Attack of the Clones

For no particular reason, I threw on Attack of the Clones tonight.

Unsurprisingly, the best transfer to DVD of any movie I’ve seen, with the exception of, perhaps, Finding Nemo (which was, of course, created entirely on computers and not in need of transfer in the traditional sense.

For Clones, the same joys and disappointments as before. You could name them as well as I could.

But I found myself thinking about the tall, skinny aliens from the Camino system (Caminans?). They have a whole planet, covered in water and dotted with clone factories. “Cloners, these people are” says the crusty cook from the ’50s diner to Obi-Wan.

Well, I’ve never heard of a whole planet’s population identified by their profession, and it stuck out weird. Really, is the entire population of Camino involved in the production of clones? Are there no truck drivers, no bricklayers, no doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers on Camino, except those connected to the cloning industry?

It’s sort of like someone saying “Los Angeles, filmmakers those people are.” I mean sure, LA is a company town, but I often go weeks on end without running into a single filmmaker. I meet housewives and grocery clerks and doctors and accountants and locksmiths and librarians and swim coaches and short-order cooks and all kinds of things. But no, apparently on Camino all they do is make clones.

But wait: in all the Camino scenes, we meet a grand total of — well, let’s see — two Caminans (Caminists? Camisoles?). One is a female greeter of some sort and the other is identified as the Prime Minister. Now, Prime Minister implies that there are quite a few Caminans running around, but where are they? And where are their belongings? The rooms we enter into are completely uncluttered and sparkling clean. No piles of magazines or half-eaten doughnuts sitting around. I know that we never get inside the living quarters of a genuine Caminan, but they must eat and sleep somewhere, something. They have clothes, which they must keep somewhere, but what do they eat? Fish? Plankton? Where do they go to the bathroom? And where are they all?

Who built those factories? It must have been contract work from another planet, because the only things the Caminans do is clone. Cloners, those people are.

And then it struck me: maybe the female greeter and the Prime Minister are the only two Caminans on the planet. Maybe that’s all there are, and all the cloning and clone-training is done by machines.

But wait — if there are only two Caminans on the planet, why is one Prime Minister?

And suddenly the whole movie turned into some sick charade. There are two creatures on a planet, and they’re surrounded by these artificial people that they make, and there are so many of them that they start to think that they are actually the leaders of some great society, instead of just a couple of cloners running an automated factory. And in the extremity of their isolation and loneliness, they start to refer to each other as Prime Minister and, who knows, Vice-Prime-Minister or something.

Maybe they trade off from week to week, calling each other Prime Minister.

They’re smart, that’s for sure. They built those factories and they figured out how to clone hundreds of thousands of clones, so they must be pretty sharp. But no one visits, no one “drops by,” even the Jedi who ordered the clones never stopped back to check their progress. Little do they know their planet has been erased from the Archives on Coruscant.

I can imagine the two of them sitting around wondering what happened to tourism on Camino.

MALE CAMINAN: “We put up the billboards, we sent out the emails, how come no one comes to rainy, water-covered, windswept clone-factory-town Camino?”

FEMALE CAMINAN: “People just aren’t interested in cloning any more. Hey, can I be queen next week?”