yoda more expressive, more nimble and more endearing than ever before. The beloved Jedi Master, a fan favorite since his introduction in Empire, is finally granted the freedom of full movement through the magic of digital effects, and he remains as enchanting as ever. The effects technicians labored to mimic the character?s familiar shaky body movements, an aftereffect of the former films? muppet origins, while providing enhanced manaeuvability. Infused once again with Frank Oz?s distinctive vocals, lending generous heart and soul to the machine, this CGI marvel effectively steals the show. This Yoda packs a punch and a surprise up his sleeve, too.

Attack of the Clones is a great time at the theater. While it takes a little while to rev up, proceeding in fits and starts in its first hour, once it achieves momentum it hurtles at warp speed. Having never placed unattainable expectations on the franchise, Clones provides this reviewer with what all the previous films have done in their own way, an enjoyable summer popcorn film and a breathtaking two hour jaunt to that familiar galaxy far, far away...

Jason Clarke

NOTE: This review is chock-full of spoilers.

Unlike the venerable Mr. Humphries, I am a Star Wars fan. But I think he's wrong when he claims that most SW fans were disappointed with the first prequel and would equally criticize this one. The majority of diehard SW fans I've spoken to have been willing to overlook all flaws of both the first prequel and this one, even, in some cases, trumpeting what I saw as some of the worst faults. I, however, do not think Lucas has given us his best work.

When I first sat down to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on opening day three years ago, I could hardly contain my giddy excitement. I knew hardly anything about the film, having deliberately stayed away from the websites, but from the trailers it looked as if I were in for a wonderful, mythic prelude to some of my favorite films. As the film opened with John Williams's blazing, familiar score, and that gigantic yellow scrawl began at the bottom of the screen, I felt as if I had gone home again after sixteen years. The film began. Liam Neeson as a Jedi, Ewan McGregor doing his best Alec Guinness impression - all good. Then Nute Gunray opened his big, ugly frog-like mouth. The minute I heard that vaudevillian mock-Chinese accent, my jaw dropped. It was so blatantly stereotyped that my mind instantly tried to rationalize it - was Lucas doing this to make the pre-Empire universe more diversified? Somehow that argument didn't fly.

Things only got worse. Jake Lloyd, the 10-year-old who played Anakin, wasn't quite up to his monumental task. The two-headed announcer at the pod race, with his Bob Costas-style commentary, made me cringe. Jar Jar Binks was just annoying - and not funny at all. We've already got C3PO in this movie (for whatever reason), why do we need more comic relief? Besides, everyone knows that stuffy British accents are much funnier than goofy patois ones.

It's now three years later and here comes the Attack of the Clones. I won't comment on the title except to say it sounds lame and is counterintuitively related to what happens in the film. Is Attack of the Clones better than The Phantom Menace? Yes, but not by much.

I went into Clones with a skeptical and, I'll admit, even negatively-biased disposition. Lucas had botched the first film badly and had set up a framework that I didn't think was viable. After the confusing mess that serves as a plot in Clones, I see I was correct. At its most basic level, the plot is identical to that of the previous film: Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) secretly stages an elaborate power play to consolidate his control of the Galactic Senate. That's it in a nutshell, for both films. Lucas may pull the ol' switcheroo by making the Darth Sidious character (also played by McDiarmid and clearly meant to be the Emperor of Return of the Jedi) a clone of Palpatine, but I'm not going to let him use that to weasel out of the fact that he basically recycled the plot of the previous film. There is apparently "unrest in the Senate" and some planets are trying to separate - the "Separatists" mentioned ever-so-briefly in the opening scrawl. But the evil Count Dooku (Christopher Lee, playing his worst-named character ever) is apparently working with the separatists (who will presumably form the core of the Rebellion), while the Jedi are secretly developing an army of clones to crush the separatists (or are they? So Dooku or Sidious or whoever poses as this long-dead Jedi to order an army of clones, and when the Jedi, led by Yoda, find out about this, they decide to just use the clones in a manner that turns out to benefit Palpatine perfectly? I mean...honestly). I have to admit, this whole Jedi-as-Gestapo thing bothered me. By the end of the film the Jedi are aware, or at least suspicious, that a Dark Jedi has control of much of the Senate. Yet they brutally defeat the separatists and "preserve the peace," and apparently, since "Begun the Clone Wars are," as Yoda says, many more separatist worlds will feel the heat of Jedi lightsabers and Jedi-commanded clones.

Perhaps most annoying of all is the fact that this highly confusing plot (which forces almost every line of dialogue to be one of exposition) is really only a backboard for five or six videogame-like action sequences. Watching the film I just knew that this or that scene would soon be found on your friendly neighborhood Playstation 2.

