Anakin and Obi-Wan confront Count Dooku and fail. Yoda confronts Count Dooku and fails. George Lucas fails.
Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones (02.03.01-02.11.23)
The lightsaber battle between Count Dooku and Yoda was the reason why Yoda needed to be done digitally for Attack of the Clones, though, to be fair, the animators also created digital Yoda to advance their craft, and for that, I salute them.
The action picks up exactly where it left off, in the middle of a chaotic, pointless battle. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala, and a few clone grunts are flying high above the battle in a Republic gunship. Out of nowhere, Kenobi spots Dooku fleeing from the arena on a speeder flanked by two fighter jets. This is miraculous because Dooku is flying through a canyon and Kenobi is flying over a massively flat desert, but anyhow…he and his gunship give chase. Anakin, clear on his objective, shouts “Shoot him down!” to which the clone pilot replies, “We’re out of rockets, sir.” Then Anakin shouts the next obvious thing, “Use your laser cannons!” and Dooku is shortly shot out of the…oh, wait, this is a prequel, and nothing makes sense (02.03.10). The only reason the gunship doesn’t shoot Dooku down with rockets is because then there could be no (anti)climatic lightsaber fight(s). Just another reason in which things happen or don’t happen so that other things can happen. Sigh. Also, the gunners in Dooku’s cover fighters have the aim of stormtroopers: conveniently bad, because they can’t hit the gunship until it offloads its Jedi. Sigh.
So, what happens instead is that a near miss and a collision with a sand dune knocks Padme out of the gunship. Again, to set up a lightsaber duel, because the obvious thing would be to have Padme shoot Dooku in the head while he is distracted by two Jedi assailants. Also, Padme is dumped so that there can be some sort of weird argument between Kenobi and Anakin to foreshadow Anakin’s utter dependence on having Padme as a trophy (as if no one got that before now). Anakin is crazy with Padme, so crazy that he is screaming incoherently about needing to pick her up out of the sand. Kenobi is making the tactical, and the Jedi, decision: sacrifice the one for the many. And, Kenobi probably figures that Padme will be just fine, after all, she can handle herself in a fight and she does have clone trooper backup. Amongst the inane babble and shouting, I discern Kenobi saying something about Anakin being “expelled from the Jedi Order” if he disobeys Kenobi, or goes back for Padme, or something (02.04.05). I am not really sure what Anakin is doing that warrants expulsion that he hasn’t done before. Perhaps Kenobi means that if Anakin marries Padme he will be expelled from the Jedi Order, but that doesn’t really fit the context. Also confusing is the little hint of the Imperial March heard during this argument. What? Is Lucas trying to imply that Anakin being (overly) concerned for Padme is indicative of his status as Darth Vader? It is through insane attachment that he is said to fall to the Dark Side, but still, such a foreshadowing makes little to no sense.
Yoda seems to be inordinately attuned to Anakin, and he calls for a ship so that he can arrive to distract Dooku from killing Anakin and Obi-Wan. I wonder why this is the case.
I’ve said this before, but in the original trilogy, every single lightsaber battle happened for a reason. Each of the battles was an extension of the dialogue, of the confrontation between characters: Obi-Wan confronting Vader again, Luke confronting his father, Vader trying to entice Luke to evil. The battles in the prequels happen arbitrarily. Maybe something could be said for Darth Maul just trying to wipe out Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, but actually engaging Count Dooku here seems premature. The Jedi would not want Dooku dead, they would want him to stand trial for his crimes and to have his Sith-ness revealed. An entire clone army is just beyond reach, so all they need to do is stall him until troops arrive (because it is unthinkable that the clone pilot would not have called in a report about Dooku during the pursuit). Actually, they are closer to the ship than Dooku is when they show up, so why not just throw a lightwrench into the engine and end the conflict right there? They still might fight, but then it could be a Sith outpouring of rage from Dooku, and could be at least analogous to Darth Maul on Naboo in Phantom Menace.
