Clones, again

It’s extremely fashionable to knock Attack of the Clones. Having watched it again with my folks last night, I have to say … I’m a slave to fashion.

I mean, there’s just a ton of eye candy. And, having until of late played in a Star Wars RPG campaign set in the prequel era, it’s sort of fascinating seeing of this stuff again from a cinematic perspective.

But, jeez, the story is horribly convoluted. You could have (all things being equal) a fine film about Anakin Skywalker, or a fine film about Obi-Wan Kenobi, or even a fine film about the Truly Messed-Up Jedi Council, but this movie tries to be all three, and even joining all of them up at the end doesn’t clean things up. There’s a bit of that in the middle episode of the original trilogy — but it sure seemed a lot easier to follow along what was happening in The Empire Strikes Back. I don’t think that’s just hindsight.

Second, there’s just folks behaving stupidly. We keep hearing over and over again from Mace Windu that the Jedi are just peacekeepers, not an army. Which explains why they get all gathered together into a giant battle, from which few of them survive.

(Jedi are ninja — individually, powerful and cool, but easily overwhelmed by massed forces, and far too training-intensive to serve as troops. What a bunch of goofs.)

We’ll leave aside that military strategy in the Republic seems limited to human (or robot) wave attacks. Or that strategic weapons are unknown (since one tactical nuke would have simply wiped out both the Federation robots and the Republic clones). Feh.

But that’s just unrealism, and we can forgive all of that. The bottom line of the failure of Clones is that the best actor in the film is Christopher Lee, who plays a supporting villain. One of the leads, Hayden Christensen, can’t seem to act his way out of a paper bag. (“Hi, I’m Anakin Skywalker, the Sulky Jedi. Now I’m a Tormented Jedi. Now I’m a Murderous Jedi. Now I’m a Henpecked Jedi. Now I’m a Headstrong Jedi. Now …”) Not only is the writing/directing/acting poorly designed, it’s poorly executed. I don’t know if Princess Amadala should dump Anakin in a second because he’s an awful person, or because he’s awfully acted.

Not that Anakin is alone in getting stilted and poorly acted dialog, but he’s the “best” at being the worst portrayed.

*Sigh*

Granted that Lucas could never have told a story that would live up to the expectations, that he’s managed to squander so much of the good will he had coming in is practically a crime against humanity.

Glancing back at my review at the first viewing, it doesn’t seem it was any better the first time around.

Ah, well.