Read a review of Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith
Read an interview with sound designer Ben Burtt.
Old
Friends
STAR WARS:
EPISODE II ATTACK OF THE CLONES
George Lucas' penultimate Star Wars
movie builds to its climax.
With Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen,
Christopher Lee
Written by George Lucas & Jonathan Hale
Directed by George Lucas
ON THE ONE HAND - which, by the time it's over, is all Anakin Skywalker has left - the new Star Wars movie, Attack of the Clones, is prčt-á-porter summer cinema.
How could you slip into anything more comfortable than a meeting of the Jedi Council, where sweeping cloaks define the fashion of the Force (and conceal light sabers), or the sinewy elocution of the duplicitous Chancellor (formerly Senator) Palpatine, or the burgeoning romance between Senator (formerly Queen) Padmé Amidala and the 20-year-old man-child Anakin, who's become a gifted but impetuous Jedi knight. He blames his wearying insomnia on missing his mother, but one rather suspects he's kept awake by his own wet dreams for the serenely confident and profoundly appetizing Padmé.
On the other hand, Master Yoda not withstanding, we know more about these characters than they know about themselves, so everything they say or do in Attack of the Clones is a harbinger of events whose outcome we've already witnessed in Episodes IV, V and VI. Not even George Lucas and digital effects can make us fear for their lives when, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi hangs from the wing of a racing thingamabob, or when Anakin and Padmé elude the conveyor-belt jaws of a robot manufacturing plant. (Let's face it: If that doesn't kill them, then they simply can't be killed).
You may or may not be delighted to know that Jar Jar Binks is still flouncing around worriedly, still babbling incomprehensibly, and still sounding like a chorus of doom when everyone could surely use a pick-me-up. Fortunately his role is a cameo this time, and it's actually C-3PO, also a minor player, who will probably annoy you the most. And when Jar Jar is finally ready for his closeup, he gets the good guys into a galaxy of trouble.
And don't ya just love it? Binks or not, when you leave the theater after Attack of the Clones, don't be too shocked when you realize that the whole bloody good adventure is about two hours away from being over. Is this installment better than the largely panned but hugely successful Phantom Menace? Does it make us eager to see Whatever Silly Name Lucas Dreams Up for the Next One? Who can say? It's Star Wars, and basically, that's enough.
Attack of the Clones takes us to familiar worlds, like Naboo and Tatooine, and to new ones, like Kamino, a turbulent aqueous planet whose willowy residents - fulfilling a puzzling request from a long-dead Jedi, as well as a prophecy from Episode IV - are nurturing a huge army of soldiers all cloned from the same donor, the ferocious bounty hunter Jango Fett. These human fighters, we're told, surpass robot soldiers, although one can hardly see how: Waiting for babies to grow up, even if technology accelerates their growth, means you have to plan your war a long time in advance. So evil, it seems, is patient as well as banal.
In fact, Lucas and his co-screenwriter, Jonathan Hales, stumble upon a 21st Century lesson in Attack of the Clones: When a frightened Republic Senate, fearing a clandestine enemy, gives "emergency powers" to its patriotic Chancellor, one hears the echo of America's current attorney general, protecting us from nebulous terrors by throttling our constitutional rights.
At its best, Attack of the Clones gives us a spattering of the intimate moments we all want to see between characters we know like old friends. In the rollicking father/son friction between Obi-Wan and Anakin, or in Padmé's futile struggle with desire for her brave and beauteous guardian/suitor, Attack of the Clones is a series of mini-love stories. This vein of the movie climaxes poignantly with the swift Freudian nightmare moment when Anakin finds his kidnapped mother, a trauma so profound that it pushes the anguished young man considerably closer to his dark side.
In the presence of such distilled and effective drama, the battles and chases in Attack of the Clones do more than just waste time that Lucas could spend on better things. Rare in the Star Wars canon, the technology here gives you the impression that Lucas is showing off. Over and over he sets up his heroes against impossible odds - and then he gets them out of it anyway. That's just a little too much fidelity to the Saturday afternoon serials on which he based his idea in the first place.
And yet, one digital action climax of Attack of the Clones features a showdown we've waited for decades to see - one that I, quite frankly, didn't believe possible, and that I doubted Lucas would ever dare try. But he does, and it just may be the most thrilling and memorable event in the Star Wars universe.
The movie's best sustained use of technology is probably the sagacious Yoda, who's entirely computer generated in Attack of the Clones. This allows the character to exhibit more supple gestures and glances. Rarely can you see the digital effects at work anywhere in the movie, and Lucas? creative team seems to possess a bottomless pit of ideas for imagining alien creatures. There's a gladiatorial arena filled with lethal beasties that illustrate the pleasures of digital animation. But they still also make you think of the pioneering Ray Harryhausen, whose ancient stop-motion monsters looked perfectly and cheesily unreal.
As Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ewan McGregor continues his eerie impersonation of Alec Guinness, thus making him Lucas' most gratifying casting choice. Natalie Portman, quite lovely as Amidala, still seems to rush some of her lines, which doesn't work for the character now that she's an adult. The wonderfully steely Christopher Lee, as Jedi-turned-Sith Count Dooku - is his name a paean to the actor's Draculan screen persona? - taunts Anakin and Obi-Wan just as he did Galdolf in The Lord of the Rings. He's joined in villainy by Ian McDiarmid, back again as Palpatine and his veiled alter ego, Darth Sidious.
But none of them finally matters as much as Hayden Christensen, the lean and pretty Canadian lad chosen to play Anakin Skywalker at this turning point of his life. He doesn't exactly have to run a gamut of emotions in Attack of the Clones, and he does it at least as well as, oh, Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. If Anakin's whiny petulance seems to come as much from the actor's diction as it does from the character's emotions, then young Christensen will have the chance to do better in 2005, the next and final time we travel back long ago to a galaxy far, far away.
Read a review of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace
Read a review of Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith
Read an interview with sound designer Ben Burtt.