ATTACK OF THE CLONES

WATCH REPORT FOR: January 29, 2022

WATCHED: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

SUMMARY: Ten years after the events of The Phantom Menace, Padme Amidala has completed her term as Queen of Naboo and become a Senator, leading a coalition of pro-Republic delegations seeking to avoid a civil war led by Separatist systems. This brings Padme under threat of assassination, in response to which Supreme Chancellor Palpatine requests security assistance from the Jedi Council. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker are given the assignment together, but ultimately work separately as Obi-Wan tracks the assassination plot from Coruscant to the cloning facilities of Kamino to the droid foundries of Geonosis, while Anakin accompanies Padme to Naboo. Anakin's dreams of his mother send him to Tatooine, along with Padme, too late to save his mother from Tusken Raiders. Obi-Wan sends a distress call from Geonosis before being captured by Count Dooku and the Separatists, prompting Padme and Anakin to mount a rescue attempt, unsuccessfully. Obi-Wan, Padme and Anakin are sent to a gladiatorial arena to battle monsters to the death, but are themselves rescued by a force of Jedi masters and the clone army from Kamino. After dueling Anakin, Obi-Wan and Yoda, Dooku escapes and war begins, between the Separatists and their droid armies and the Army of the Republic, created under Palpatine's emergency powers granted by the Senate. After he recovers from losing an arm to Dooku, Anakin weds Padme in secret on Naboo.

OVERALL REVIEW: I've always said that AOTC is a better movie than TPM, and that I like it better, but watching the movie with a critical eye for this project I am forced to admit: it's not that much better! It's somehow simultaneously dull and confusingly overcomplicated.

Don't get me wrong, like TPM, there are a couple of things about the movie I really like. The whole sequence from the drone delivering the two poisonous centipedes to Padme's chamber, Anakin running in and lightsabering them, Obi-Wan jumping through the window to grab the drone and flying through the skies of Coruscant, through Anakin stealing a speeder and catching Obi-Wan and their pursuit of the assassin is genuinely great, probably the highlight of the movie. That extended chase scene is one positive bookend for the movie, the other being the arrival of the Jedi to save the day on Geonosis near the end. That part is less a triumph of filmmaking, the battle choreography and camerawork is just serviceable, but dozens of Jedi whirling lightsabers and fighting hundreds of droids is just inherently appealing to my inner twelve-year-old.

I also unironically love the lightsaber duel between Yoda and Count Dooku. I am aware that a lot of people scoff at it and find it silly, the weightless way CGI Yoda leaps and tumbles around the screen, but as the kids say, it really hits for me. To have grown up with Yoda as a cool mentor character who was nonetheless decrepit and literally dies of old age in Return of the Jedi, it was wildly entertaining and satisfying to see him in his prime, absolutely flipping out with Jedi excellence. Haters gonna hate, but I ate it up in the theater when I first saw it and still eat it up every time I revisit AOTC.

In any case, there are a litany of other complaints about the movie which are broadly accepted as valid, and which I will neither argue with nor rehash in too much detail. Lucas makes some odd choices, like once again allowing his Boomer nostalgia for the 1950's take the reins so that he can set one scene in a galactic malt shop run by a CGI alien whose dialogue sounds too specifically modern/human. Jar-Jar Binks has severly reduced screentime compared to TPM, and that's an objectively good thing, but his character is still just as grating for the few short intervals we do spend with him. And instad we get C-3PO as the comic relief fish-out-of-water taking part in a large-scale battle with a mixture of confusion and cowardice.

The biggest gripe people tend to have is that the story is supposed to show the beginning of Anakin's descent towards the Dark Side, which is not exactly caused by but somehow bound up in his love for Padme. And so the plot beats are also supposed to carry the audience through the story of Anakin and Padme falling in love, but it's utterly unconvincing. Natalie Portman and Hayden Christiansen don't have much chemistry, the dialogue for their scenes of emotional intimacy is stilted, and as I mentioned when reviewing TPM, Portman plays Padme as a stoic who buries all emotions deep beneath the exterior of political competence. This makes Christiansen's Anakin, who wears his heart on his sleeve, seem wildly over-emotional by comparison. None of it feels particularly compelling.