The acting is spotty. Ewan McGregor does a fine job as always playing Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lee, fresh off his role as an evil wizard in The Fellowship of the Ring, is fine as the evil wizard Count Dooku, or Darth Tyranus, whichever you prefer. Despite the script, McDiarmid manages to play Palpatine as a suave bureaucrat obviously plotting everyone's downfall. Jimmy Smits plays Bail Organa, Senator from Alderaan, future foster father of Leia and future victim of the Death Star. But no one ever identifies him as Organa, so he's just Jimmy Smits doing a cameo in a Star Wars movie. I'm serious - I just checked the script and no one ever says his name.

But the biggest problems are with Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman. First of all, I'm ending my silence - Portman is not a good actress. She's cold and unemotional and plays every role that way. I know she had horrible dialogue to work with. But so did Kirsten Dunst in Spider-Man - and she still managed to imbue her role with warmth and sexuality. Portman is frosty and her character is fairly boring. That's part of what makes Christensen's task as Anakin so thankless; he's stuck delivering lines of burning passion to a character that wouldn't start a brush fire in most men's hearts. The result is a forced, rushed romance that requires more suspension of disbelief than all the computer-generated mayhem. In one scene, Anakin pours his heart out in front of a fireplace while Padm? listens to him, immobile and emotionless. The scene is unquestionably dreadful, and I suspect you'd find most viewers would agree it was the worst in the film. I've spoken with some other SW fans who claim the romance in AOTC is better than that of Han and Leia in The Empire Strikes Back. To those people I say: you really need to try falling in love.

There are a few redeeming things about AOTC. Visually, of course, it can't be beat. Lucas's digital effects empire, Industrial Light & Magic, is where all the money goes in these films. The battles are all well-done and fairly cool - particularly when a certain diminutive Jedi Master opens up a can of whoop-ass on Count Dooku. That was, by far, my favorite moment in the film, and the one point in the whole prequel saga so far that matched the heart and small-scope grandeur of the original films. Also, Anakin's slaughter of the sandpeople that enslaved his mother was a good bit of character development, even if Anakin then told Padm? about it and she didn't seem to care. Finally, I've never found C3PO that funny, but in the last half-hour of the film he not only provides some desperately-needed comic relief, but they're genuine laughs. British accents=comedy.

AOTC fails because of its script. The whole film seems rushed and the romance is forced; Lucas is desperately trying to make his saga fit properly with the original films, yet each prequel adds a whole host of new loose ends. I suspect the problem lies in the way that the SW saga has been fundamentally changed since the first films came out. Author Kevin J. Anderson once pointed out that writing novels based on the SW universe was hard because, unlike Star Trek "when Star Wars was developed, modeled on a mythic cycle, it wasn't designed to have many many other adventures tacked onto the end afterward. In true mythic cycles, the main characters are allowed to die heroic deaths, etc., and we are under tougher constraints in producing spin-off fiction."
This didn't stop Anderson from writing dozens of SW novels, of course. The confusing mess of plot in the prequels may be a result of this rapid expansion of the SW universe. One of the main locations in the prequels, the capital planet of Coruscant, was invented by sci-fi author Timothy Zahn in a trilogy of books that came out in the early 1990s. The Sith and the Fetts have volumes of material written about them in both books and comics. The name "Darth" was almost certainly not a title until the ancillary media made it one. Lucas actually has continuity editors on staff who are supposed to make sure all the novels, comics and movies hang together.

But all of this extra material has only made Lucas's task with the prequels even more difficult one. He has forgotten how much success the original films had with using a smaller scope. In the modern world, epics only work when they have strong internal consistency, such as Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Even Tolkien's character names were derived from Tolkien's complete fictional languages or real-world historical ones. The SW universe is randomly-constructed and contradictory, even within the films themselves. The average reader or audience is much more amenable to fantasy when it is solidly grounded in realistic characters - characters that, most importantly, the viewer can identify with.

This is where Lucas has failed. A friend once remarked to me that Lucas doesn't really understand the original SW saga. He thinks it's about his precious avatar, Luke. But it isn't. Star Wars is about Han Solo - the human character we viewers can identify with. Han has complex morals and a sardonic cynicism about the universe that serves as a necessary balance to the goodie-goodie nobility and idealism of Luke and his Jedi mentors. Luke is a freak - he has weird powers that normal people don't have. Han Solo anchored the fantastic plot of SW and gave us a way to look at the incredible events and characters as we would see it ourselves, just as the quotidian and practical Hobbits do in The Lord of the Rings.

Han has no corresponding character in the prequels, and I believe it is this that turns me off from them so much. I can't identify with all these politicians and Zen Jedi. I can't even identify with whiny Anakin - is any young man so incapable of understanding responsibility, or of employing subtlety in his behavior? It's clear that Darth Vader is going to turn out to be the biggest dupe in the galaxy, passively succumbing to Palpatine/Sidious's influence. No wonder Peter Cushing could boss him around so much in Star Wars. He's a wimp.u

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