James Lileks likes Attack of the Clones. Well, we all have our lapses of taste. I happen to enjoy Howard the Duck a lot.
He does make three important observations.
1. It helps to into it neither go into the film with Fond, Loving Memories of the original trilogy, or with the specs to Boba Fett’s backpack as your judge of whether the movie is “technically accurate.”
2. Maybe we should cut Anakin’s dialog some slack.
Yes, he gets saddled with some bad dialogue, but he’s supposed to be 18 or something, and what he says mirrors the crap I wrote in my journal at the time. I thought Hayden Christianson did a hell of a job with the role.
Well, if it was intentional, it was far more subtle than I give Lucas credit for.
3. Maybe the triviality of so much of what happens in Episode 1 is intentional.
Everyone loves the Ep5 because it’s Dark, which is Cool. Well. I’m 43 now, and I find bleakness and tragedy less interesting than I did at 23, mainly because I’ve seen some of the real thing. When you’re young and melodramatic, you identify with the tragic because it seems more authentic than your parents’ sunny bouncy happy-crappy attitude. Later you learn that they’re probably far more aware of the Dark than you were, and kept it from you, and from themselves most of the time. It’s how you get through the day without going mad. It’s hard to concentrate at work when you stop and think of the yawning grave that awaits us all. A fascination with things Dark ends up being a self-regarding melancholic pose, a way of signaling to your fellow adolescents that you possess a deep, deep nature. You’re wrong, of course. It’s no insight to think that Life Sucks. The insight comes when you understand that it doesn’t have to, and that its nature is up to you.
So I don’t need The Dark anymore. Neither does Lucas, it seems – hence the juvenilia that littered Ep 1. Now he gives us Evil, which is different.
I don’t know if I buy his conclusion. But I buy his premise just fine.