Star Wars: Attack of the Clones Movie Review/Analysis/Rant

Dawn of the Clone Bores

Princess Amidala is no longer a princess and is now serving as a Senator for the Naboo. She opposes the military creation act to create a clone army, and in doing so she has now become a target for the separatists. I presume the separatists are in favour of a clone army. So why do the separatists want the clone army, ultimately the clone army will be used against them? As a result Amidala’s ship gets blown up and her decoy is killed in the explosion. Considering the decoy has just been blown up she doesn’t look too bad. Before she punches out her last ticket she apologises to Amidala for failing her. How exactly did she fail her? As a decoy didn’t she do exactly what she was meant to do. 

It’s obvious that there has been sometime between the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones as Anakin is no longer a whiney little kid but is now a whiney young man, and he and Obi Wan haven’t seen Padme for ten years. This begs the question why didn’t they just start the prequels here? Anakin is very different as he is now grown up, as is Padme, and we didn’t get to know much about Obi Wan, as he just sat about complaining in the last movie. It feels as though the events of the first move were pretty pointless and somewhat not considered anymore. Much of the problem with the Phantom Menace is that we didn’t have a protagonist, someone relatable, to guide us through the story, to embark on a journey with, and Attack of the Clones is no different as it also suffers from no recognised protagonist. The friendship between Obi Wan and Anakin is forced (pun intended) on the audience, they have to be told, through the recounting of previous experiences together. In contrast to the original trilogy we watched as Luke and Han’s friendship developed, they saved each other’s skin a few times, and you could really feel that they cared for each other, they had a bond. The Obi Wan and Anakin friendship seems strained, and they barely like each other or get on for that matter. Anakin thinks Obi Wan is overly critical and jealous, and Obi Wan thinks that Anakin is arrogant and reckless. Doesn’t sound like a good friendship to me, unlike the claim that Obi Wan made in A New Hope, “Anakin was a good friend”.

Attack of the Boredom

Concerned that there may be further attempts on Amidala’s life, Obi Wan and Anakin are assigned to protect her. So an assassin hires an assassin to assassinate Padme, for no reason other than to introduce a new character to make and sell merchandise. The attempt on Padme’s life happens when she has retired for the night and is asleep. It’s okay though, R2-D2 is scanning the room for threats, but not the windows, the most logical place of where an assassination attempt will come from.  A droid drills a hole through the window and poops out two centipede looking things. This is the most convoluted and stupid means to assassinate someone. Why not just strap a bomb on the droid and blow it up next to the window, or pump a lethal gas into the room. Obviously the assassination attempt fails, and a chase ensues. Obi Wan without any hesitation leaps through the window and dangles from the droid. This is out of character for Obi Wan. Obi Wan is the more cautious out of the two and you would expect it to be the more reckless Anakin to leap out of the window. Obi Wan seems to have a brain fart as he doesn’t consider the risks involved, and it is stupid for some many reasons. I’m going to list three.

• Can the droid support the weight of a person and stop them falling to a horrible death
• What if the droid was designed to explode, resulting in a horrible death
• Will the droid lead directly back to the assassin

Coruscant has an identity crisis and now looks like the far flung future of 2019, Los Angeles in Blade Runner. The car chase suddenly becomes like something out of a cartoon and all suspense is dispelled when Anakin jumps from the vehicle and safely lands on the assassins vehicle. With hundreds of vehicles passing below Anakin as he falls he manages to land on the right one. I was really on the edge of my seat there. What if he landed on the wrong one? He just starts to hack at the cockpit with his lightsaber with no consideration that he could have landed on wrong vehicle and is horrifically murdering someone inside.

The assassin takes shelter in a club, but Obi Wan claims to Anakin that he went in there to hide How does he know that? What if this was the assassins hide out and they are being lured into a trap? Anakin believes the assassin to be a shapeshifter, so Obi Wan warns Anakin that they need to be extra careful, as they were only being a little careful before. Why did an assassin that can shapeshift wear a mask to hide their identity? They enter the club and inexplicably the assassin tries to take out Obi Wan rather than formulating an escape plan. The assassins target was never the Jedi, and there escape should take precedence over slaughtering the Jedi in pursuit. In a scene reminiscent to A New Hope, Obi Wan lobs of the assassins arm. The Jedi attempt to interrogate the assassin, about the attempted assassination only to be assassinated by the assassin that hired the assassin to assassinate Padme.

