Film Review #80: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

To quote the great Harry S. Plinkett:

"Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones is the worst thing ever made by a human, except for the bagpipes"

I couldn't have said it better myself, Mr. Plinkett.  While The Phantom Menace  may have more things wrong with it, the things wrong with Attack of the Clones are so awful and disgusting that people lose brain cells the minute the DVD is put into the player.

PLOT: Ten years after the events of The Phantom Menace, the Republic has split in two with a faction of systems leaving and forming the Confederacy of Independent Systems, led by the mysterious fallen Jedi, Count Dooku.  Fearing a full scale war, the Senate calls for a vote as to whether or not create an army to combat the Separatists.

Padme Amidala, the senator most vocally against the army, has several assassination attempts on her life when she returns to Coruscant, forcing Chancellor Palpatine to have the Jedi send two bodyguards, Obi-Wan and Anakin, to protect her.  After another failed attempt against her life, the Jedi have Anakin escort Padme back to Naboo, while Obi-Wan investigates into the assassination attempts.  His search takes him to the planet Kamino, where he learns that a Jedi had ordered the creation of an army of Clone Troopers to fight for the Republic.

While on Naboo, Anakin and Padme begin to give into their feelings for each other, while Anakin also has troubling premonitions about his mother in pain on Tatooine.  Failing to reach his mother in time, Anakin and Padme receive a message from Obi-Wan, that reports that Dooku is behind the assassination attempts, before he is captured by droids.  Padme and Anakin set off to rescue Obi-Wan, while the Jedi and Senators ponder the prospects of war.

What's Bad?: The first two prequels could not have been more different in terms of the awfulness that they both have.  The Phantom Menace is a mosaic of awful, with little specific tidbits of awful sprinkled all over the film's 2 hour run time.  You have a Jar Jar here, and some midichlorians there, and a shitty acting kid in the corner.  But in Attack of the Clones, the awfulness reaches new levels of crap, because unlike the film that preceded it, the things that are awful about this movie are what George Lucas planned to be the best and most important part of the movie: the struggles of Anakin's inner psyche, and the romance between him and Padme.

Let's tackle that Anakin part first.  Anakin, according to the Original Trilogy, was a great man and a good friend of Obi-Wan's, who was tragically seduced to the Dark Side of the Force and ultimately became Darth Vader.  There was nothing said by anyone in the Original Trilogy that he was "Space Jesus".    But to make matters even worse, is that Anakin Skywalker is an unlikable asshole in the entirety of this film.  There are some things you can do to make a film better in terms of a director's cuts or fan edits, but when one of the main problems of the movie is Hayden Christiansen's terrible acting and atrocious delivery of Lucas's shitty dialogue, you can't just edit an entire main character out (Superman 2 is a big example of this).  He is a selfish, obstinate, whiny little shit who has no respect for anyone, including Obi-Wan and Padme, and expects the world to welcome him with open arms and love him and be just the way he wants it.  Normally, I would have no problem with that, but when he is a whiny little shit who doesn't even give Padme the time of day when their talking about their feelings, it's kind of hard to feel sympathy for someone who murders an entire village of Sand People.  "And not just the men, but the women and the children too."

Lucas's strong points as a writer are not romantic scenes, hence why some of the scenes involving his characters and their romantic actions are a bit of a drag to sit through.  But when he establishes on screen chemistry, such as with Han Solo and Princess Leia, we actually want to see the two of them together and are saddened when the two are torn apart by Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back.  Anakin and Padme's exposure to each other in The Phantom Menace was so clunky and disjointed that it seems highly unlikely that these two would be together.  Then, with a time gap of ten years between Menace and Clones, and with Anakin telling Obi-Wan that he hasn't seen Padme since the Battle of Naboo, it is even more unlikely that Anakin and Padme would love each other.  And the only amount of connection either character has to each other in these movies is their physical attraction to the other, and Lucas could not have a Star Wars movie be about them F***ing like wild rabbits in the woods.  Therefore, Lucas puts Anakin and Padme in these horribly cliched scenes with heavily implied romantic backdrops including waterfalls, romantic picnics, eating dinner, sitting by the fire with Padme wearing sexy clothes.  And with no connection between either Padme or Anakin, we cannot understand or care about their problems and love for each other.

Then we come to quite possibly the worst element of all three Star Wars Prequels: the overuse of CGI.  Hayden Christian said in an interview around the making of this pig slop:

"It's [the green screen backgrounds] everywhere.  I think I've only ever been on one set without any green screen."

George Lucas, who was also responsible for trying desperately to ruin the Original Trilogy with his "Special Editions" that add more crap on the screen that only serves as a distraction to the audience, also manages to make these films almost impossible to sit through with all of his unnecessary digital effects.  Since the Original Trilogy was so rich in story and normal non-CGI visuals, it is only a minor inconvenience.  But when you have a Prequel Trilogy devoid of human presence in the story, acting, and visuals, it only makes the illusion of filmmaking more of an illusion.  This is why The Two Towers is one of my all time favorite movies.  It blends the CGI of nearly 10,000 orcs and the realism of actual sets and actual actors.  Also, Peter Jackson hired people who can actually relate with actors instead of bitching and moaning about not getting his way.

The rest of the crap in this movie is basically on the same level as The Phantom Menace.  The basic fact that the most basic amount of common sense would have foiled all of Palpatine's plans at galactic conquest, makes every single Jedi in this movie and Revenge of the Sith completely null and void, even Yoda.  Anyone with an ounce of brain matter would know that Palpatine has been behind everything since the Invasion of Naboo, yet the Jedi let easy facts like this go right by them.  Even when Dooku elaborates practically the entire plan of the Sith to Obi-Wan on Geonosis, the Jedi just shrug it off.  Good luck getting me to care when you all get wiped out next movie.

And while Jar Jar is more limited in this movie, we get to see his replacement in this film: Yoda with a lightsaber, which makes a schizophrenic moron drinking 10 gallons of Red Bull look sane.  Not only is it far too funny to be taken seriously, it also completely circumvents what Yoda represented in The Empire Strikes Back.  Yoda was this wise and all knowing being who surprised us and made us really try to learn what the Force was, when we see that a three foot tall alien was the greatest Jedi Master of all time.  But when we have Yoda spinning around like Taz from Looney Toons, we have a serious problem.

What's Good?: Unlike The Phantom Menace, which had Liam Neeson throughout the whole movie to try and keep our attention, the only actor worth sitting around for doesn't show up until the second act of the movie.  Christopher Lee, who was beginning to revive his career in acting as Saruman the White in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, lent his awesome evil to Count Dooku in this film.  Dooku seemed to be the only person in this film who cared about what he was doing.

Overall: This is a perfect sign of one of those films that was awful that still made a ton of money at the box office.  There is no depth, no human emotion, or anything resembling anything natural about anything in this film, making it, as far as I'm concerned, one of the worst motion pictures in cinematic history.

Final Grade:   F-