I don't disagree that the love story falls flat, but then again, I'm not sure how it could have been salvaged. Naboo culture is weird, and the Jedi religion is extremely weird, and Padme and Anakin are respective products of that which makes their POVs inherently alien, much moreso than, for example, Leia Organa and Han Solo, who had time to fall in love in a more naturalistic way over multiple movies and in a subplot woven through other things happening, not a rushed "let's put these two together in a pastoral paradise with literally nothing else to do and see what develops" way.

AOTC is truly two stories at once, a love story which doesn't really work and a mystery/detective story ... which also doesn't quite work. And that's my own personal far more relevant complaint. To this day I do not fully follow all the misdirects and double-crosses. Sifo-Dyas was a Jedi Master who really existed but died about ten years ago, which is right around the time of TPM but that's apparently a coincidence. Unless it's not? Presumably, Palpatine killed Sifo-Dyas (or had him killed) so that Sifo-Dyas could be impersonated (by Palpatine? or Dooku?) and place an order with the Kaminoans for a clone army. Which doesn't make sense, why would the Jedi order an army? The political plot of AOTC revolves outright around the fact that Palpatine can't simply create an army bcause he wants to, he has to get the Senate to vote to approve the emergency powers to do so. Mace Windu himself states (in an echo of something Qui-Gon Jinn said in TPM) that Jedi are peacekeepers, not warfighters. So rather than impersonate a Jedi, wouldn't it make more sense for Palpatine to falsify Senate approval? Heck, he could have avoided overplaying his hand in TPM with the invasion of Naboo and simply framed Chancellor Vellorum for illegally assembling an army and taken over the role that way. But the thing is, it doesn't matter whether Jedi have any military authority or the Senate votes or not because THE KAMINOANS DON'T CARE. Dex tells Obi-Wan that the Kaminoans only care about money, and once they get paid and start cloning, they never communicate wth anyone about anything. Nobody from Kamino reached out to the Jedi Council or the Galactic Senate to confirm the order was legit, or for any other reason, even to provide updates, which is why it's a mystery for Obi-Wan to solve. Seems to me like a terrible business model! Nevertheless, despite the Kaminoans' profit motive and discretion, Palpatine felt it necessary to delete Kamino's existence from the Jedi library to cover his tracks. Which is painfully, infuriatingly dumb on every level. A map with a hole in it will still lead to the spot where the hole is, so the deletion accomplishes nothing. Obi-Wan and the Jedi librarian are still befuddled by it, and a youngling has to spell it out for them, which just makes Obi-Wan seem dense and the librarian seem unforgivably bad at her job. (I know, I know, somewhere under the many layers of bad decisions in these movies is a hidden motif about the fall of the Jedi because they had become too calcified and stagnant in their thinking, blah blah blah, it's still a dumb example.)

And then, of course, there's Jango Fett. Selecting a bad-ass bounty hunter as the genetic template for the clone army does make a fair amount of sense: once again, there's just the profit motive to deal with, and he's a proven combatant (to whatever extent such things are genetic, but never mind that). But once the Kaminoans had his DNA, some stem cells, whatever kickstarts their process, why would they need Jango to hang around? If they didn't, but were indifferent, and he chose to use Kamino as a great secret hideout, why would he do things like use Kaminoan fletchdarts or whatever that would lead others straight to his secret hideout if they asked around?