Sand by Me

So the Jedi Council decide that for Padme’s safety that she should be placed under Jedi protection and is to be sent to a secure location. In their wisdom they assign Anakin as her bodyguard, this is a guy that in the Jedi’s own words describe as, “Danger surrounds him”. Why not send the more level headed and cautious Kenobi with her? That would have made more sense, however  Lucas needs an opportunity to get Anakin and Padme together, alone, so he can craft the most awkward love story ever told. George Lucas does not seem to have a clue of how create a believable love story between Anakin and Padme. Lucas thought that all he had to do was to put them in a romantic setting and the romance would flow.

The setting is similar to that of Italy, the romance capital of the world, it’s so clichéd that I was expecting to see a shot with the Eifel Tower appearing in the background. For some reason the Jedi are forbidden to love, and even more confusingly senators are also prohibited to love for some unspecified reason. After numerous awkward creepy looks and even creepier dialogue from Anakin, a romantic relationship is established between Anakin and Padme, perhaps Lucas thought forbidden love would be more believable and would have a certain level of gravitas to it. The relationship feels forced and unbelievable. We then get the worse line in movie history “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere” and then Padme kisses him? What the heck, this was the line that sealed the deal.

Count Dookula

Meanwhile Obi Wan has been investigating the origin of the whereabouts of the elusive assassin, and is at a loss when he can’t find a planet. He consults Yoda, when training younglings, a collection of kids that are devoid of any acting ability and are blatantly the spawn of Lucas, the producers or whoever else worked on the movie. We see them training with a similar apparatus that we see Luke training with on the Millennium Falcon. At the time in A New Hope it was just assumed that Obi Wan had come up with the exercise then and there. He stumbled across a helmet with a blast visor, that could well have been used for a practical application whilst doing maintenance work on the Falcon. Kenobi could have improvised this with what could have been part of a game, after all they were playing that chess game so there could be more games to pass the time zipping from star system to star system. Has this now been retconned, so that Han Solo had Jedi training equipment on board the Falcon?

Count Dooku is revealed to be the main villain of the movie and is also an ex-Jedi. I hate the lame name that Lucas give Dooku as he thought it was a clever play on words with Count Dracula, a character that Christopher Lee is famous for playing. To Mace Windu’s utter disbelief he cannot reconcile that Dooku can now be acting against the Senate and the Jedi, and is not capable of the attempted assassination plot on Amidala, due to him being an ex-Jedi. Doesn’t it mean that by the very nature that Dooku having left the Jedi order, that he may not embrace there values anymore and could actually do things that the Jedi would take a dim view on, so he could essentially be capable of anything. A bit like Anakin Skywalker when he decided to slaughter younglings. In the original Star Wars movie we are introduced to Darth Vader early on, he’s wearing black, has a foreboding voice and he interrogates a rebel soldier by choking him to death. From the first few minutes of his introduction early on we are able to determine that Vader is the villain, and we understand what his objectives are. We don’t see Dooku until half way through the movie and what is his objective? Why has Dooku become disillusioned with the republic? Again, why does the separatists want the creation of a clone army, when it will inevitably be used against them? Doesn’t make a whole lot sense.

Obi Gone Kenobi

Lucas has a tendency to highlight when someone loses there lightsaber. This happens in all of the prequels. The camera will cut away showing the lightsaber tossed up into the air or land on ground. The confrontation with Jango Fett is no different and butter fingers Kenobi loses his lightsaber. Jango Fett feels awkwardly shoehorned into the movie and is only there to serve as connective tissue with the original trilogy, as he is the father of Boba Fett, the most bad ass bounty hunter in the galaxy. I really didn’t care about Boba’s origins, and I don’t know how they managed to do it, but they managed to cast a worse actor than the annoying kid that played Anakin in the Phantom Menace. During this green screen soaked encounter Kenobi takes explosions to the face to no effect, this makes the scene more comical than serious as it leaves the audience scratching there head as to why Obi Wans head hasn’t been blown off.

