Further thoughts on Attack of the Clones
Many pixels have been spilled in the pages of this journal regarding Attack of the Clones. Most of them revolve around the world of Kamino, particularly the mysterious and seductive scoopy chair.
But one has not seen a movie until one has watched it with a six-year-old boy, as I did with Attack of the Clones today. I think this probably works with any movie; watch it with a six-year-old boy and any narrative flaws will become immediately clear. I must remember to try it with L’Avventura sometime soon.
The love story, as everyone knows, is an embarrassing shambles. And its not that the actors’ performances are so bad (although they are), it’s that the script makes absolutely no sense at all. From the very top, it’s simply unbelievable that Padme would fall deeply in love with Anakin, who is, throughout, nothing more than a petulant, moody, griping, disturbingly awkward pest. The most romantic thing Anakin says to Padme while he pitches woo to her is when he talks about how one day the republic will bend to the will of an iron dictator. As for his attempts at poetic flattery, search the racks of every greeting-card store on the planet and you will not find a single verse that tells a woman she is not like sand.
The detective story, “Who is trying to kill Padme and why?” works very well, thank you and is the best reason for the narrative existing. Obi-Wan tracks down Padme’s would-be killer in a crackerjack chase scene, finds a clue that leads him to a remote planet, where he stumbles upon a vast mystery that will change the course of history — as all good clues do. Super. Although I will add that Obi-Wan is a miserable detective — he can’t find a planet just because a snippy librarian tells him it doesn’t exist, but, literally, a six-year-old boy can.
The rescue story (“I must find my mother”) comes out of left field half-way through the movie, is motivated by nothing and leads nowhere. It’s ugly, brutal and racist (between the flies buzzing around the somehow-even-more semitic Watto and the characterization of the Sand People as “animals”). The action story (“We’ve got to find Obi-Wan!” “Uh-oh! Gladitorial combat!”) works well, and would work even better if the rescue story wasn’t in there. And the war story is gloriously staged and truly spectacular.
In fact, one of the interesting things about Attack of the Clones is that the CGI characters consistently give better performances than the live actors. Case in point: compare the arena scene on Geonosis with the pod-race sequene in Phantom Menace. The human extras at the pod race give terrible performances and look ridiculous in their rubber masks and silly costumes. In contrast, the giant-bug Geonosians look utterly believable and in fact give more subtle, more believable performances. And when a human has to interact with a room of CGI creatures, the effect is always awkward, but fill the screen with monsters and robots and it looks absolutely splendid and believable.
Now then: I still have some notes.
It says in the title crawl that “thousands” of solar systems have fallen under the power of “the mysterious Count Dooku.” Are we to believe that thousands of systems, representing untold billions of individuals, have decided to throw in with a leader they know nothing about?
Palpatine’s desk — it’s too clean. In fact, everything in Attack of the Clones is too clean. Everything looks like it was just unpacked yesterday.
Jango Fett comes to Coruscant to kill Padme. He contacts a female bounty hunter and gives her the squiggly bugs to drop in her window (they are apparently homing squiggly bugs — otherwise this is a stupid plan). The female bounty hunter takes the canister of squiggly bugs and loads it into a little flying thing, which takes off for Padme’s window (good thing for the bounty hunter she didn’t decide to sleep on the living-room couch at the last moment). My question: why does Jango Fett need the goddamn female bounty hunter? Can’t he load the goddamn flying thing himself? He’s already got the canister of squiggly bugs, presumably he knows how it fits in the flying thing. What the hell is his problem?
Senator Padme travels back to Naboo and chats with the new Queen. She counsels action but the new Queen chooses caution and patience. Padme nods in acquiescence because she understands from her own experience that becoming Queen of Naboo turns you a fucking idiot.
Now those Kaminoans (you knew it would come back to this): I’m sorry, I just — now wait. Play this back for me. Ten years ago, a Jedi guy came to you and placed an order for a clone army. In the ensuing ten years, you’ve been diligently manufacturing that clone army. The Jedi guy never called back to check up, and in fact business has otherwise dropped to zero due to your planet being removed from the archives, but you have kept on making this clone army. It must cost untold billions of dollars, and is useless to you personally, but that is, apparently, the way you do business. Okay. I get that.
