Little Orphan Anakin
1:Attack of the Cloned Reviews
There is a world shortage of
opinions about Attack of the Clones.
It seems that the only things
that anyone is allowed to say is that:
1: It has bad dialogue
2: It is dominated by CGI
special effects
3: It is derivative of other
movies, e.g. Fifth Element and Gladiator
4: It is better than Phantom
Menace.
Opinion famines seem to attach
themselves to this kind of movie. At the time of Star Wars all
anyone said was that it had great special effects. At the same time, all you
were allowed to say about Doctor Who was that it had bad special
effects, and, interestingly, that The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy
was impossible to understand.
When someone says 'Doctor Who
has bad special effects' I am inclined to reply 'Well, I don't think the CSO
experiment in Underworld worked particularly well, but then the alien dimension
in Warriors Gate was very evocative.' To which they reply 'Wobbly sets, wobbly
sets, wobbly sets' and walk off: the concept of 'wobbly sets' has expanded to
fill their whole consciousness on this point. Silly me to expect words to be
used to express actual ideas.
In the case of Phantom Menace,
the only viewpoint one heard was that Jar-Jar Binks was very irritating. I have
to say I never found him so: I thought he was a relatively amusing character,
in same vein as C-3PO, Jabba the Hutt, and all the other comic-relief
characters of the first trilogy. After six viewings of Phantom Menace,
the only 'racism' I can discern is the Japanese accent of the trade federations
representatives.
This separatist review will
therefore secede from the army of cloned opinions which is oppressing the
galaxy, and try to say a few coherent things about the movie.
1: Dialogue
The dialogue of Attack of the
Clones is melodramatic and non-naturalistic. If 'good dialogue' means, say,
Tarantino-esque repartee, then Attack of the Clones doesn't have it. On
the other hand, there is only one genuinely awful passage, the blazing-fire
love scene, in which Anakin and Amidala start talking in a weird, formal
language, rather like a badly translated opera libretto. For the rest of the
movie, well it didn't sound like bad dialogue to me; it sounded like the way
they talk in a Star Wars movie. 'Bad' dialogue has been a feature of the
franchise from the moment the Jedi with the public school accent said 'He
thought he should have stayed at home and not gotten involved.'
The problem was actually one of
unintentional bathos as a result of an inconsistent tone. If we had been asked to
believe that the 'Old Republic' was an age of heroes where everyone wore
sweeping clothes and talked in arias, then 'If we follow to this to a logical
conclusion it will take us to a place where we cannot go and which would
destroy our lives' might be a reasonable thing to say. But it is a mistake to
have Anakin saying 'If Obi-Wan saw this, he would be very grumpy' in one scene
and 'I am haunted by the kiss you should never have given me' in the next.
2: CGI Effects
Computers are still a
sufficiently novel idea that we are aware of what they can do. We are therefore
inclined to use CGI as a buzzword. We are less impressed by fantasy and
spectacle because we now know that it is relatively easy to produce. Most of us know that you can create any kind
of virtual world inside a computer: the only limit is your artist's imagination
and the amount of time you are prepared to spend rendering it out. There were
very few moments where it was obvious to my untrained eye that I was watching
computer animation. Some scenes, especially the Jedi council had a quality of
unnaturally sharpness which gave me a sense of it 'not being quite real'. (This
may have been an artefact of the Leicester Square Odeon's ultra high teach
projection system.) CGI creatures occasionally have a specific, slightly
mechanical way of walking which distinguishes them from, say, the slight
jerkiness of a Ray Haryhausen monster pic. (I particularly noticed this as Yoda
walked offstage in the background of the Jedi councils first meeting with Palpatine.)
The film naturally plays to the
strengths of the computer animation process. The special effects in Attack
of the Clones are not 'better' than those in Return of the Jedi. The
spaceships in Return of the Jedi look real; you can't actually improve
on that. What the new film can give you is MORE special effects. A computer can
give you a hundred or a thousand Stormtroopers, where miniatures and extras can
only manage ten. That tends to give us very crowded screens; and to me, a
thousand battle robots is less dramatic than a single invincible Death Star. In
that sense, the capabilities of the CGI process did rather dictated the
contents of the film.
