The Clones that Should Have Been
The buzz on Star Wars has always been that it’s an homage to the old Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers movie serials, only better. The new series reverses this - it’s incoherently silly like the old serials, but flashier and duller. At least Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones isn’t as bad as its predecessor, The Phantom Whatsit. The worst thing about it is that it purports to show us the evolution of Darth Vader, and it stubbornly, maddeningly, avoids it.
 Attack of the Clones |
In the back of my mind for fifteen years I’ve been turning over, as I suspect a lot of people have, how I personally would tell the story of the creation of Darth Vader, the trainee Jedi gone bad, the golden child turned satanic machine. Poor Luke Skywalker, and yet lucky Luke - he found out that his father was the evillest cyborg in the Universe - bad! but also a powerful cold-as-steel boss gangster. Kinda cool. Who of us didn’t want Darth Vader for a father? And if his dippy son’s story could be so great, we wanted a doozy of an epic to tell the story of Bad Dad.
Instead, we get the story of how the Evil Empire got to be both evil and an empire. Not in any coherent way, mind you, but then I never cared in the first place. This aspect of the Lucas universe was not what kept me watching seven and a half hours of Episodes IV through VI back in the 80’s. At no point during The Empire Strikes Back did I say to myself “Hey, wait a minute. Can I be sure the Evil Empire rules without a popular mandate? How does it handle the question of agricultural subsidies?”
Attack of the Clones is awash in these half-baked political intrigues. In Clones, politics is on everybody’s mind. They sit around in posh hotel suites in what I presume is the Hall of Justice or something, and natter about dissident miners and Trade Federations and so on. Too much of this and the movie starts to resemble Galactic C-span.
The Empire is still a Republic when this movie opens. You know the Republic’s in trouble because an evil party of Senators is running things their way, and the Senator on our side is Jar Jar Binks. Don’t accuse Lucas of avoiding topicality. Anyhow, Queen Amidala is now a Senator (?) because her term as Queen ran out (??) because of term limits (???) so she takes a long journey to Planet Washington DC, but no sooner has she arrived than someone tries to blow up her spaceship, and then ice her sexy ass with poisonous mega-centipedes.
So after she’s come all this way for an Important Vote (whatever it was) she’s packed off home again, after a substitute is found to vote in her place. Apparently her mission wasn’t so important that it couldn’t be fulfilled by “Senator Binks.” Oh, that wacky Jar-Jar. There’s less of him than in TPM, but he’s in fine form: “Meesa propose to all-a Senate to draft-a emerrrrgency meazhas!”
Accompanying the Queen home is Jedi-in-training Anakin Skywalker, assigned to declare his undying love for her in goopy cliches that would be hilarious and even expected, considering his age, if the director (ahem) knew how to undercut them just a bit. Sigh. No, it’s all deadly serious. Then Anakin has a bad dream about his mommy and so he and the VIP whom he’s supposed to protect and on whom the Fate of the Republic depends, go off to Tatooine without telling anybody. Meanwhile Obi-Wan…
None of this really makes any sense. Worse, the action set pieces don’t make sense either. The heroes dodge stamping machines and molten steel on a robot assembly line, which has appeared pretty much out of nowhere. Then they emerge from here into… an arena? Opening off the factory?? Who are the slithery bat-things in the audience? Never mind. Our heroes fight a gratuitous number of digital beasties, and then the Jedi SWAT team shows up, and they do a lot of repetitive, Masters of the Universe style deflect-the-laser-beams-with-lightsabers stuff. Then Yoda flies in with the Clone army (no, really) and says stuff like “Around the forward position the perimeter defend!” I could take his inside-out syntax when he was a pint-sized Jedi guru — “Patience you must learn if a Jedi you would be” — but his role as a muppet Patton is a little hard to stomach.
Imagine, if you’ve got a minute, that instead of Attack of the Clone’s McLaughlin Group blather about dissident miners and evil Senators, we had gotten a story like the following. This is my “fix” for the problems plaguing the Star Wars franchise:
In my version, all the political intrigue is given short shrift, or is kept in the background. We know the Republic is goi���o���ome the Empire. It doesn’t matter how. A few bits of bad news: “Senator Palpatine has impeached President Clintontine!” would convey everything just as well. Meanwhile, Obi Wan is training Anakin, but taking it too slow. In the Blade-Runner style city on Coruscant, Anakin meets a shady dude who offers to show him the stuff Obi-Wan won’t show him, like how to strangle someone by looking at him (remember the poor general who pissed off Lord Vader?) He exhorts Anakin : “Use your anger! Feel the hate! Hate makes you strong!” Maybe he also teaches him a Jedi breath-holding technique that accidentally gives him - hooohhh-huuuuhhh - a case of Jedi asthma.
Meanwhile, Obi-Wan has no inkling of this, until a major Jedi Test comes up which involves “telepathic bonding” with a Furby-ish kind of alien. When Anakin tries it, the fuzzy-wuzzy cutie-pie tries to tear Obi-Wan’s face off. He kills it and a bolt of blue lightning tips him off that Anakin has some unwholesome kind of Force in him. The Jedi Council, like the clueless lumps they are, decide that Anakin needs to cool his heels in Jedi Juvie. They put him in a program for wayward Jedi and he has a good time mentally beating up his fellow inmates. Obi-Wan gives him one last chance. During a climactic battle (with clones or what-have-you) Anakin screws up honestly and some good guys take it in the shorts. (This would be a fine opportunity to kill off Jar Jar.)
Finally, Obi-wan accuses his young padwan of deliberate evildoing, and strips him of his Jedi rank. A furious and wronged Anakin seeks out his evil trainer and begins (perhaps with the aid of a new mechanical arm) to learn the ways of the Dark Side. Oh, and we get to find out what the Sith is and why they’re all called Darth. I’m still hazy on this point.
This treatment, whatever its idiocies, at least keeps the focus on the characters: Obi-Wan who thinks he has it in him to shape a young Jedi, but who’s just too callow himself. Anakin, the original wayward yout’, on his way to the ultimate bad end. Yoda, the midget goblin with the Grover voice who wonders why it is that human girls never want to go all the way with a nice guy like him. And Queen Amidala, who wonders why it is she got naked with this young Jedi just because he looked her in the eye and said “You want to get naked with me.”
Notice that this is 180 degrees different from the plot of Attack of the Clones. This is because in Clones the story of Darth Vader doesn’t happen. Save one moment where he uses the Force for vengeance and the scary Darth Vader theme plays, Hayden Christiansen’s just doing bad Family Channel. The story we all wanted told is told poorly and halfassedly. I don’t believe for a second that chubby Ewan MacGregor will ever grow into the sagely Alec Guinness. As for Anakin Skywalker, I certainly don’t see any resemblance between the black-clad Dark Lord of the Sith in Star Wars and this dewey-eyed, puppy-loving dope mumbling his lines to a polystyrene Natalie Portman. At this point, the future Lord Vader will need about six hundred years of elocution lessons before he can speak as well as James Earl Jones. But morph into Darth? Don’t hold your breath.
Related posts:
- The Future a Long Time Ago: Attack of the Clones
- Return of the Jedi Loses Status in Star Wars Sextet
- Space Junk: Star Wars the Experience
- Star Wars Number Two
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Hollywood Blockbuster
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