| Very Industrial, But Not Very
Magical
As wise as these Jedi are in the ways of The Force, they
may be the most naive parents. The Jedi Council sends
their stud apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, by himself
to act as private guard dog for the young and beautiful Queen
Amidala. The hills of Naboo are alive as Anakin and
Padme roll in the greenest grass ever filmed; love blossoms
like wild flowers; it cascades like silvery waterfalls—they're
in paradise, which in Lucas World resembles a Monet
painting with the contrast turned up way too high. Seeing
that Anakin sprang forth from his mother's womb via a unique
configuration of midi-chlorines, you might say that he is
First Man, and with the gorgeous senator, they are Adam and
Eve in Eden. Fair enough, but when Anakin is running
with the boys, we see the germinating seeds of hatred and
rebellion against the holy code of the Jedi. Apparently,
Lucas cribbed the prequel trilogy from the Cliff's Notes of
Paradise Lost, but Anakin Skywalker has to shoulder
the burden of being both Adam and Satan—a tall
order for the young Padawan apprentice.
With this much expository weight, you would think that Lucas
might not reduce Anakin to an archetypally irascible teenager,
but this is Star Wars, after all, so every archetype
is in play. And since nostalgia has already sold the parents'
dollar, the second mission is to sell the children, whom I
guess are supposed to identify directly with a swordsman wearing
a rattail straight out of a Lynyrd Skynaard concert. If Joseph
Campbell were still with us, perhaps he could have reminded
Lucas that the very reason we admire Satan in the first two
books of Paradise Lost is his heroic energy, his
stature as a glamorous underdog. If that is supposed to be
contained by little Jake Lloyd yelling, "Yoo Hoo!"
from the cockpit of his space cruiser, then consider me underwhelmed. To
its credit, though, Attack of the Clones attempts to
atone for this in the opening: Anakin senses some dastardly
caterpillars burrowing their way toward a slumbering Senator
Amidala, so he barges in and slices them with his light saber.
Then he and defacto father figure OB-Wan Kenobi jump out the
window and chase bad guys by hanging and swinging from space
cruisers. I kept thinking about how quickly Spider-Man would
have tracked down Jango Fett by jettisoning his webs all over
the space city, but I get the point: Anakin is the young hot
shot and OB-Wan is his fussy mentor, and eventually the generation
gap will be bridged by battle.
So Lucas defines original sin as a pettish teenager.
Hmph. To Boomer parents, this may not be news, but I was expecting
a little more: After all, this is Darth Vader in question
here, but I guess this is as much evil as Lucas is willing
to risk to keep this a "kid's film." I knew Lucas
had lost his nerve when, in a fit of incestuous anger after
the passing of Shmi, Anakin skulls a couple of Sand People,
but then relays the news verbally to Padme: "I killed
the women. I killed the children." Hayden Christensen
sulks it up pretty good, but wouldn't it have been more effective
to actually show the killing of the women, the killing of
the children, especially in the bloodles way Star Wars
is so famous for? They are the Sand People after all,
and nobody likes those swarthy bastards anyway.
Plot aside, as almighty as Industrial Light and Magic may
be, Lucas has claimed that the biggest struggle in making
the prequels is promoting the acceptance of digital moviemaking—though
the rest of us know that George's most ardent struggle has
always been with the English language. However, he was wise
enough to put the script's finishing touches in the hands
of (), whose only previous credit is The Scorpion King.
Before you laugh, I will say that as far as campy action goes,
The Scorpion King delivers in spades, and it's this
sort of spirit that should have propelled Attack of the
Clones through its volumes of tedious exposition. Some
of the esoteric referencing is fun: My favorite line is Ewan
McGregor announcing, "It's very good to see you, Jar
Jar," when, clearly, he's the only being in the universe
of the sentiment. This time out Jar Jar is promoted from bizarre
comic relief to Senator Binks (G-Naboo), and the comic relief
falls to C-3PO, who is his whiniest ever. Of the over six
million languages he's programmed to speak, for Attack
of the Clones I think he was set on "Pun." For
instance, when he's decapitated, he picks up his head and
says, "Oh my, I'm beside myself."
As for the rest of the cast, I think that everyone forgot
that they were in Star Wars. This is supposed to be
fun! How can such famously bad lines be spoken so solemnly?
Samuel L. Jackson acts like he's in a Shyamalan movie and
hides behind his light saber. Hayden Christensen plays the
sullen teenager like he's hiding jock itch in his Jedi robe.
He's sullen alright, but he flirts with Amidala like he's
negotiating cease fires on the Gaza Strip. Instead of sexy,
he's scary, and I could never figure out why such a regal
figure like Queen Amidala would be attracted to this psycho,
especially after he "slaughters the women and the children."
On one level, that should have just creeped her out, but on
a second, are we to believe that such a figure of such uncommon
integrity and maturity would pity-fuck such a capricious dude,
nonetheless marry him on a whim—especially with all the
uproar over trade sanctions and armies of the republic and
what-have-you?
As for Natalie Portman's performance, I think she dealt with
the Wal-Mart tornado better. She brings zero allure to Amidala,
as if relying solely on her resplendently outlandish hairdos
for character development, reciting her lines as if she's
auditioning as a tour guide of Naboo, rather than its former
queen. She seems to have miscalculated her character in the
same way Joan Allen did in The Contender: We understand
that she's supposed to have unflappable character that requires
austerity in the face of adversity, but to gain such a lofty
position, she also needs some charisma—in other words,
Senator Amidala lacks the star power for her apparent importance.
