Author: Phil RedBeard

Shroud. Marriage. And End Credits. A few final thoughts on Attack of the Clones.

Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones (02.11.24-02.22.21)

Lord Tyranus, aka Count Dooku, arrives on Coruscant after fleeing Geonosis to tell Darth Sidious, aka Chancellor Palpatine, what is happening on Geonosis even though they both know that Palpatine already knows this.

In the Jedi Temple, Kenobi Windu and Yoda are discussing Count Dooku’s revelation. Kenobi asks, “Do you believe what Dooku said about Sidious controlling the Senate? It doesn’t feel right?” (02.13.09). Oh really? What part of an illegal war, an immediate vote of emergency powers, or a convenient clone army does feel right, Obi-Wan? Nothing about this is right on any level, and yet, the Jedi Council does nothing about it, not even question the very convenient clone army created by a dead Jedi!

Yoda dismisses Dooku’s words with a reassuring “joined the Dark Side, Dooku has. Lies, deceit, creating mistrust are his ways now” and all Windu thinks is that they should “keep a closer eye on the Senate” (02.13.24). Really, the lack of any action here on the part of the Jedi Council is just criminal. A “wait and see” policy during an inexplicable, galaxy-spanning war fought with unexplained clones is not logical, reasonable, or realistic for what is self proclaimed to be the highest moral authority in the galaxy. But, Lucas wrote the Jedi Council this way which is why they go from mystical warriors in the original trilogy to the dumbest of dupes and pawns in the prequel trilogy.

No, Yoda, the “shroud of the dark side” fell long ago (02.13.57).

Senator Organa watches the clones board ships for battles abroad with more than a little regret. Too late, buddy. Your failure will be complete when that same army destroys your home world, and you along with it.

Anakin weds Padme, and she does not look happy to be married to Darth Vader while the galaxy plunges into needless war. Who can blame her?

(02.15.56)

I have said why I think Anakin is already Darth Vader, why the Clone Wars began impossibly, and many other things throughout my Deconstruction of Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones. There is no more to say about that, but what surprises me are my feelings before and after the deconstruction. When I started, I thought that Clones was going to be much better than Menace, and mostly that is still true. More of the story makes more sense, and the characters act a bit more rationally, but I discovered that there is much to this movie that is strong evidence of a fundamental failure of re-writing. Even in composing my previous blog post, hardly itself a masterful work, I spent almost as much time re-writing and editing as I did in the initial draft. I ended up restructuring paragraphs, adding bits, deleting phrases and rabbit-trails (probably not enough), and shaped what I finally published. It again seems like Lucas did none of those things to improve the story of Attack of the Clones, especially when entire sequences are added after the movie was 80% finished in post-production. Sadly, it seems like Lucas’ dependence on technology to help him tell his story only made things worse because nothing was finalized until days before the movie shipped to theaters. Anything was changeable, and anything was possible, which meant that the story was never going to be coherent or logical. A movie shot on location in a very small amount of time needs a much more rigid script, and needs to be much more thought out, because if something doesn’t make sense in post there isn’t time or ability to change it, but a movie shot entirely on green screen (with the exception of the homestead scenes) does not need to be thought through because any decision can be overturned at any time.

Film is a medium by which a story is told, and it seems to me that as Star Wars has progressed, the story has taken a tragic back seat to the special effects and the magic of modern-day movie making. George Lucas is a genius at special effects and a pioneer of digital filmmaking and has left his indelible mark on world cinema, but at the cost of the ability to tell a good story.

Compare Star Wars with Tron for a moment. Both were revolutionary in terms of scope, story, and special effects, and both had lasting effects on their generation. Tron is the story of the world inside the computer, and Star Wars is the story of the world a galaxy far, far away. Both have strong characters that carry the story and both have indelible images. Fast forward to 2003/2010 and compare Attack of the Clones with Tron: Legacy. Both were lightyears ahead of their origin movies in terms of scope and effects, but only Tron: Legacy kept the same strength of story, really the only thing that lasts for generations. Attack of the Clones‘ story was drowned and choked by the demands of the effects, and of the shock and awe. Tron: Legacy made the shock and awe subservient to the story. Watching Tron today is possible because the story overshadows the old school effects. What intrigued me about Tron: Legacy was that there were only one or two more action sequences, and the pacing stayed about the same as Tron. Watching Star Wars today is very enjoyable, because the effects were limited, and the story was paramount (because the effects literally could not carry the picture), but today, watching Attack of the Clones is painful because the awe of the effects is gone, and only the story remains, and that is sadly lacking.

