So what did I really think?

I’m writing all of this before reading anyone else’s reviews, and I’m still just getting my arms around Attack of the Clones, figuring out what I did and didn’t like about it.

And that’s probably a bad sign.

(WARNING – MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW)

Consider the original trilogy. Eps. IV-VI were tales of heroics, of people fighting for freedom against a faceless, evil empire. Even the darkest of the episodes, The Empire Strikes Back, which ended with one main character captured, and another gravely injured, still had an element of hope about it. They were going to go out there and find Han. Luke was going to recover with his new cybernetic hand. And the Rebellion was going to regroup and eventually kick some imperial butt.

One of the problems Lucas faces is that this chronologically-first trilogy is about the fall of the Republic. Not a happy thing. The original trilogy is about the fall of the Empire, a happy thing indeed, despite individual setbacks and pain along the way. In keeping with the feel of a Saturday Serial, there would be cliff-hangers and danger, but there was never any real doubt that the guy (well, one of them) would get the girl, and the bad guys would get their come-uppance. In the first trilogy, on the other hand, we don’t want the guy to get the girl, and everywhere we turn, we see doom and destruction and futile efforts to stop same.

Hard to get folks to cheer that.

This downward spiral was just beginning in The Phantom Menace, but in Attack of the Clones it’s in full force. The Jedi Knights are already stretched thin; by the end of the film, they’ve been decimated (worse, decimated by their own stupidity). Despite the immediate victory against the … well, Dooku’s “rebellion,” whatever we want to call it … Yoda is right in pointing out that it’s a Pyrrhic victory indeed, and only the beginning of even darker times.

So Lucas’ first and foremost problem is that, small, individual victories aside, things have to get Worse before, in the second trilogy, they get better. That would be daunting for anyone. But for someone writing an heroic adventure, it’s nearly impossible. And for someone like Lucas whose films hinge on heroic action, not on personal drama, it is impossible.

Consider, for a moment, the other big Summer Blockbuster already out, Spider-Man. (And, let me just say, it’s incredible to think that Star Wars, Spider-Man and Fellowship of the Ring are all in theaters at the same time.) You could argue that Spidey is really a tragedy. The guy doesn’t get the girl (in fact, he turns her away, at great personal cost). The villain is vanquished, but such that the hero gets no accolades, only more disparaging headlines. The hero’s personal life has been turned upside down, and he’s shouldered himself with a personal motto that can only crush the life out of him.

But it all works, because the personal element of the story works. We care about Peter Parker, and MJ, and even Harry and the other supporting cast. We continue to root for them because we know they are good people trying to find light in a dark world.

Attack of the Clones suffers from a lack of heroes. And those folks who are supposed to be heroes are defined primarily by their fighting prowess, which means that defeats in battle are literally denunciations of their only admirable qualities.

Consider that. Anakin, ostensibly the star of the film, is hardly heroic. He’s petulant, haunted, immature and impulsive. He precipitates nearly every crisis in the film that isn’t related to plots by Darth Sidious. He’s ultimately willing to live a lie over his obsessive adolescent romance. The one personally heroic thing he does is follow his “duty” into the final battle with Dooku; everywhere else his heroism is defined by how deftly he wields a light-saber.

The rest of the Jedi are almost as bad. Mace Windu keeps intoning, in both movies, about how the Jedi are not soldiers, that they cannot fight a war. He then turns around and marches them openly into hostile territory which is known to be filled with droid soldiers. That any of the Jedi get out alive is a miracle that has nothing to do with Mace’s heroism.

It has to do, in fact, with Yoda. But even Yoda (despite the incredibly cool “Li’l Green Dervish of Death” routine) is problematic as a hero. He spends all of the first movie, and most of the second, grunting and sighing and sounding worried. He finally gets off his little green butt, but only in desperation, and arguably his decision to send in the clones is only deciding on the lesser of two evils.

