Cloning Around
May 14th: Note that Bristol Odeon is doing a
special late night showing of Attack of the Clones on Thursday morning,
the earliest possible point that they can show the movie. Decide that,
realistically, I am not going to wait until the 25th to see it with friends in
London, and that seeing the late show would be an amusing thing to do. Discover
that Odeon's on-line booking service is doesn't work.
May 15th, morning: Buy ticket the old fashioned way at box
office.
May 15th, 11.40:PM: Arrive
in cinema. Take seat in back row, to make doubly sure no-one can sit behind me
telling me what is going to happen next. To my surprise, the cinema is full,
mainly with people who I suspect of being students.
May 16th, 12.05 AM: Film due to start. (No trailers.)
May 16th, 12.06 AM: Audience riot.
May 16th, 12.08: Film starts
May 16th, 2.30AM: Film finishes. I walk home, taking care to
attach myself to other groups of revellers to avoid being mugged. (Remind me to
tell you about the murder that was committed outside my old flat sometime when
it wouldn't be a digression.)
May 16th, 3.00 AM: Decide that this will be the only opportunity
I have to write my first impressions while they are still first impressions
Write:
WARNING
SPOILERS
MASSIVE SPOILERS.
MASSIVE, MASSIVE SPOILERS.
GREAT ARMIES OF CGI CLONED
SPOILERS THAT RAMPAGE ACROSS THE SCREEN AND GIVE AWAY ALL THE PLOT POINTS.
DO NOT READ FURTHER UNTIL YOU
HAVE SEEN THE FILM.
UNLESS, OF COURSE, YOU ARE ONE
OF THOSE WIERDOS WHO HAS ALREADY BEEN TO WATERSTONES AND BOUGHT THE COMIC BOOK,
THE NOVEL, THE SCRIPT, THE ARTBOOK, THE AUDIO BOOK.
Attack of the Clones is a lumbering, diffuse, out of control muddle
of a movie.
It feels like a session of a Star Wars RPG. We can tell that it is Star Wars because there are characters
called Obi Wan and Anakin Skywalker, but they seem to be getting on to coaches;
discussing the funding of political campaigns and meeting contacts in 1950s
coffee bars, as if someone didn't quite understand the brief.
It feels like someone connected
a hook-up direct to Lucas's brain; so that droid factories, clone armies,
arenas, asteroid fields and lots and lots of lightsabres come tumbling out in
no particular sequence.
It feels like the wreckage that
was left of the collision of four other movies, any two of which would have
made a satisfying film. (1: The "Foundations Edge" fall of the
Galactic Republic political intrigue movie. 2: The romance 3: The Wild West
Indian captivity story translated to Tatooine
4: The evil Jedi / trade empire / clone war movie that explodes from
no-where in the last twenty minutes.)
It has some of the silliest,
most OTT action sequences ever filmed; especially the entirely gratuitous
robot-factory production line, which is so obviously a set up for the
Playstation platform game that it hurts, and Yoda's brief Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon pastiche.
In short, I enjoyed it very much
indeed.
Phantom Menace had a fairly traditional narrative structure. It
felt very like one of the original Star
Wars movies albeit re-orchestrated into a slightly Disneyeque key, with an
Asimov galactic empire hovering in the background. Characters met up, formed a
group, acquired objectives, fulfilled them, and even occasionally talked to
each other. The film did nearly everything right, but them shot itself in the
foot by giving you a set of characters who were lackluster or irritating; and a
series of battles which were never as well choreographed as they should have
been.
Attack of the Clones goes down an opposite path. The characters
largely work. Obi-wan and Anakin are a convincing and engaging double act, with
rapport and banter, very much what Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan entirely failed to be in
Episode I. Having created this pair of characters, Lucas proceeds to
split them up for two thirds of the movie, leaving Ewan McGregor wandering
around the universe collecting plot coupons, and explaining the script in
one-side dialogue with his R2 unit; while Anakin goes off to enact his
pre-ordained slushy love story with Amidala. A nice surprise is that Yoda and
Mace Windu emerge as an enjoyable subsidiary double act: Yoda even gets some
laughs.
The battles are still, compared
with the original trilogy, not very well choreographed, but they are just so
enormous that one doesn't mind too much. Most of the time, I was able to follow
what was going on the screen. Phantom
Menace kept giving me sensory overload (slow down! Where am I meant to be
looking here?) The flying football match in that movie about the kid with the
funny scar was another instance of the same problem. That rarely happened in Attack of the Clones. Maybe Lucas has learned how to direct CGI
armies rather better in the last 3 years; or maybe I'm just more used to this
kind of movie making.
The battles, particularly the
climactic clones vs. robots sequence suffer from a sense of cinematic
diffuseness, a rot which set in in Return
of the Jedi and has plagued this type of movie ever since. There are lots
of brilliantly done cameos -- look, there goes an exploding space ship that
looks like a water tower; whiz, here comes a fast moving low flying vehicle;
duck, incoming moral dilemma for Anakin -- but no overall sense of what the
battlefield looks like or what is going on overall. (Compare this with the
AT-AT sequence in Empire Strikes Back,
where you know what the enemy is trying to achieve, how close they are to
achieving it, and roughly where the various forces are in relation to each
other.)