Lucas's imagination has a
relatively limited range, and keeps going over and over the same material, trying
to do the same kinds of scenes better and better each time a new piece of
technology comes along. I have the sense of a man who is forever frustrated
that he can't make the pictures which he sees in his head come to life on the
screen. When we first saw the bar filled with aliens in Star Wars, it
was an awesome and funny concept, even though some of the individual creatures
were not particularly well realized. It is understandable that Lucas wants to
do it again and again, with aliens that really look alien. But there is a law
of diminishing returns – and when we end up in the bar in the Coruscrant under
city, we don't say 'Wow, wow…a night club full of aliens!' we say 'Yeah, yeah,
yeah: another Cantina scene.'
Duh, it's a Star Wars movie.
Star Wars is basically
pastiche; cool bits of other movies translated into sci fi terms and then
pasted together—Roman Arena with aliens; Ben Hur with aliens; the Searchers
with aliens; the Dam Busters with space ships, some of which are flown by aliens.
It is true that some of the
source material for the Coruscant car chase in Attack of the Clones did
seem to be Judge Dredd, Blade Runner, Fifth Element; and the assassin-eels looked as if they had
wandered in from Alien or Wrath of Kahn. It might be
thought a pity if Star Wars is
reduced to pastiching post-Star Wars sci fi movies.
I also felt that some of the
pastiche was a little too banal, so that the Jedi archive looks too much like a
modern public library and the civilian transportation looks too much like the
interior of a subway. This implies, to me, a failure of imagination, a failure
to see that everything in the Star Wars universe must be, not only
bigger, but also more heroic than that in real life.
This is not to say that I don't
think that the film was flawed. It was. I think that its flaws were threefold:
The film's plot went nowhere.
There was no tension in the Amidala-Anakin romance, because we all knew where
it had to end up: but the element of pre-destination wasn't used to generate,
say, dramatic irony. But neither was
there any great sense that Obi-Wan's wanderings from set piece to set piece
were very meaningful, nor that they related to the overall structure of the
movie. Just as Phantom Menace very loosely follows the structure of A
New Hope, so Attack of the Clones is meant to feel
structurally similar to Empire Strikes Back. We jump backwards and
forwards between two plots, one full of action (Obi Wan, Han and Leia) and one
static and character based (Anakin and Amidala, Luke and Yoda.) But Empire
Strikes Back is tightly plotted: not only do we know that the sufferings of
Han and Leia are intimately related to what is happening to Luke; but we also
recognize continuous thematic echoes between the two storylines. (For example,
Han Solo and Luke both have an adventure in a cave which turns out to be quite
different from what they were expecting.) Attack of the Clones is really
just a tumbling mass of incident. And the end result of all the incident is
neither victory nor defeat for the heroes, but the release of two small pieces
of plot-information, or the moving of a plot pawn or two. Anakin and Amidala
are married. Palpatine is voted special powers by the senate. Er…that's it.
Does anyone remember Dark
Crystal? (Rhetorical question. Don't write in.)
Despite the rather inane plot,
it's one of the best-realized cinematic fantasy worlds. The surreal muppetery
creates a great sense of Otherness. There are no knights in armour, no castles,
or goblins: it is set neither in the world of here-and-now, nor in the
over-familiar world of fantasy archetypes. (Granted, once you look at them for
more than a minute or so, you realize that all the weird creatures are
the familiar archetypes in fancy dress but that didn't remove the initial sense
of being far, far away.) It also has great depth, or rather, the illusion of
great depth. Wherever you look, there are wall carvings, symbols, strange
ceremonies, and unfamiliar flora and fauna. One of the first images is of a
Mystic creating a sand painting and destroying it with his tail. We don't know
why he does this: we just sort of accept that sand paintings are very Zen, and
this is very much the sort of thing these Mystics might do.
