And now I come to the final three posts of Star Wars: Deconstructed for Attack of the Clones. I am covering a lot of screen time because little of what happens for the rest of the movie is real, or realistic. Never before have so many pixels fought over so little since the days of Atari and Space Invaders.
Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones (01.35.29-02.03.00)
This part of the film begins with Padme and Anakin arriving on Geonosis, so while they make their approach, I want to talk about why starting the Clone War as it happens in the movie makes no sense.
First, this is a rescue operation, not an invasion. Second, there is no clear enemy. Third, this is not a just war.
1st) Anakin and Padme, who are homing in on some exhaust vents of some kind, are trying to rescue Obi-Wan Kenobi from an unknown threat, and they are rushing to do so because the Jedi Council (and therefore help) is much farther away and unprepared to mount a rescue on the spur of the moment. All that is known to all concerned is this: Obi-Wan is on Geonosis, having tracked Jango Fett there from Kamino. He told them that Count Dooku, so far the peaceful leader of a movement to secede from the Republic, has made some sort of alliance with some large businesses, and that the alliance is building an army of droids. After that he was cut off by a droid attack.
2nd) Who are the Separatists? In the opening crawl, the Separatists are “several thousand solar systems” which have only declared their intention to leave the Republic, and haven’t, apparently, made an actual attempt to do so. The audience never actually sees this body politic because the films portray the Separatist leadership as those seen here in Attack of the Clones: a bunch of businesses. So, as the Clone War begins, the “rescuers” are actually an army which invades a neutral system and proceeds to attack people they are not officially even at war with, and potentially people who they are supposed to protect, ie, their own citizens, and they destroy a bunch of property belonging to legitimate business owners. There are no real Separatists or enemies here.
3rd) This is not a just war. Unfortunately, I do not know enough about Just War Theory to expound upon it at this time, but I do have a few observations. Geonosis is neutral territory, not being part of the Republic. What happens on Geonosis is outside of the Republic’s jurisdiction, which is probably why Count Dooku is there, outside of the fact that the Geonosians are building battle droids, a commodity that he needs. Second, he can make any business arrangements he wishes to with any corporate entity he wishes to on two grounds: first, he is a Count, meaning that he has some royal standing on wherever he comes from, and second, he represents an ad-hoc government, or at least a committee of some sort, and this seems to be just a business arrangement whereby some droids are transferred in ownership. Sure, this seems like a bid to create an army to force the issue of secession, but right now it seems to be entirely legal, and without overt aggression towards the Republic. Even the “attack” on Kenobi is not clear provocation because Kenobi is most likely trespassing on foreign soil as a spy. If anything, what the Republic is doing is illegal.
Now, I am unsure what America would do if they caught, say, DHL stocking up on tanks and automatic weapons, but I would hope that the American army would not invade their headquarters in Bonn, Germany. (One could say that America did this in Iraq, and they would be right except that DHL is a company, not a country, and Poggle the Lesser doesn’t seem to be a dictator a la Hussein who is wiping out his own constituents and he hasn’t actually built the weapon of mass destruction yet [again, neither did the Iraqis, apparently]. But, say Geonosis is Iraq, and Palpatine is former President Bush, and maybe you understand another reason why Lucas is a bad writer/director: he copies stories from the news and he makes his films political.)
Basically the Republic is proving the Separatists’ main point for them. This is not an evil Empire stamping out freedom, this is senseless aggression and malcontent. Palpatine refuses to acknowledge corruption or deal with the problem directly (mostly because he is corruption) and therefore he chooses to simply kill those who disagree with them. Lucas tries hard to make the Separatists the villains, but in fact, they are the heroes. (An odd choice if you interpret Episodes II and III according to the American politics of the time, because then Lucas would be saying that Bush was the hero when he obviously thinks otherwise. Or does he? There don’t seem to be any heroes here because Palpatine is evil, the Senate is weak, Anakin is a child murdering child, the Jedi are dumb dupes, Kenobi is narrow minded, Padme is a self-righteous enabler of evil, and Dooku is one dimensional – in fact the only hero seems to be Artoo Detoo.)
Beyond that, I only have a few loosely connected thoughts about what happens before and during the battle:
Anakin and Padme land in some exhaust vents, which they inexplicably think is a good place to be. This is just stupid. How do I know that? because months after principle photography was finished, Lucas added this entire sequence because he felt the film needed more senseless action. There is absolutely no story reason for this droid factory debacle, which makes it even more amusing when Padme tells Anakin to “follow my lead: I’m not interested in getting into a war here; as a member of the Senate, maybe I can find a diplomatic solution to this mess” because just who she thinks she is going to have a diplomatic conversation with in a droid factory is beyond me (01.36.07). Also, her naiveté is overwhelming if she thinks she can avoid a war which Palpatine is so clearly itching to start.