Here’s my question. Ten years later, another guy in a Jedi robe shows up. He obviously knows nothing about the clone army and in fact seems to be lost. Don’t you even ask him for his receipt? Is this how you operate in your business? The only order you’ve had in the past ten years, and you don’t even ask for a receipt? Suppose this Jedi guy you don’t know says “Hey, nice army, wrap ’em up, I’ll take ’em with me,” and then the next day your actual client stops by? What are you going to do then, Kaminoans?
(By the way, today I counted a total of six Kaminoans, not two as previously reported: the Greeter, the Prime Minister, Jeeby, and three others, wandering around the halls of Kamino. The lack of population probably explains why the Prime Minister doesn’t even own a desk, but just sits in his windowless glowing room doing nothing while waiting for visitors to drop by every ten years.)
Note to Obi-Wan: when you’re chasing Jango Fett through a deadly asteroid field, what prevents you from simply leaving the asteroid field? You’ve got a freaking tracking device on him, and he’s heading for a giant planet, and everyone knows that in Star Wars Land every planet only has one or maybe two places to land — where the hell do you think he’s going to go?
C-3PO falls into the robot-factory machinery, then, within 24 hours, ends up wandering out onto the arena field with the rest of the just-created battle-droids. Yet all the battle-droids with him are already beaten up, scuffed and dirty. My son Sam suggests that they’re actually made to look like that. Perhaps the Separatist army prefers their droids pre-distressed, like stone-washed jeans — it gives them character and let’s you stop worrying about keeping them pristine.
The movies obviously take place a long time ago because librarians, now, don’t automatically trust databases of any kind.
(Thanks for the hair-in-a-bun-librarian stereotype on film, Mr. Lucas. The field really appreciates it).
My wife, a master’s degree-holding librarian her own self, didn’t appreciate the knock either.
Palpatations
“The rescue story (“I must find my mother”) comes out of left field half-way through the movie, is motivated by nothing and leads nowhere.”
The Star Wars prequel trilogy never comes out and says this, or offers evidence towards it, but I suspect we’re meant to believe that Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious/the future Emperor is behind the kidnapping and murder of Annakin’s mother in order to lead him further down the path to the Dark Side of the Force. Annakin’s massacre of the sandpeople anticipates his massacre of the Jedi in ‘Revenge of the Sith.’
I think Palpatine/Sidious’ schemes throughout the trilogy are fairly ingenious and complex; all the plotting on Naboo in ‘The Phantom Menace’ is really just a pretext for Palpatine to be elected Chancellor, a seemingly-trivial event in the film. I think people might appreciate those virtues (admittedly dwarfed by the films’ problems) if the films better explained what Palpatine/Sidious was up to. After ‘The Phantom Menace,’ I had to explain to a friend that Senator Palpatine and the mysterious robed figure (Darth Sidious) were the same character as the Emperor from ‘Return of the Jedi.’
Palpatine/Sidious may even be Annakin’s father, since Annakin’s mother claims that he was from a virgin birth in ‘Phantom Menace,’ and Palpatine talks about a Sith lord (presumably himself) who could have done such a thing in ‘Revenge of the Sith.’
Re: Palpatations
My six-year-old son didn’t get it from Menace, but he picked up on it right away in Attack — because of the voice.
I totally agree that Menace would work 200% better if they explained who Sidious is and what he’s up to. Hell, he could even be the protagonist, as far as I care — it could be a real Richard III kind of story.
Re: Palpatations
I remember that, back in 1999 when Phantom Menace was new, a lot of fans argued that Palpatine couldn’t be Darth Sidious, because [quote] George Lucas wouldn’t be so obvious about it. [/quote]
Nooo… they were just accidentally played by the same character, who also played the evil Sith Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi. Just random chance, right.
you might be interested in the star wars remix i am in the process of posting (seasons one and two are online now).
the entire raison d’etre for the project is that star wars is a non-linear story. lucas may want us to watch episodes 1-6 in that order, but doing so really destroys the narrative strength of 5 – especially the revelations surrounding yoda and darth vader. yoda’s scene in particular has the potential to be turned into something out of mst3k or a british panto (“he’s behind you!”).
but after addressing those two issues in the first season, i realized that there was solid potential to present palpatine’s story in it’s own contained arc (the upcoming season three). there is enough material throughout the six movies that can be pulled out and put into it’s own context to give even the most dedicated viewer another take on what ol’ palpy’s been up to the whole time.
the middle season is, of course, just the action/adventure stuff from clones, sith, empire and jedi. because every trilogy needs a good solid action center to keep the punters happy.