We only see her a few times delivering speeches in the Intergalactic
Senate or being debriefed by her advisors, and I'd almost
say that Paul Tsongas was a more riveting legislator. As for
Senator Binks, I'd take his oration on the necessity of an
army of the republic over a Strom Thurmond State of the Union,
but barely. The only actual person that seems to be enjoying
himself, thus creating an actual character, is Ewan McGregor
as OB-Wan. I think it's significant that at this time last
year, we saw Ewan in Moulin Rouge!, which was shot
on the same Australian sound stage as Attack of the Clones.
Thankfully for Lucas, the Luhrmann party seems to have hung
with McGregor a bit, because he's the only who gets that he's
in Star Wars.
But what about the special effects, you may ask. After all,
isn't that why we're here? Isn't that why it takes more security
clearance to access The Skywalker Ranch than it does an Al-Qaeda
training facility? Of course, Lucas has to be credited with
creating some breathtaking landscapes. To steal a line from
Frank DeCaro, though Episode 2 is ostensibly a love
story between Anakin and Padme, the real love story is between
George and his computers. He focuses on the landscapes first,
the actors second. He wants to show off his creations panoramically,
for us to see it all at once. But this strategy diminishes
the actors—reading their expressions sometimes require
binoculars. He's not skilled enough with the camera to give
us an idea of the landscape while staying with the actors,
and he seems to afraid to end a scene in any way but with
a quick cut right after the final line. Perhaps if he would
trust the audience and his actors, he could pull back from
a scene after the talking has stopped. We promise, George,
we won't be any more bored than when Anakin is struggling
through negotiations with that giant blue flying Jew.
Like Watto the Flying Blue Jew, Lucas' crew has created several
very interesting blue and purple creatures, but they don't
really come alive as they did in the first films. One of the
strengths of the first film is that Lucas persuades us that
the Star Wars universe, though in a galaxy far far
away, is undoubtedly real. There's a genuine sense that we're
being taken to another world when Luke and OB-Wan enter the
bar on Tatooine, in part because the creature seem so real.
And that's because they are. They are giant puppets and machines;
the spaceships are tiny models—they're really with the
rest of us in the third dimension, actually interacting with
the cast, rather than forcing the actors to conjure them from
a blue screen. Sure, they're more crude than the artistically
refined computer graphics of this film, but these creatures
are recessed onto a blue screen, and this second dimension
physical distance creates an emotional distance. CGI attempts
to fool the audience into thinking something is there that's
not, and sometimes a filmmaker gets away with it, but when
CGI is juxtaposed with real figures, it makes a difference.
One of the biggest complaints against Spider-Man is
the fact that you can really tell when the animated Spidey
takes over for Tobey Maguire, and this aesthetic difference
indeed undercuts the fantasy. Our belief has to suspended
at all times if the transport is to be complete, and though
the computer figures are impressive, the rudimentary brutes
of the first work better as fantasy. It's the same reason
E.T. would never have worked as an animated figure.
To give Lucas his proper credit, though, the the clones themselves
are most impressive. There's genuine horror in the incubating,
blank, lifeless masses of flesh hanging from racks, suspended
in placental sacs. When they take life, the clones are obviously
Storm Troopers Version 1.0. They march in equilateral formations,
executing orders like teenagers assembling quarter-pounders—essentially,
Count Dooku and Darth Sidious are Lenin and Stalin overlooking
their Marxist battalions. Of course we know that the most
"insidious" must be saved for the sequel, for the
same reason that the Galician routs of World War I occupy
much less airtime on The History Channel than the The Battle
of Stalingrad in World War II. It's an awe-inspiring creation,
showing us the menacing potential of the Dark Side, almost
justifying an endeavor clearly outside Lucas' storytelling
abilities: With his talk of politicians, separatists, and
the republic, Lucas tries to wrap the fall of Satan around
the battle for democracy.
Despite all this technical analysis, which is probably contrary
to the whole spirit of Star Wars anyway, the final
question is: Are the light saber fights cool enough to lay
down eight bucks for? Yes, they are. They're preceded by a
couple of cool sequences cribbed from other movies: a factory
scene that reminded me of the pot pie machine in Chicken
Run—seemingly an add choice as an action template,
but it worked well in stop-go claymation, so there's little
chance of Lucas screwing it up. The second is a mighty imbroglio
in a coliseum that might have been inspired by Gladiator.
The Jedi are certainly a multicultural bunch, and various
blue, green, and black and white human beings engage in a
mishmash of beheadings and deflected lasers, but the scene
does nothing if not reveal the fatal obstinance of The Dark
Side: If awkward, wobbly-legged lizards emerging from caves
were not victories in Episode II, then why do they
insist upon them in the sieges of Hoth and Endor?
Regardless, in the fight scenes, Lucas does a good job showing
how much mastery of The Force Jedi's possess. For instance,
OB-Wan has considerable trouble with Jango Fett, but Jedi
Master Mace Windu—well, just see what Mace comes up with.
But even beyond them, the final fight scene between the venerable,
eighty-year-old Corman veteran Christopher Lee and Yoda is
a sight to behold. The audience comes alive with the film—it's
no surprise, I think, that the most animated character in
the movie is an animated character. Yoda, well, we always
knew he had it in him. His Greeness puts on a show worthy
of the previous four hours of prequel, one that may inspire
a revival of The Force, or in the very least, sell a couple
more bags of Yoda-endorsed Sour Cream and Onion Ruffles.
|