The showdown continues in space, and to be more precise an asteroid field. In the Empire Strikes Back there is a big deal when our heroes encounter an asteroid field, something like a 3,720 to 1 chance of successfully navigating. They create tension that they are in a very threatening and dangerous environment. Obi Wan and Jango fly around as though it’s not even an issue, this goes someway in devaluing the peril faced in The Empire Strikes Back, the only thing I like about this scene is the sound of seismic charges, kaboooom.

Battle of Boring

Anakin and Padme's rescue mission ends in failure and they are captured, they are to be executed along with Obi Wan in an arena by some alien monster things. Obviously Lucas must have been watching Gladiator at the time of writing this scene and drawn inspiration from it. It was actually refreshing to see the hero's try and get out of situation without having to rely on their lightsabers for a change. It seems as though the prequels can’t go two minutes without someone whipping out a lightsaber. Jedi re-enforcements arrive and the first thing they do is give Anakin and Obi Wan a lightsaber each. Do they carry spare lightsabers around with them?

What happens next is a mess. During the battle of Geonsis there was not one human actor playing clone trooper, they were all CGI, and it's not as though you can't tell. The visuals look like something from a modern day video game. Why didn't Lucas use practical effects, or even just real guys in clone trooper suits, that are at the foreground of a shot? You lose all interest in the battle, when it looks like a cut scene from a video game. The dispensable generic bad guy gets his head cut off by Mace Windu, but we really don't care at this point as we are bored to tears. Why didn't Jango Fetts head not fall out of the helmet when Boba picked it up?

A Disturbance with the Force

When the force was explored in the Empire Strikes Back we learnt through Yoda that physicality has very little to do with being a Jedi. I would presume that this would also be apply to the Sith, as the Emperor and Vader were themselves not exactly in peak physical condition. This is really highlighted when Luke attempts to use the force to recover the X-Wing from the swamp. Luke fails, he believes that it is too big. Yoda succeeds and quips "size matters now, judge me by my size". I really like that notion, if you have a strong understanding of the force then that will compensate for any physical failings. The prequels do a pretty good job of going back on that lore altogether. When Yoda and Dooku are evenly matched in the force they resort to using their lighsabers. I have a problem with this as I always thought that Yoda would not rely on the use of a  lightsaber. The Emperor in Return of the Jedi refers to the lighsaber as a Jedi weapon, so something that the Sith wouldn't normally use. I always assumed that Vader had a lighsaber as he was once a Jedi, and it would have been useful for when he was hunting down the remaining Jedi. I always thought that the Emperor and Yoda would be exempt from using lighsabers as a lighsaber would not be a match for their ability in using the force. Seeing the old and frail Yoda flip about with ease so that he can just participate in a duel feels cheap. Lucas thought this is what the fans wanted to see. It had a comical effect and felt totally out of place with the character, devaluing the power of the force on the way. What we should have seen from Yoda is him utilising the force to fend of Dooku, overpowering him, rather than resorting to pull out his little laser sword.

The End

For me Attack of the Clones is the worst movie out of the Star Wars prequels. I really didn’t think it could get any worse than The Phantom Menace, but Lucas managed to reach new depths with Attack of the Clones. With all things considered there were a couple of things that were okay in this movie. John Williams soundtrack was amazing as usual, but that guy is incapable of producing poor soundtracks. The sound effects were also excellent, I liked the sound of the blaster on Slave 1, and the sound of the seismic charges detonating. Christopher Lee is a class act, and to get him in a Star Wars movie should have been a masterstroke, however he was criminally underused, and now that we are on the subject of underused actors, Samuel Jackson again sits on his arse and occasionally whips out his lightsaber. Samuel Jackson is at his best when he is flying into a rage, being angry is sort of his thing. As Mace Windu he is devoid of any emotion, but because he is played by Samuel Jackson, we should assume that  he is just bad ass, but he is just boring. At least after The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, expectations for Episode III where rock bottom, as it couldn’t get any worse.