Sure, he (and Mace) are suffering from Darth Sidious’ clouding of the Force. But you almost have to wonder if the Sith Lord isn’t actually leading them to make some egregious errors in judgment — especially when it comes to entrusting Anakin with Padme’s safety.

Padme does some heroic stuff, no doubt — though much of it is reaction to being forcibly shuttled hither and thither. She lets herself get bossed around by the Jedi Council and by Chancellor Palpatine, she commits the amazingly daft error of leaving Jar-Jar in charge of the Naboo delegation, with voting rights fer gosh sakes, and …

… and she doesn’t run screaming from the room, away from Anakin, on at least a dozen occasions when any sane (or at least admirable) person would do so.

I mean, here’s this overly-intense Jedi apprentice, possessor of amazing powers, grinding his teeth and half-confessing, half-bragging about how he slaughtered an entire village of Tuskan Raiders (and how un-PC was that whole chapter?), and then breaking down in sobs.

What does Padme, former Queen of Naboo and now freedom-loving Senator do? Does she run off? Does she break off her nascent love for him? Does she go and tell the others? Does she contact the Jedi Council?

No. She sits down next to him and comforts him.

Padme, it seems, is just as obsessed over this child a good dozen years her younger. She leads him on, by fits and starts. She wants to fix the pain she’s seen in him since they met. And, when it suits her, she can be just as immature and impulsive as he is.

It’s hard to consider Padme a hero.

Obi-Wan is, arguably, the hero of this movie. He’s makes the most sense when he talks, and acts the most successfully when he acts. He overcomes great odds time and again — and is the only person with the brains to communicate important goings-on on a regular basis, in case he’s captured or killed. Even so, he’s clearly wildly out of his depth with Anakin as his Padawan Learner.

The most successful fit of this back-story to the older trilogy to this is that the older Ben Kenobi clearly recognizes the immensity of his responsibility in unleashing Darth Vader on the galaxy. He failed to rein in Anakin’s arrogance, probably because he’s not that removed in age from Anakin in the first place, being a freshly minted Jedi Knight himself (and because — well, let’s face it, his own teacher, Qui-Gon, was sort of arrogant, too). He failed to observe the influence Palpatine was having on Anakin. He fails here as well to recognize the depth of his apprentice’ obsession with Padme, leading to that whole messed-up romance occurring. He fails to recognize his apprentice’ angst over his mother, too. Obi-Wan does great on his own. But he’s an awful teacher, and the Jedi Council is seriously falling down on the job in not recognizing that up-front.

So there are few heroes here, and those that could possibly bear that crown are deeply flawed. This breaking of Lucas’ successful formula from the original trilogy is without a doubt the biggest problem this film has.

Okay, enough studied analysis. What else comes to mind about the film?

• I have a sense of incredible business, to a distracting degree. Far too many cuts back and forth between different planets, different people doing different things. It’s like a constant blur of action, a frenzy that ultimately distracts more than sweeps you along.
• The Jedi are Ninja — highly-trained, highly-skilled, even magical super-fighters, used for political purposes by the powers that be. Great combatants, to be seriously feared … but not the sort of folks you throw into a battle head-on. That’s why nobody in feudal Japan fielded Ninja armies. And that’s why leading the Jedi into open battle like Mace does was unforgivably stupid, especially since everyone kept saying “Jedi are not soldiers” over and over again until then.

• George Lucas really doesn’t like politicians, does he? He doesn’t seem to have any real alternatives to offer, but you get the sense that even though the Republic is a Good Thing, it’s held the seeds of its own destruction for a while now. It’s either a paralyzed wreck or a tool to be manipulated by Palpatine. Doyce thinks Anakin was teasing Padme over his own political beliefs, but I’m not so sure (especially given who is political mentor was).

• Padme has to get over her mothering complex. It will be the death of her. (Actually, we were speculating last night about Padme’s fate. Death in battle? Death at Anakin’s hands?)

