May 17, 2002

 
I want to live in a world where people do not clap in movie theatres.

I just got back in from seeing Attack of the Clones - I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. In some ways, it was really fun, a good space adventure. I'm happy that things actually happened in this story, and that it was mostly true to all the things I really loved about the original trilogy as a little kid. Overall it's pretty good, and is about as good as Return of the Jedi, but lacking in the emotion of Luke's confrontation with his father, or any other emotion for that matter.


SPOILERS.


When I think of the flaws, my opinion of the film drops significantly.

The "romantic" scenes were poor, just absolutely horrid.


"I hate sand. It's irritating. NOT LIKE YOU."

(kissssssss)

What? I just feel bad for Natalie Portman, her character is so flat and dull, she has no choice but to act stiff and generally lack charisma entirely.

Was there any good reason for shoehorning Jar Jar Binks into the film, besides George Lucas' stubborn refusal to admit that the entire planet hates that character with a deep burning passion? Well, everybody except for the guy a few rows ahead of me who kept chuckling at his lines. Something is wrong with that man.

I was very offended by the return of the Watto character, this time making the anti-semitism behind that character more blatantly obvious than the last time by giving him a scraggly little beard and a small black hat, making him appear to be a Hasidic Jew. WHAT THE FUCK? When you consider this sort of anti-semitism, is the scene with the stormtroopers at the end merely a direct visual reference to Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, or is it a loving homage? This really troubles me, especially since the horrible Asian stereotypes from The Phantom Menace are in this film too. These characters are superfluous - Lucas clearly is adding them in because he thinks they are funny, revealing his bigotry without shame.

I think that overall the clone/droids/Dooku plot was too confusing, I know that my poor mother was confused as hell afterwards as my brother and I attempted to explain what was going on. Basically, Dooku was acting as a double-agent, tricking the Trade Federation/Separatist folks into creating a crisis that Palpatine's clone army could stop, after giving him dictatorship of the Republic. The scheme also seemed to deliberately force Anakin and Amidala together, and kill a whole bunch of Jedi. The story was clear moment to moment, I don't think there were parts where the audience was thinking "huh? what?"; but as a whole, it seems like a big mess of events that seem important but have little resonance. This film is incredibly insular, it certainly is only trying to appeal to its core fanbase at the expense of reaching out to a wider audience. It suffers from the same problems that most mainstream comics have for the past twenty years, and it's a shame.

I'm not sure what I think of Lucas deliberately recycling his own themes/motifs/iconology. There's so much of it throughout the film, sometimes it seemed like a hermetic vacuum of self-reference. Most of the time it felt like the goal was to make the audience feel safe in its familiarity, either that or Lucas was just throwing his hands up in the air and saying "well, I've run out of new ideas! I'd better go back to the greatest hits!". Being less cynical and giving Lucas the benefit of the doubt, I can imagine that it's his attempt at making the series something like a palindrome of motifs and events, that it all adds to the consistency of the series.

I did like a lot of it too, but my misgivings about the film are what linger in my mind after having seen it. I enjoyed the scenes in the beginning with Anakin and Obi-Wan in pursuit of the bounty hunters on Coruscant, the subsequent duel between Obi-Wan and Jango Fett was a lot of fun and visually exciting as well. There were a lot of good action adventure bits, little fan-pleasing tidbits scattered throughout. That's all cool with me. With the exception of some awkward looking alien characters, the film looked really beautiful. I know a lot of people really like the Yoda vs. Dooku duel, but I think it was very anticlimactic even if it was sorta neat to see the little guy jumping around Matrix-style. Whatever.

If I have to pick a side in the Attack Vs. Spidey debate, I'm definitely siding with Spider-Man. It's so much more fun, clear, inspiring, and audience-friendly. Still, I think that Attack of the Clones is a pretty satisfying Star Wars movie. Outside the context of Star Wars, it's not much at all.