Star Wars Saturdays: Why "Attack of the Clones" is also good, actually
"May the 11th be with you" doesn't sound as good
On Saturdays, we’re going through the entire STAR WARS saga in episodic order, a series that will include a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the second film in the prequel trilogy, ATTACK OF THE CLONES. Enjoy…
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
2002, Dir. George Lucas
Composite based on notes written February 3rd, 2018 and October 25th, 2019, and incorporating excerpts published September 19th, 2011
Except for periods of my life where peer pressure won out and I felt compelled to mock it, I have always liked Attack of the Clones. It came out when I was nine years old, and I absolutely loved the film’s creatures and landscapes and action, its visual expansiveness and immense, detailed world-building; I will not deny that part of the appeal was also because seeing Natalie Portman here was the first time I remember having a crush on a movie character. As an adult watching it now, I still greatly enjoy it, sometimes for the same reasons – the world-building is just as exhilarating to me now as it was then – and sometimes for new ones: There is more good character work going on here than the film typically gets credit for, and as the middle chapter in the fraught political narrative that is the Prequel Trilogy, the film is also thematically fascinating, constructing a story where the triumphant actions of the heroes is in every way planting the seeds of their own downfall, as individuals and as a society. There is so much interesting stuff going on here, and if you really can’t get past Hayden Christensen being kind of stiff occasionally to see what is valuable, I pity you.
The film is far from perfect, and probably the ‘weakest’ of the six Star Wars films Lucas directly oversaw. It is a bit too long, gets narratively messy in places, and has some ‘middle chapter’ problems in telling a story without a particularly firm beginning or end. More importantly, George Lucas runs into some of his own limitations here harder than he does in his other Star Wars pictures. He is not a writer equipped to pen authentic, effective romance, nor is he a particularly skilled director of actors, at least not actors who don’t already bring in their own wells of charisma and screen presence. Attack of the Clones, unfortunately, is the film most concerned with a love story, and is the one with a lead actor, Hayden Christensen, most in need of firm direction. Christensen is not a bad actor – his work in Revenge of the Sith and, much later, Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries attests to that – and there is a certain rough, unvarnished angst to his performance here that I do genuinely believe works; the Anakin of Attack of the Clones is an uncomfortably awkward teenager, and the film captures that particular dynamic better and more authentically than most viewers are willing to admit. Lucas deserves credit for capturing that side of the character and performance, but he also deserves blame for not guiding Christensen more when the script calls for something a bit more specific, or helping to draw out a more appealing charisma in moments when Padme is meant to be falling for him. Lucas was never a great writer of dialogue, but he flounders here the hardest; structurally, as a piece of storytelling, I actually think this script is extremely sound and even accomplished – it must be remembered that there is more to writing films than dialogue – but Attack of the Clones would undeniably be a stronger film if Lucas had someone with greater flair for speech to do a rewrite here.
But as real as those problems are, I truly believe the film’s strengths heavily outweigh them. Attack of the Clones remains a drop-dead gorgeous film with endless visual imagination, one that paints such an interesting, complicated portrait of its world and characters. It is, in so many ways, the technological epicenter for the cinematic age we live in now – the ‘big bang’ for a new era of filmmaking. It was the first major Hollywood film shot entirely on digital cameras, made huge innovative leaps in visual effects that would not be matched or surpassed until James Cameron’s Avatar, and most importantly, its stunning art direction has influenced two decades of science-fiction, particularly in video games, to degrees the film is never granted enough credit for. The world of Bioware’s Mass Effect, in particular, is ripped in so many ways from the environments created for Attack of the Clones, and the ‘skyboxes’ Bungie is so renowned for, in games like Halo and Destiny, are very clearly inspired by similar images in this film. While I’m not sure mainstream Hollywood ever really absorbed the many visual possibilities of digital production offered by the Star Wars prequels, western video games of the 21st century simply wouldn’t look the way they do without these films.
David Tattersall was the director of photography here, and the work he does with the HDW-F900 – a camera jointly developed by Sony and Panavision for this film, and which gave birth to Sony’s CineAlta line – is one of the great triumphs of early digital cinematography, a film that feels absolutely liberated by the new possibilities the technology affords, rather than weighed down by trying to recreate the look and feel of celluloid on a different format. The shot of Anakin speeding through the desert as he pursues the Tusken Raiders, with the camera tracking all around him in three dimensions, is absolutely wild, a seemingly impossible movement realized through the marriage of digital effects and digital cinematography. The film stuns in its imagery, compositions, and fluid camera movement from start to finish, and other than The Empire Strikes Back, it is the most visually accomplished of the six Star Wars films created by Lucas himself.
And while I focused earlier on the mixed results of Hayden Christensen’s performance, I think the film more than makes up for it in the material Ewan McGregor is given, which is honestly some of my favorite Star Wars content ever. His investigation into the attacks on Senator Amidala showcases a powerful Jedi at the height of his game, and that means more than just twirling a lightsaber. Jedi are fascinating for their physical and mental prowess, and Obi-Wan’s detective work that leads him to Jango Fett is just as engaging as his eventual battle with the bounty hunter. Through it all, McGregor is in total command of the character, and I adore the slight sarcastic, playful edge he gives this grown-up version of Obi-Wan. There’s never any doubt that this man is wise and brilliant, but he also wears his exasperation on his sleeve; he hasn’t quite achieved the calm of Alec Guiness, which is exactly as it should be.
I also adore Christopher Lee’s performance as Count Dooku – who wouldn’t? The role isn’t even that fleshed out on the page, but I’m not sure it needs to be when you’ve got an icon like Lee doing his thing; he conjures such a complete sense of character, from voice to physicality, in his limited screen time that if anything, the character is sorely underused. Yoda, who in the original release was appearing as a digital creation for the very first time, also gets some awesome showcase moments from start to finish, demonstrating his wisdom, his power, and his compassion; in particular, I love the sequence where Obi-Wan walks in on Yoda teaching the Younglings, and Yoda instructs the children to help Obi-Wan with some interstellar cartography. Considering that past movies in the franchise really only showed us Yoda in one location or capacity, I love how much more the character gets to do this time around.
John Williams, though, is the true star and scene-stealer this time around. The love theme for Anakin and Padme, “Across the Stars,” is in particular so magnificent, so overwhelmingly moving and evocative, so filled with longing, passion, sadness, and ecstasy, that it honestly makes up for whatever issues I have with Lucas’ wooden dialogue or the gap in chemistry between Christensen and Natalie Portman. That moment where Anakin and Padme are handcuffed in the chariot being led out into the arena on Geonosis, and the music swells as they kiss and the light outside opens up around them, does more to sell the weight of this romance than the performances or writing ever do, or maybe ever could. Lucas has obvious weaknesses as a writer and director – as do all filmmakers – but one of his greatest strengths is empowering other artists, like Williams, to help make up for those deficits. And in all the myriad ways it showcases cinematic artistry, Attack of the Clones is, at the very least, one of the most interesting snapshots of that underlying tension that animates his work.
We also devoted an entire episode to ATTACK OF THE CLONES on The Weekly Stuff Podcast a few years back, so here is that episode again for posterity’s sake:
All STAR WARS SATURDAYS Pieces:
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