• I’ve heard criticism of all the romantic cliches in the Anakin/Padme romantic dialog. That really didn’t bother me. People talk in those cliches. I’m desperately glad that nobody videotaped my courtship of Margie. What bothered me more, from a story point of view, is how Padme ignored all of the cliches of Bad Relationships to Get Into. She may be great at wielding a blaster pistol, but she could use a good talking-to by Oprah.

• Ewan McGregor does an increasingly fine job of playing a younger version of Alec Guiness’ Obi-Wan. Bravo.

• Shmi’s abduction and torturing-to-death … bothered me. For some reason, I kept flashing on “savage” Indians capturing helpless frontier maidens and torturing them to death for their own nefarious purposes. It doesn’t make any sense (or, rather, Lucas does not provide any sense behind it), save to create a big dark blot in Anakin’s life. It’s a (literally) pathetic ending to a very nice person.

  

• Most Gratuitous Waste of a Character Award has to go to Jango Fett. He’s the template for the Clone Army (why?), has a clone son of himself (why?), is a hired gun for Count Dooku (why?), is a bounty hunter himself but hires an assassin to do his work for him (why?), and simply provides a sacrificial bad guy for the film, setting up his clone son as Boba Fett (whose senseless death in Return of the Jedi seems all the more senseless for it). He has enough on-screen time to seemingly scream for more characterization (especially if it would mean reduced meadow-romping for Anakin/Padme), but we never get it. A waste indeed.

  

• So the Republican Army is made up of clone troopers. The implication is that the Imperial Stormtroopers are also all clones, from the same stock, which suddenly adds additional humorous significance to Leia’s line from the original film, “Aren’t you sort of short for a stormtrooper?” It’s also a very nice twist.

• Number one priority for the Army of the Republic should be to build assault ships with rear-firing guns.

• Refugees? There are refugee ships going from Coruscant to Naboo? What’s that all about? (Yes, I’m sure it’s explained in the novelization, or in various other books that have been written, just like some of the other questions I mention here have been. But I haven’t read the novelization, and I don’t read Star Wars books as a genre. I expect the movies to tell me about things mentioned in the movies. Silly me.)

  

• Perhaps stinging from the near-universal condemnation of Jar-Jar Binks in the first film, Lucas has stripped this film of nearly all humor or kiddie-focused stuff. Heck, Jar-Jar doesn’t even trip over the furniture, though he’s (very nicely) manipulated by the bad guys. The only exception to this is the comic relief by Threepio and Artoo. But the sign of bad characters is that they could be snipped from the film without any loss, and that applies particularly to both droids this time. Artoo maybe less so — why he’s become Padme’s mascot is not well-defined, and he’s a lousy watchdog, but he saves her butt (sort of) later, so that’s all good. Threepio comes across less as annoying-but-useful comic relief and turns into annoying-but-really-annoying comic relief. I mean, the whole head-switching thing was kind of amusing (if technically improbable), but that’s about it.

  For that matter, why does Threepio end up coming with them? Presumably he belongs to Lars now. Does Anakin, amidst all the angst of his visit to Tatooine, purchase him? Does Lars donate the whining thing to get rid of him? It would have been nice to see, rather than simply having Threepio show up on their ship, evidently part of the entourage.

  

• I’m wondering, speaking of the droids, when they get their memory wipes. Because, heck, you’d think that both of them would recognize the Lars/Owen/Beru’s moisture farm when they return to it in the future, or even recognize Owen and Beru. Or Obi-Wan, for that matter, if not Vader.

• Lucas continues to out-do himself with big battles. The Clones vs the Droids makes the Gungans vs the Droids look like a cotillion. The pause button on the DVD player is going to get mighty worn out once the film is released for home purchase. There’s a huge amount of stuff there, all very cool. Though it’s clear, suddenly, why clones are so much more practical than raising armies the “old-fashioned” way: because offense outweighs defense in this world so badly, they’re going to get mown down like butter anyway, so you need some means of mass-producing your soldiers.