Story is what matters, not how flashy or amazing the digital part of the film is. In the end, people will watch the movie decades from now and smirk at the early effects, but they will never smirk at a good story. Why is the original Star Trek still popular forty years after it was canceled? The characters, not the salt shaker props. Decades from now, when I am old, the original Star Wars will still be the most popular three of the six, and I doubt that many will cling to the prequels when all is said and done because the story of Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi is so much stronger than that of the Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith.

End Credits.

(02.22.21)

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).

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).

Anakin just murdered an entire clan, or tribe, of Tusken Raiders and is returning to the Lars homestead with his mother’s body. Padme cares very little for this fact, shrugging off their deaths as a natural result of human anger. And, as if that weren’t disturbing enough, from this point onwards, the galaxy runs headlong for civil war, though that course of action is not the logical result of anything.

Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones (01.23.09-01.35.28)

Anakin rides up, and carries his mother’s body into the homestead. He still looks pretty pissed while he does this. Meanwhile, one thing to notice during this scene, and remembering the rest of the scenes on Tatooine: everyone wears one change of clothing, except Padme, who here, like everywhere, changes clothes every ten minutes. When does she do this, and why? And how much of her taxpayer’s income goes toward funding, and transporting, her obscenely massive wardrobe?

Anyway, on to the true horror of this section of Attack of the Clones. Padme finds Anakin in the shop, the very same workshop in which Luke will fiddle with an older Artoo and find a message from Leia to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Anakin is fixing the shifter on the speeder, and Padme offers blue milk and cookies. Anakin talks incoherently for a few minutes about nothing before exploding into a small rage and blaming Obi-Wan for his failure to remake the universe as he saw fit. (By the way, this discussion is very much a rehash of the earlier conversation in Padme’s apartment back on Coruscant.)

Anakin is acting like a five year old who has never seen death before, which is impossible. He has been living at the Jedi temple ever since he was “rescued” from Tatooine by Qui-Gon Jinn, and given the way the Jedi celebrate death, I find it hard to believe he never once attended a bonfire funeral and learned about death. Or his mother’s death has forced a psychological break in which he has reverted to a child-like state, which could explain his temper tantrum, ie, mass murder. Padme even responds to him as she would a child: “sometimes there are things no one can fix” before trying to gently crush his thoughts that he can stop death: “you are not all powerful” but Anakin isn’t listening: “well, I should be!” (01.24.37). What? Where does this idea come from? The quiet whispers of Palpatine?

At this point, Padme should be starting to seriously reconsider her relationship with, and physical proximity to, Anakin. Delusions of grandeur and megalomania are signs of an increasingly unstable person.

Anakin continues to sound like an angry little child when he insists that he will be “the most powerful Jedi ever!” I mean, I would expect to hear this from a kid throwing a tantrum, but not a 19 year old (01.24.48). I am starting to think that while George Lucas was writing this dialogue he was thinking of the 9 year old little kid Anakin was in the Phantom Menace: “I’ve built the fastest pod ever!”

Padme asks what is wrong. And gets this reply:

“I…I killed them. I killed them all. They’re dead. Every. Single. One of them. And not just the men. But the women. And the children, too. They’re like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I HATE them!” (01.25.50).

Padme should be running, not walking, back to her ship and blasting the heck away from Tatooine, or calling the Jedi Council for someone to come and lock up her boyfriend before he slaughters anyone else like an animal.

“To be angry is to be human,” (01.26.09). What? what is she doing? Sitting down, talking gently, rubbing hair, giving Darth Vader safe haven? No. She is a senator of the Galactic Republic, a person of annoyingly high moral character, outraged over the littlest form of injustice and a human being, and she shrugs off an admission of wholesale slaughter of innocents with a trite platitude. Murder may be the natural human response to a great injustice, but it is one almost every civilized nation on this planet condemns and expects its citizens to restrain from exercising. We lock up and execute people who refuse to follow this mostly universal and very simple rule. Nothing explains why Padme absorbs and promptly forgets Anakin’s admission of heinous guilt. But, she will do the exact same thing several times again in Revenge of the Sith. More and more I think Padme is as tweaked as Anakin.