The dialogue between Anakin and Padme before entering the arena is just execrable, so I am going to ignore it, and anyway, it is a rehashing of stuff they have said before. No new material there, same old…
I do like some of the interplay between C-3P0 and R2-D2, which for me was always a delight to watch in the Original Trilogy. And, I always smile when Anakin and Padme are led into the execution arena to a sarcastic Obi-Wan, “I was beginning to wonder if you got my message” and “good job!” with a pointed look at his shackles (01.45.08). Clearly he expected Anakin to rush to his rescue, despite all orders to the contrary. Finally, I like that throughout the entire battle in the arena, the acklay (the beast that looks like a praying mantis) has it out for Kenobi. The creature goes after Obi-Wan with a singular passion until the Jedi handily dispatches him with a borrowed lightsaber.
I wish there would have been a scene that explained how we get to a gladiatorial execution. Somehow it is assumed that our heroes were going to be killed, but I don’t get there, logically. It seems to be: these are our film’s villains, so they kill people, but in the Original Trilogy, there was very little summary execution of anyone who wasn’t an Imperial star destroyer officer. Also, it is very convenient that Padme has a lock pick in her utility belt.
If Mace Windu is able to sneak up behind Count Dooku, why not just kill Dooku? He just lets Dooku and Co. walk away after some inconsequential posturing, while waiting for Dooku’s droids to arrive. He just waits. And Fett waits to douse him with fire. If anyone was seeking an immediate end to this “war” Windu would have taken Dooku hostage and used him as a shield between himself and the droids/Fett and forced a surrender, or cease fire, or negotiations or something.
Tthe Kaminoans must be into manufacturing weapons and materiel, not just clones, because the clones that Kenobi saw have armor and weapons, and somehow they have an entire army’s worth of transportation, munitions, and sundry vehicles of war by the time they arrive on Geonosis. If the Kaminoans did not manufacture all of these, which seems rather unlikely to me (because companies tend to specialize what they make, and manufacturing on that scale seems to be beyond the scope of a single planet in the Star Wars galaxy), then where all that war stuff came from is left unexplained.
Yoda shows up with the clone army, and everyone forgets about trying to get Dooku and the other Separatists who are still in the arena somewhere. Yoda even says, “If Dooku escapes, rally more systems to his cause, he will.” (01.57.58). I totally agree, because the Republic’s invasion was unjust and illegal, and that makes for good “Republic is Corrupt” propaganda. But, if this is true, why did everyone just vacate the immediate vicinity of Dooku’s last known position? He doesn’t turn around and walk off his balcony until after the last Republic gunship flies off. This is just stupid. Everyone just rushes out to fight a war already in progress (when did this battle start? how? why? why didn’t the Republic fleet just fire from space and wipe out the droids, Separatist ships, and everything else on the ground?). Furthermore, I don’t understand why the Jedi lead the clones into battle? Windu made a point at the beginning of the film of saying that the Jedi are not soldiers. The clones seem perfectly capable of fighting a war. I know that Clone Wars are Palpatine’s way of killing all the Jedi, but as I’ve said before, this is clumsy, and it doesn’t make sense that the Jedi would assume command, especially since the entire order has made a point of renouncing aggression as the path to the Dark Side.
The Death Star’s cameo in this film is confusing because it somehow takes the Empire 23ish years to build the first Death Star and only 3 years to build the second Death Star. Does that seem off to anyone else?
The only win here: the image of Boba Fett finding his father’s helmet amid the carnage. That was a moment of quiet poetry amid a cacophony of hack writing.
Finally, this battle is overkill. Way too many droids to believe anyone could survive, even Jedi. Or, way too many Jedi to appreciate their singular talents or believe that any useless little droid could survive. Way too many computer generated images and nowhere near enough reality. After a certain point the viewer is just overwhelmed with the digital unreality.
There is just too much going on to really focus on any of it, which is sad because Lucas and the people at Lucasfilm somehow thought that a single shot packed with so much action was a good thing. In the words of the immortal Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park:
“You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox…your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
At any rate, the battle between expendable digital armies is about to become secondary to two really lame lightsaber fights.
(02.03.00).
a simple man 