Yes, the winged Geonosians and their robots were the stars of the pic for me. The question “What do the separatists want?” became the leitmotif and the answer was of course “To make Quebec an independent country”. The whole film took a very clear meaning and I laughed for a long time. It was unreal and hilarious.
On the other hand the Camino Clone Circle was all brass tack pure “hard” science fiction which I took as a completely separate movie. You found the white interiors sterile and unconvincing? They plunged me in the spacecraft interiors of Kubrick’s 2001, and all the science fiction worlds that existed before May 25 1977. Not many inhabitants on Camino? That put me right in the mood of Asimov’s spacer worlds.
On the whole the humans were superfluous and uninteresting in that film.
I felt that the two main failings of the prequels, especially AOTC, were: a) I didn’t give a bantha’s ass about any of the characters, and b) the design work wasn’t up to par.
The first point, and all the related bad acting, bad scripting, and bad dialogue writing related to it have been discussed extensively by everyone.
The second point, I don’t think gets enough attention. The original trilogy had an undeniable cool-factor. There were a few things that contributed to that: the feeling of “epicness” in the plot, the fortuitously apt casting… but I think a large part of it was the utter perfection of the set, character, and spaceship design. TIE Fighters, X-Wings, Star Destroyers, AT-AT walkers… every one of those designs is perfect and iconic. The design team at Industrial Light and Magic put in some of the most perfect design work that the medium has ever seen. The sets were great too. Think of Cloud City, or Star Destroyer bridge, or the interior of the Falcon. The “futuristic, yet lived-in” look that those designs captured was the defining aesthetic of the whole trilogy. It’s something that the prequels tried, and failed, to emulate. A large part of this failure was, I think, the reliance on CGI. We have the technology now where we can create thousands of ships all flying around each other in hugely complex spaces that would be flatly impossible to film with traditional model shots — but somehow, we haven’t managed to get it to look as good as model shots. And the ships designs weren’t as good. I think this is important. Did the prequels give us *anything* even approaching the iconic visual appeal of the X-Wing or the Star-Destroyer? Everything was either re-hashes of those old designs, or new but completely uninteresting.
The success of the original Star Wars trilogy rests on the shoulders of ILM, John Williams, Harrison Ford, and perhaps, if you’re feeling super-generous, George Lucas as a distant fourth. (Akira Kurasawa is somewhere relatively high on that list too.)
In Lucas’s defense, he’s still a producer of the first rank, if only for assembling that team to realize his vision.
I’ve already gone through most of the reasons I think the prequel trilogy doesn’t work, but this post does remind me of a few other points:
Palpatine’s desk — it’s too clean. In fact, everything in Attack of the Clones is too clean. Everything looks like it was just unpacked yesterday.
That, to me, is one of the signs of the failure of the prequels. The fans liked the dirty, used feeling of the original films. The universe of the prequels was too shiny.
C-3PO falls into the robot-factory machinery, then, within 24 hours, ends up wandering out onto the arena field with the rest of the just-created battle-droids. Yet all the battle-droids with him are already beaten up, scuffed and dirty. My son Sam suggests that they’re actually made to look like that. Perhaps the Separatist army prefers their droids pre-distressed, like stone-washed jeans — it gives them character and let’s you stop worrying about keeping them pristine.
And that’s just a sign of “too little effort in the wrong spot.” Lame.
Jango Fett comes to Coruscant to kill Padme. He contacts a female bounty hunter and gives her the squiggly bugs to drop in her window (they are apparently homing squiggly bugs — otherwise this is a stupid plan). The female bounty hunter takes the canister of squiggly bugs and loads it into a little flying thing, which takes off for Padme’s window (good thing for the bounty hunter she didn’t decide to sleep on the living-room couch at the last moment). My question: why does Jango Fett need the goddamn female bounty hunter? Can’t he load the goddamn flying thing himself? He’s already got the canister of squiggly bugs, presumably he knows how it fits in the flying thing. What the hell is his problem?
Either Jango Fett really sucks as a bounty hunter, or this is just a (very poor) excuse to have another character and to “extend” the mystery. The only thing Zam Wesell had going for her was that she was a Clawdite, a changeling, something which the Star Wars universe apparently lacked.