What the film lacks, compared
with Phantom Menace is anything
remotely resembling a dramatic structure or even a plot. Like Empire Strikes Back, it splits the
characters up and jumps between two more-or-less separate narrative threads;
but unlike Empire Strikes Back, it
lacks a strong thematic center to give it a sense of unity. Empire Strikes Back can be understood as
"How Luke studied under Yoda to become a Jedi, and how Han and Leia were
used as bait to draw him away from his training.". Attack of the Clones can only be
understood as "Anakin and Obi-Wan do stuff." Luke's vision of the
suffering Han Solo draws him away from Yoda and back to the point at which the
two parallel storylines will coalesce; Anakin's vision of his mother draws him away
from the ongoing slushy love story and into a completely different subplot on
Tatooine.
The love story is the one point
at which the film slows down enough for the main characters to speak
consecutive sentences; and actually works surprisingly well. Both Amidala and
Anakin manage to deliver lines of the "I have died each day since we were
re-united" variety with a surprising amount of straight-faced conviction.
Anakin is one of those actors who can produce tears to order. He can also pout,
snarl, wisecrack and giggle, but what he can't do is shake off the feeling that
Lucas really wrote this part of Leo Decapprio. The trouble is not that the
romance is slushy; it's that we know more or less where it is going; Annie has
to produce kids by the end of part III, or part IV isn't going to get started,
so any talk about Jedi not being supposed to know love is obviously just
playing hard to get.
The bit that we are not
necessarily expecting is the death of Anakin's mother; which should therefore
have had a big emotional punch. (Anakin's farewell to his mother in Phantom Menace was one of the more
engaging sequences in that film.) However it is over so quickly that we don't
really have time to care. It's probably a bad sign if an audience who have
remained dutifully silent during the picnic-in-the-long-grass sequence titter
during what is supposed to be the emotional climax of the movie. The whole
Tatooine thing felt sketched in; undeveloped. I saw a publicity still of Anakin
talking to the Jawas, and thought "Cool! We are going to see more of the
Jawas. " I always regretted that the Jawa-market pre-production art for
the original movie was never realized in the film. But it turns out that, er,
the publicity still represents the entire scene: one tableau of Anakin and a
sand crawler; 30 seconds of a Tusken camp. Really, "Anakin's quest across
Tatooine to rescue his Mum" could and should have carried a movie by
itself.
(There is also the suspicion
that there could be a "directors cut" to come; that there might be
more of this movie than we have been allowed to see. Maybe Lucas never intended
us to see Anakin's massacre of the Tuskens; maybe he planned for us to only
hear about it second hand. Or maybe there was a last minute censor's chop. I
have never before seen a high profile British movie advertised as
"Certificate: T.B.A" only days before it is due for release. And
weren't there scenes in the trailer that didn't make it to the finished film?)
Over and over again one felt
that the film was too short for its subject matter; that what we were watching
was set-up and establishing scenes for other movies that are never going to get
made. You want more of Annie and Obie, but all you really get is 10-minute car
chase. It's like the film was meant to be a 26 part TV series in it, not one poxie
two-hour movie.
I suppose that foreshadowing is
an occupational hazard with prequels. Owners of the DVD heaved a sign of relief
on discovery that the line "Some day, Greedo you'll come to a bad
end" was cut from Phantom Menace;
would that "I sometimes think you'll be the death of me, Anakin"
could have found its way to the floor of the same cutting room. Random
characters from the other four movies jump up all over Attack of the Clones, just for the sake of being there, really:
even 3PO and R2, though they get some
of the best lines, are really little more than nostalgic cameos. Jar-Jar is
harmless and even quite amusing; Watto, has acquired a silly hat, making him
look even more like a caricature Shylock than he did before. Most bizarre was
the brief appearance of not-yet-Uncle-Beru, living with his father (Great Uncle
Bulgaria, or somesuch) in the homestead where Luke grew up. It has not changed
a jot since we last saw it, 20 years in the future. This causes Anakin to
strike some Lukish poses and John Williams to reprise a few of our favourite
themes. We are not so much developing or expanding an established sci-fi
setting as wandering through old haunts.
The last 20 minutes or so of the
film are totally over the top; with climax piled on climax to the point where
one becomes bored with it all. I really thought that the battle in the arena
was going to be the end of the movie…but that leads into the arrival of Yoda
and the Clones; which leads into the full-scale infantry battle. The latter
part of this, I started to find a little wearing: I guess my overall sense in
all the battle sequences was "Hey…cool!…Just remind me, what are they
fighting about, again?"; but it totally redeemed itself in the four way
Lightsabre dual, and Yoda's relatively unexpected entrance. This was the only
part of the film, (apart from a couple
of one-liners), where the audience was reacting, cheering, laughing and
applauding in the way that they should be in this kind of picture.
In short: an engaging set of
characters who are not allowed to settle down and relate to each other; half a
dozen different settings and almost as many storylines; no coherent plot; and
not even that much advancement of the back-story. Bigger and sillier battles,
and more ridiculous space ships than have ever been exhibited in captivity
before. Sensory bombardment on a cosmic scale.
It's magnificent, but it's not Star Wars.
May 16th: 4AM: Up the apples
and pears and into Uncle Ned. (Metaphorically, since I live in a flat.)
May 16th: 11AM: Get up. Do a
single edit of first impression review written last night.
May 16: 1PM: Complete edit.
Decide to upload the thing straight away, on the assumption that my extensive
readership will be so impressed with the speed at which I got the review out
that they will be forgiving that it is not as polished and well structured as
my writing is wont to be.
May 16 2PM: Into Bristol. I
wonder if they have tickets for the 4PM showing available?