Movie 666

Early in this movie, the eponymous Yoda announces that “the Dark Side, clouds everything; the future, impossible to tell.”

While this statement might hold true for the characters living within Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, the audience knows better.

Plotting the fate of the universe: Attack of the Clones

In fact, much of the legibility of Attack of the Clones is based on prior knowledge of the Star Wars saga. For instance, we have a young Jango Fett with his clone child Boba, Senator Palpatine en route to become the Evil Emperor, and of course the future Darth Vader in the form of the sulky, surly teenage Anakin.

No scene displays this internal referencing better than the saber battle between Yoda and Count Dooku. Refuting 20 years of limited mobility in three previous Star Wars appearances, Yoda discards his cane and takes to the air as a master swordsman. Yoda derives his power not only from the Force, but from his digital liberation from the literal puppet strings that controlled him in earlier episodes. Ultimately, he plays against the expectations established in these earlier movies to create a thoroughly rousing if not entirely credible display of agility.

Attack of the Clones is therefore a strange, connect the dots experience of storytelling in reverse. It is certainly the most self reflexive of the Star Wars films to date, telling in anti-climax the stories of characters whose fates are already sealed by knowledge of previous movies. It is safe to say that this film would have trouble standing on its own without these internal references, and would in fact be almost incomprehensible without them.

The result, I suppose then, is tragedy in the classic sense - pulpy tragedy, to be sure, but tragedy nonetheless as we watch headstrong Anakin Skywalker realize his fate with his inevitable descent into villainy. After all, we already know from previous films that Anakin has no escape from later ones. We do not root for him or other characters in this movie, since we already know who will win and who will lose. Our only recourse is to admire the spectacle of fate unfolding in high resolution pixel vision.

PARENTAL GUIDANCE AND WAR

In the original Star Wars series, politics were abstract. The Empire: evil. The Rebellion: good. In this first series, the only tangible goal of the Empire was to wipe out the Rebels. The only tangible goal of the Rebels was to wipe out the Empire. There are no scenes of everyday life under the Empire. “Culture” is for the most part limited to uniform designs and speeder styles and even the Rebels, as witnessed in the original Star Wars movie, like a good military-style awards ceremony.

The new trilogy is more specific about its politics, but actually no more clear. The Republic is threatened by separatists and saber rattlers. Democracy is threatened by totalitarianism. One is loathe to find reference to elected government in the initial trilogy, but talk of free elections is all the rage in Attack of the Clones.

Certainly the political landscape of Star Wars has changed across films and over the years, and one can certainly create analogies between real world situations and the structures in these movies. For instance, one would not have too much difficulty identifying in the world today a modern day Empire that uses military force and high tech weaponry to achieve its objectives. One might even call this Empire something specific, like, well, the United States of America! (Quick, R2 - inform Darth Ashcroft and his Jedi Knights…)

Ultimately, analogies between Star Wars and Gulf Wars and Vietnam Wars and World Wars could be many. Ronald Reagan was so easily influenced by Star Wars and other period cinema that he nicknamed the Soviet Union “The Evil Empire” and proposed spending billions of dollars to develop weapons that would make George Lucas drown in a puddle of drool.

Despite its political mutterings, Star Wars is really about what the name implies - good old fashioned blow ‘em up wars. The politics really don’t make sense - teenage monarchs babble about democracry, peace preaching puppets teach inbred Skywalkers how to kill, monkish swordsmen fight with armored skeletons about who is in charge of maintaining order in the universe. The niceties of the battles that occur, the political structures involved, and even the characters that bumble through them are not as important as the actual mechanics of the fights themselves - namely, the ships involved, the rate of fire, the uniforms worn by the soldiers, and all of the other ornaments and fetishes of combat.

I have only one conclusion to draw from this conclusion - everyone in the galaxy (or pretty much everyone who pays to keep this franchise going) likes a good star war with space ships dodging asteroids and planets being leveled by death stars. That said, is there any possible way that we can keep scary Republicans and related hawks from taking movies like this too seriously? Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that while most of us are eating popcorn and watching droids explode into pixels, there are Reagan Era types and their offspring and clones taking this stuff much too seriously - dreaming of real life high tech wars in space and on earth as well.

I might sound paranoid, but I fear that we may someday see a prototype for a smart bomb called the Yoda.

Lucas, to be sure, makes war in space look like a hell of a good time. Kids love it! In Star Wars blood is kept to a minimum; the bad guys have terrible aim; and casualties are generally robots, clones, or faceless armored soldiers. Following this model, one could probably make three, er six, um let’s make it 12 movies filled with new and creative weapons to annihilate enemies with.

After all, we lick it up.

Related posts:

1. The Clones that Should Have Been
2. Return of the Jedi Loses Status in Star Wars Sextet
3. Film and the Future: Media After September 11
4. Space Junk: Star Wars the Experience
5. Equilibrium: A Bush Like Vision of the Future

Trackback Post