Tied in with the movie was a
gurt big art book called The World of the Dark
Crystal, which I understand now sells for frighteningly high amounts of
money on Ebay. Mine isn't for sale. It contains a lot of pre-production art,
and some photographs from the movies; all tied together with an elaborated back
story about how the Crystal came to be broken in the first place, and lots of
data about the goodie Mystics and the evil Skeksis. We learn the names of
individual Mystics and Skeksis; we learn that the Mystics aren't really called
Mystics at all, but Ur-Ru. We learn that the beings they merge into at the end
are called the Ur-Skeks. We even learn what the sand-painting meant (it
represented the history of the world of the Dark Crystal.) It was the
sort of book that every fantasy geek would be proud to have on his coffee
table. I often thought 'I could use this as the basis of an RPG', before adding
'No, I couldn't: background notes about the significance of murals is not a
good basis for an interactive scenario.'
It would have been intolerable
if all that background detail had appeared in the film. Exposition of Ur-Skek
religion and the mystical significance of the number three would have slowed
down the plot. But it is that the existence of all that off-screen data contributed
to the illusion of reality which made the film so convincing..
I have, to coin a phrase, a bad
feeling that Attack of the Clones only existed as a vehicle for its back
story. George Lucas had some notes about the political structure of the
Galactic Empire and the relationship of the Jedi to the Sith and he jolly well
wanted to explain them to the audience. Plot and characters were secondary to
that world-building aim.. He'd decided that the Death Star was designed by some
people called the Geonosians; and decided to work this into the movie. But
'worked in' means 'stated, alluded to, dangled in front of the viewers nose':
It doesn't actually have any purpose or role in the story. Yes, Star Wars
aficionados get a certain sort of pleasure from noticing that the
representative of the Techno-Union has a breath mask reminiscent of Darth
Vader's; but he's only in the story is so that aficionados can notice him. It
all feels flung together, like Lucas is trying to retro-fit the old films to
his new vision of the setting.
Lucas's failure to understand
what made his original movies tick is immense. Go back and watch the films,
particularly the first one, and what strikes you are the chemistry between the
five main human characters, with a bit of a comic relief from the metal ones.
What makes us go back to Star Wars again and again is the way Han Solo
says "No reward is worth this", and Leia says "This is some
rescue!" This survives into Empire Strikes Back, about a third of
which is about the sexual tension between Han and Leia, and even into the
slightly more cardboard Return of the Jedi. Now, granted, Attack of
the Clones has a better stab at creating some characters than Phantom
Menace: but they never sparkle. They are primarily there to go through the
motions of advancing the plot. Anakin is going to rebel against Obi-Wan and go
bad; Amidala is going to fall in love with Anakin. There is no group dynamic,
only a collection of plot-coupons.
Once upon a time it seemed
rather bizarre to imagine that there could be a Star Trek series which
didn't feature Sperk, Kock and Bones. Surely, Star Trek was reducible to
those three characters? But Mr Roddenbury, having half a brain at least, sat
down and said "If I come up with a new set of characters, with some of the
same themes and ideas behind them, then people will accept Star Trek: Next
Generation as a new version of the same show. And so it proved. Say what
you like about Enterprise or Voyager, and I often do, but each version
of Star Trek has been based around a set of characters whose
interactions are likely to generate amusing narrative situations. Cardassian
civil wars come a very poor second.
So why, oh why could not Mr
Lucas think along these lines? "I need to think up a set of half a dozen
cool characters, he could have said -- quite possibly one of them a bit roguish
and one of them a bit mystical -- and get them together in Episode I,
and keep them together until Episode III. And I need to make them as
much fun to spend time with as the characters I created in Star Wars. And
then I need to think up some cool adventures for them to have. Perhaps I'll
have them fighting baddies, who we can call, for the sake of argument,
"The Sith". And in the background to their adventures, I can leak
some data about the Old Republic, and then, as a sub-plot, we can show how Obi
Wan's apprentice goes bad and turns evil. He'll be a minor character in the
first film, and the main villain in the last one."
But, alas, what Lucas actually
did was say "Gosh, everyone is bound to be fascinated to find our who
Luke's mother was, and precisely what it was which turned his Dad bad; and
won't they just be so thrilled to see a young Obi and a young Darth walking
into a bar together. When they see Anakin and Amidala fall in love, they will
know that they are witnessing an awesomely important event in galactic history;
and that will make the film seem important, and that importance will be enough
to carry the film all by itself."
It ain't so, George. It just
ain't so.