Many months from now, we will get to Empire Strikes Back and the original introduction of Boba Fett, and some time after that we'll get to The Book of Boba Fett, so maybe now is not really the time to get into the particular niche the Fett legacy occupies in the Star Wars Saga overall. But file this away for future reference: young Boba is introduced in AOTC as Jango's clone/son. Boba's last appearance in the prequels is also in this movie, when he kneels and picks up his father/genetic template's helmet (possibly with the head still inside inside), newly separated from Jango's shoulders by Mace Windu's lightsaber. This in turn sets up Boba Fett's role in the central trilogy as someone who hates Jedi and will stop at nothing to avenge his father's death at their hands. Except not that. Boba Fett started out as a deadly rival of Han Solo who was happy to work for Vader and the Empire if the money was right and utterly indifferent to whatever was going on with Luke Skywalker. Retroactively assigning Boba Fett some backstory baggage about his father and the Battle of Geonosis is certainly a choice.

The easy explanation for all of this - Jangos' past motives or Boba's future ones, the exact timeline of "Sifo-Dyas"'s transactions with the Kaminoans, all the rest - is simply lazy, mediocre writing. Lucas is trying to cram in Anakin's gradual approach to the Dark Side, Padme and Anakin's love story, the weaknesses of the Jedi order, the introduction of a new apprentice to Darth Sidious, the origin of Boba Fett, and the necessary underlying conditions for the Clone Wars, all in one movie, and it simply can't be done without a lot of handwaving and assumptions that the goodwill of the audience will paper over the plot holes. However I do get the distinct impression that it's not all laziness and carelessness. I'm left with the impression that at least some of the headscratching moments in the movie are meant to be high-order Xanatos Gambits. If one purpose of the movies is to establish how unbeatable a foe Palpatine was and how fiendish (dare I say, insidious) his schemes and manipulations are, then everything he does is done on purpose. One could argue that Palpatine (or one of his pawns) had the clone army created in Sifo-Dyas's name so that if it were discovered too early, it would discredit the Jedi and leave the then-Senator of Naboo blameless. Or that the crudeness of deleting Kamino from the Jedi archives and leaving a hole in the map was deliberate, because Palpatine wanted the clone army to be found and claimed by Yoda. Or that Jango Fett's true assignment was to lure a Jedi to Geonosis to precipitate a battle between the Republic and the Separatists that would lead to all out war. The problem with any of the above thories is that they aren't really supported by the movie. They're pure conjecture, and whether or not they make sense, the movie doesn't earn them in any way.

So once again, we see why the prequels get such a bad rap. Even when they are not relying heavily on outdated stereotypes of 'exoticism' and/or comic relief pitched at kindergarteners, they somehow manage to do too much and not enough simultaneously in their storytelling. But we're going to take an extended break from the movie prequels proper for a while here and focus on other media in the canon ... begun, the Clone Wars have!

SOMETHING I NEVER NOTICED BEFORE: You may or may not remember that one member of the Jedi council looks kind of like a bipedal parasaurolophus. The character's name, never mentioned onscreen but present in official reference material, is Coleman Trebor. He dies in AOTC, and I don't know why, but I never noticed before that his death is fairly ignominious and kind of hilarious. Coleman jumps onto the balcony where Dooku is standing, threatens the Sith with his lightsaber, and then almost immediately gets shot a few times by Jango Fett emerging from the shadowy access tunnel. Coleman staggers and plummets to the arena floor below. It's pretty lame, especially considering that "dinosaur Jedi" should be the most crazy awesome thing to ever come out of Star Wars. Again, this is the problem with the sheer amount of boxes AOTC is trying to tick. On the one hand it needs to put over the Jedi as fearsome warriors who can ostensibly lead a clone army in a war against a thousand separatist worlds and do the job well. But it also needs to demonstrate how formidable a foe Jango Fett is. So while most of the Jedi effortlessly parry a near-infinite number of laser bolts fired by precision-engineered battle droids, poor Coleman can't even block three little pewpewpews from Jango Fett. Something in the math there doesn't quite add up. RIP Jedi Master Trebor, you probably should have stayed back on Coruscant.