This also brings up another point from TPM: why did Lucas take such pains to introduce a female bounty hunter, Aurra Sing, then not include her instead of Wesell and Jango Fett in Clones? I personally don’t care about seeing Boba Fett as a kid or finding out that he’s a clone. Let the fans keep the mystery surrounding his origin and introduce a new badass bounty hunter (although she could hardly have served as the model for the clones, but that’s another story).
For that matter, why is this movie titled Attack of the Clones? Aren’t they on the side of the good guys? The title makes it sound like they’re the ones attacking, but instead, they’re called into service by the heroes for defensive purposes. After all, we’re not supposed to know Palpatine is the bad guy yet, right? As far as we know, and especially based on the events of TPM, the enemy army is the droid army.
I suppose it beats Star Wars: Episode II – Roger! Roger! The Return of the Battle Droids, but it’s still a misnomer.
Yes! That was why Star Wars used to be cooler than Star Trek.
Actually, what I heard was that the whole “robot factory” bit was not in the original movie, and when Lucas watched a rough cut he said “You know what we need here? A big action set-piece.” So it’s entirely possible that the distressed robots in the arena were there first, before Lucas decided to construct the robot-factory sequence, and then forgot, or didn’t care, to make the continuity match later.
That makes perfect sense.
It’s still too little effort, but of a different kind.
You thought Watto was Semetic? I thought he was supposed to be Arabic. Odd.
I like Sam’s idea of pre-distressed robots, tho. You figure there’s got to be a psychological angle in robot warfare. That’s why you make the Terminator look like Arnold instead of Woody.
Well, in literal terms Arab is Semitic, but I see your point. But in the language of the Star Wars universe, it seems pretty clear to me that the “Sand People” are supposed to be the “filthy Arab” stereotype (their women even dress in burkas), just as Chewbacca is supposed to be the “contented slave” stereotype and so forth.
Ah, gotcha.
I do agree with you about the CGI critters being more striking (if not actually better) actors than the meat actors. Which is kind of really sad. I think because the animators have to push the performances that extra bit to convince audiences they’re not just looking at a special effect, CGI actors tend to be more theatrical and colorful and humans wash out in comparison when sharing the same screen.
I was so exasperated by this movie, I don’t know where to start. Luckily, a million other people started complaining five years ago, so I don’t have to.
Are you waiting 7 years before showing Revenge of the Sith (PG-13) to Sam? Isn’t it great that he “can’t” watch Star Wars (Episode 4) until after he sees someone’s skin being burned off?
I think it’s going to be hard to keep Sam from watching Sith. I’ve been giving away all its narrative “secrets” (most of which he picks up in the schoolyard anyway) so that the impact of the imagery will be lessened.
He’s watched Jurassic Park (R), and declared it “hardly scary at all,” and Jurassic Park III (PG-13) which completely freaked his shit, so you never know.
He was delighted to see Mace Windu cut off Jango Fett’s head.
The Clone Wars
I was re-reading your comments on ‘Attack of the Clones’ to refresh my memory in advance of ‘The Clone Wars’ movie, and read the above: actually, Jurassic Park was rated PG-13, too — I looked it up.
To suggest answers to two questions:
1. Jango Fett’s mistake was to be seen following the botched assassination. If the female body hunter had been killed in the escape (or if Fett had arranged for her to die in custory), the trail would have ended with her.
2. Perhaps Sidious/Dooku/whoever knew that Obi-Wan had landed on Camino and sent a note (or had previous left a standing note) saying “Oh, just let the Jedi take possession of the clone army.” Because either way, the goal is for the Jedi/Republic to have the clone army eventually.
So the question becomes, did Sidious/Dooku/whoever secretly INTEND to lead Obi-Wan to the clone army? If not, how did Sidious/Dooku/whoever plan to make the clone army the Republic’s first line of defense?
Re: The Clone Wars
1. Jango Fett’s mistake is not being seen, it’s leaving behind his Kaminoan sabre-dart, is it not? That’s the clue that sends Obi-wan on his detective case. Cloners, those Kaminoans are.
2. If I was one of the (three) Kaminoans on the planet and I had a Clone army that I had invested the time and money in that was ten years late on its pick-up date, I’d probably hand it off to the first Jedi who walked in the door too, just to get the project off my desk.