Artoo interrupts a funeral, and more pathetic whining and self-aggrandizement from Anakin, “carrying a message from an Obi-Wan Kenobi” in a cute little foreshadowing of a New Hope (01.28.06). I want to draw attention to Lucas’ editing style in the next little sequence: he tends to leap from point to point in a story while skipping as much of the connective tissue as possible. This is a tendency that he has carried for a while, a fact confirmed to me when I recently read a transcript of a story meeting between Lucas, Spielberg, and Larry Kasdan in which they discussed Raiders of the Lost Ark scene by scene. To whit: Anakin and Padme suddenly appear inside Padme’s ship, and then a few Jedi and Senators suddenly appear in Chancellor Palpatine’s office. There is no farewell scene between Anakin and the Lars family. There is no explanation as to why Kenobi’s voicemail is relayed to the Senate building instead of the Jedi Temple, or what this group is even doing there. The setting of these scenes is convenient, and the jumps between them designed to waste as little time as possible, but sometimes those connective moments need to remain. Rather than have Indiana Jones immediately appear in different countries, someone (I am guessing Spielberg) put in travel montages overlaying a map to imply travel time. It wasn’t much, but I think it was more elegant than “Scene Cuts to Morocco”. Personally I think that Anakin just walked away from the Larses without a word, much in the same way that he arrived, but seeing that would reinforce just how much of a dick Vader is. But, I think it is much more important why that particular group is assembled in Palpatine’s office.

Why does Padme react with more horror to Kenobi being attacked in his video voicemail than to Anakin’s admission of mass murder?

Anyway, Yoda says something very obvious: “more happening on Geonosis, I feel, than has been revealed” and like Windu replies, “I agree” (01.28.59). Right after this plans are made to vote Palpatine emergency powers so that he can approve the creation of a clone army that already exists so that the Jedi can take it to Geonosis and start a war with a political group “within” the Republic over the incarceration and planned execution of one Jedi who was probably trespassing.

I don’t know where to begin. Hmm. Ok, back to Anakin: “if he’s still alive” (01.29.29). Good point. Before launching the galaxy into civil war, why not ascertain all the facts first? The Jedi Council, Palpatine, and Padme all jump to conclusions an decide on lethal action before any attempt at all is made to actually figure out what the heck is going on. Isn’t this a Senate sanctioned Jedi investigation? Isn’t Palpatine in negotiations with the Separatists? Couldn’t he open talks with Count Dooku about the events and get his side of the story? All of these people assume that Kenobi is about to be killed, or is in danger of death, but he could be A) already dead or B) incarcerated. And even if he is important enough for some sort of military action, wouldn’t a covert operation with Jedi commandos be better than a full scale invasion of what appear to be completely legal droid manufacturing plants on a planet that may never have been part of the Republic? I know that Palpatine is eager to launch his Jedi killing war which will vault him into emperorship, but is no one else realizing what is blatantly occurring? Even the good Senator Bail Organa is simply looking for a loophole that will short circuit the debate in the Senate that has thus far stonewalled creation of a Republic army. Obviously many Senators are still against an army and open war with the Separatists, and I fail to see them all just quietly going along with this grave miscarriage of justice and governmental responsibility.

And another thing, what would make perfect sense is for Anakin to rush off to try to save Kenobi after being given strict orders not to interfere because the Republic doesn’t want to start a war, but he does so anyway because Obi-Wan “is like [his] father” (01.29.35). Padme has to convince Anakin to do something he just did. Anakin disobeyed strict orders to protect Amidala by high-tailing it to Tatooine to save his mother, so why does he need to be convinced to do the exact same thing? Come on, Lucas, this was an easy scene to write!

One more thing, back in Palpatine’s office, during the discussion of how to hoodwink the Senate into allowing the creation of an army, Palpatine’s advisor laments (in one of the more ridiculous exchanges in the movie) “if only Senator Amidala were here” in an attempt to get Jar Jar to volunteer as political pawn (01.30.46). That makes no sense, because Amidala was, in the beginning of the film, flying to Coruscant to vote against the Military Creation Act. She was the strongest opponent of such action, even. She would be the last person to give Palpatine that power. This writing/internal logic/plot planning is so bad it hurts.

Lastly, there is a little scene between Count Dooku and Obi-Wan Kenobi which is meant to mirror the confrontation between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, but without the emotional weight, drama, and high stakes. Much is revealed, but because Kenobi is a fool and an idiot, all the truths are dismissed as outright lies. Count Dooku tells Obi-Wan all of this as plainly and as honestly as possible and Kenobi hums and puts his fingers in his ears. If this weren’t so stupid (I mean, at least pretend to believe and pump for information to be verified later!) it would be laughable how obstinate Kenobi is being. Dooku tries to recruit him, somewhat lamely, and mentions that he thinks Qui-Gon Jinn would join him, and given my examination of Jinn during Phantom Menace, I believe him completely. Jinn would definitely have joined Dooku, and that would have been an interesting wrinkle in the story.

But, while Kenobi spins in disbelief, Anakin flies to his rescue, Jar Jar votes emergency powers, and the galaxy drives towards senseless war on the wings of Mace and his Jedi and Yoda and his clones.

(01.35.28).