At any rate, Anakin stupidly rushes in and gets zapped by Force lighting, all because Dooku is not Maul, and Anakin and Obi-Wan would have easily defeated Dooku. Dooku then plays with Obi-Wan before slashing his leg and arm. Sigh. Look, I know Dooku is supposed to be uber powerful in the Force, but Obi-Wan is easily 60 years younger and pretty Force strong himself. I simply don’t buy Dooku’s easy victory, especially in light of how ferocious Kenobi was against Maul. In every lightsaber battle in the prequels, except for the Anakin vs Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith (because then they are as they should have been: roughly equal), each combatant is only as skilled, or strong, as the script requires them to be, which means, logically, there is no reality to these fights at all. The audience is frustrated by inaccurate portrayal of strength, speed, or skill, which, in turn, makes the fights completely meaningless and yanks the audience out of the experience of the film. Quod erat demonstrandum: these lightsaber battles are the epitome of bad writing. As Lucas himself reiterates time and time again, this is more because “everyone has been waiting to see Yoda fight with a lightsaber” and not because these fights make any kind of contextual sense.
Which brings me, in a round about way, to my biggest gripe here: the endless, meaningless, pointless dialogue between Jedi/Sith in the prequels about their “powers”. Forgive my crassness, but this is like the Jedi version of “bigger is better”. Dooku: “As you can see, my Jedi powers are far beyond yours.” (02.05.17). “I’ve grown more powerful than any Jedi, even you” (02.08.45) Yoda: “Powerful you have become, Dooku.” (02.08.34) . Seriously, this is like a fanboy discussion. What is it doing in the movie?? Besides which, Dooku’s claims (especially) are ludicrous because Kenobi absorbs the force lightning with his lightsaber, and Yoda deftly catches it and sends it back. He just sounds like an idiot. And then he goes and says “It is obvious that this contest cannot be decided by our knowledge of the Force, but by our skills with a lightsaber” (02.09.12). Yeah, because, if it comes to throwing rocks around, Yoda totally can kick your butt.
What I hate most about this: it trivializes the Force. Telekinesis is not the point. Mastering one’s self is the point. Moving rocks is simply the outer demonstration of the inner calm and focus. That is why Vader threw stuff at Luke during the duel on Bespin: to prove that Luke was too unmastered to be either Sith or Jedi, and to prove that Sith can be more focused than Jedi. Vader threw stuff to distract Luke, to make him angry, frustrated, and to goad him towards giving in to hate and falling to the Dark Side. Not to win a “contest” or prove his skill was at a higher level than Luke’s. All the posturing and throwing lighting around is elementary school yard strutting and not something a venerable Jedi Master or a venerable former Jedi Master would do. Lucas’ inner fanboy wrote this scene, and he made Yoda sound and look completely ridiculous.
To say nothing of the fact that a 2.5 ft hobbling old alien fighting a 6.5 foot old man is the stupidest idea ever.
There is no way that this fight could actually be realistic at all. And Lucas knew it. In the “making of” material on the Attack of the Clones disc, Lucas says over and over that to do this wrong would make it look ridiculous. I would amend his theory to say that to do it at all makes it ridiculous. This is why, during the whole of the Lord of the Rings, there were no actual serious sword fights between the hobbits and anyone else: because little people fighting big people just looks silly.
The age thing also makes this fight preposterous. Christopher Lee, the actor who portrayed Count Dooku, was so infirm that he only performed the scenes in which he was standing still. He was unable to actually fight, and Lucas even considered replacing him with a digital Dooku. Yoda’s age also is a negative factor, which is why in every screening of Attack of the Clones I went to, people laughed when, after the fight, he uses the Force to pick up his cane and proceeds to hobble over to Anakin and Obi-Wan. If seconds ago he was leaping and spinning about, why does he hobble with a cane? It is so ludicrous it is laughable. Every single time.
Last quibble: as soon as Dooku turns his attention from Yoda to toppling the big column thing, Yoda could have totally leaped up and cut his head off. End of Story.
Well, almost. I know that Padme shooting at Dooku’s fleeing ship with a look of desperation on her face is supposed to mirror Leia shooting at Boba Fett’s ship with a look of desperation on her face, but here is the difference: Leia had an intensely personal reason to fire. Han was on that ship and she was too late to save him. Padme doesn’t even know, for sure, that Dooku is on that ship. This is just Lucas copying from himself shot for shot without once thinking about why things happen the way they happen.
Dooku flies off to his master, and Anakin and Obi-Wan hobble away from a pointless lightsaber battle.
(02.11.23).
a simple man 