• All the bitching aside, this movie is so full of incredibly cool visuals (and sounds), the little fanboy in me is still jumping up and down in glee. That having been said, the action and movement between all those settings is so fast, so abrupt, so hurtling-toward-disaster, it makes the earlier installments of this series seem placid by comparison. Lucas feels so compelled to make sure we know what Anakin/Padme are doing, what Obi-Wan is doing, what the Jedi Council is doing, what Palpatine is doing … heck, what Threepio and Artoo are doing … that before you can catch your breath and figure anything in particular out, we’re wiping to the next scene.

Well, that’s quite a bit of crabbing. What does it all mean?

It’s hard to objectively review a Star Wars film. There are so many associations, so much emotional and fanboy and cinematic baggage that no matter what Lucas does, you could find things to both bitch and cheer about.

I walked in, fearful of a clumsy muddle like so many folks considered The Phantom Menace to be. I was buoyed by the positive reports I’d received. And I desperately wanted to be entertained by the most famous movie franchise of all time.

For all that people complained about The Phantom Menace, I’m not sure that it isn’t a better film than Attack of the Clones. Certainly AotC is more of a technical triumph; Lucas has built an incredibly beautiful and rich set of worlds and creatures here, a glorious travelogue of a galaxy far, far away.

But AotC is really a movie about failures — personal and institutional. Nobody covers themselves with glory. Moreso than in any other Star Wars film, evil has triumphed at the end, in almost every arena. The guy gets the girl, and that’s a mistake both in and of itself and from the perspective of knowing how it’s going to turn out. The good guys (the Jedi) get their hats handed to them — the few that are left — while the Dark Force folks not only have won a huge victory, but are well on their way to forming the Empire.

PM, for all its flaws, at least had heroes to root for, triumphs to cheer, even a big parade at the end. Evil was not defeated, but you could at least feel good for what was accomplished.

The ultimate problem? Lucas should never have made this trilogy. If he wanted to revisit Star Wars, he should have tackled “What Happens Next,” despite the problems with actors’ ages and already-established book series. Because the real story being told here is “What Happened Before.” We know where things are going. And Lucas is just not up to getting us there in a fashion that doesn’t seem forced (so to speak).

That’s not necessarily inevitable. Joe Straczynski managed to give us glimpses of the future in Babylon 5, but it didn’t constrain his ongoing storytelling, because we didn’t know how we were going to get there. And once we got there, we realized that it wasn’t all what we’d thought was going to happen in the first place.

But Lucas is not as clever as Straczynski, and his glimpses of the future are a full three movies long. Bottom line, there’s a reason why, if Lucas really did map out a set of three trilogies, he started in the middle. Because that’s where the best story was.

Now he’s trying to backfill behind that original trilogy, taking mentions of “the Clone Wars” and Darth Vader’s destruction of the Jedi Knights, and Vader/Anakin’s relationship to Obi-Wan, and Vader’s parentage of Luke and Leia, and making it into a coherent story. He’s managing to do that. But it’s not necessarily a good story, nor one that needed to be told. Just because you can do a prequel doesn’t mean you should. Having the crib notes about Rhett Butler’s childhood doesn’t mean it would make a good film. Knowing how Darth Vader became who he was doesn’t mean you have to show it. In some ways, it makes the chronologically-later story less effective, because it makes you wonder whether the Jedi were all that great, or the Republic was all that admirable.

To that end, this trilogy increasingly looks to be the most beautiful and unnecessary six-seven hours of film ever made.

Bottom line, though:

• Am I glad I went and saw it? Absolutely.
• Would I recommend seeing it while it’s in a theater? Positively.

• Will I pick up a copy for myself when it’s out on DVD? No question.

But it’s not the “Feel-Good Movie of the Summer,” and it’s not going to be on my personal Top Ten list. It’s a gorgeous but ultimately depressing, disappointing, and over-complicated piece of eye candy. And I can only hope that Lucas can pull a hero out of his hat for the final installment.