There’s been a lot of debate and controversy about human cloning, so George Lucas’s timing couldn’t have been better. With his second installment of the Star Wars series—or fifth, depending on how you look at it—Lucas has settled the issue once and for all. If Attack of the Clones is any indication, we can expect our clones to be incredibly beautiful but kind of dumb, energetic but ultimately empty.
All is not good in that famous galaxy far, far away. A separatist movement threatens the stability of the Galactic Republic, and political tensions are set to boil over into war. (Sounds like Canada in an election year.) When we last saw young Anakin Skywalker, he was a cute but annoying nine-year-old. Now, as played by Canadian actor Hayden Christensen, he’s an impetuous whiner of a 19-year-old, a volatile combination of pretty-boy poutiness, youthful cockiness and poor-me teenage angst. (If it weren’t for his destiny as future über-villain Darth Vader, he’d be perfect boy-band material.)
Apparently, however, these qualities are attractive to the otherwise sensible Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman), who has given up her title as Queen of Naboo to become a senator in the Republic. (Jar Jar Binks, the universally detested Gungan from The Phantom Menace, has also become a senator, thus proving that the Peter principle isn’t restricted to our galaxy.) When an assassination attempt on Padmé causes the Jedi Council to assign Anakin as her bodyguard, the stage is set for a romance that consists mainly of Padmé soothing Anakin with platitudes while he bitches about being held back by his Jedi mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). On several occasions, I found myself thinking that the whole Vader thing could have been avoided if Obi-Wan would have backhanded his insubordinate Padawan learner every now and then.
Speaking of McGregor, he remains the best thing about this prequel trilogy. Sporting a beard for older-and-wiser Jedi cred, he has gone beyond the uncanny Alec Guinness impression he demonstrated in The Phantom Menace, and is now apparently channelling the late actor directly. More than any of the other touchstones to the original Star Wars trilogy (including a Yoda who demonstrates an agility more hilarious than impressive), McGregor’s character provides what little emotional continuity there is as Lucas tries to foreground every character, relationship and passing reference in the first three films. We even get to see C-3PO and R2-D2 start to gel into the ambiguously gay duo they will become.
Like Episode I, the story is at least partly concerned with the political machinations and dark schemes that will turn the Republican democracy into the Imperial dictatorship. (The titular clones, it turns out, are being grown to form an army that looks suspiciously like the Stormtroopers from the first three films.) Unlike Episode I, it doesn’t bog down in the details; lightsaber duels and epic battles abound, and two sequences (one in the crowded skyways of the city-planet Coruscant, the other in a battle-droid factory) take the Star Wars series to a new level of implausible videogame action.
Visually, the film is as astonishing as any of its predecessors were when they were released. In fact, the CGI gearheads at Industrial Light and Magic have created a Star Wars universe that actually exceeds the viewer’s capability to fully appreciate it; one stunning alien landscape or shiny metallic space cruiser has barely registered before something even more stunning has taken its place. Unfortunately, all that imagery starts to feel like overkill after a while. Like the largely unnecessary digital “improvements” Lucas made with his special editions of the first trilogy, the excess of detail can be distracting—especially when you’re trying to figure out how brand-new bad guys Jango Fett (whose young son Boba makes an appearance) and Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) factor into a plot with holes so big you could pilot the Death Star through them.
Worse, the still-obvious limitations of computer imagery occasionally intrude on the proceedings. In one scene that’s like something out of a Sinbad movie, our heroes are chained to posts in an arena with three of the most absurd-looking computer monsters in recent memory. (One of them, a flattened-out, pastel-coloured Cheshire Cat with a grin full of needle-sharp teeth, looks like an escapee from Pixar’s Monsters Inc.) It’s enough to make you pine for the good old days of models and stop-motion animation—well, almost.
None of this is enough to make me call Attack of the Clones a bad film. It’s far from a great film, but if you want to see a truly wretched Star Wars film, you need only look at all but one or two of the fan films at www.theforce.net. Sure, it’s not the sort of awe-inspiring piece of cinematic wonder that The Empire Strikes Back was, and that Star Wars and Return of the Jedi were to a lesser extent. But this shouldn’t be surprising. Empire is often mentioned as one of the few exceptions to the law of diminishing sequel returns; consider that Episode II is actually the fourth sequel to Episode IV. If the formula doesn’t seem a little stale to you by now, you probably also think wrestling is real. Consider also that the film (like the much-criticized Episode I) does exactly what it’s supposed to do, what fans have been demanding from George Lucas ever since the words “Episode IV: A New Hope” appeared on the very first Star Wars “crawl” prologue; it explains how things got the way they were by the start of Star Wars. To criticize Lucas for failing to deliver that old Star Wars magic is, quite simply, to expect too much of him, and to deny that our tastes may have changed after 20-odd years. If you really want to remember what Star Wars made you feel like when you first saw it, take a kid to see this film and watch his face instead of the screen.
(3/4)