Time magazine recently hailed the huge opening weekend of Spider-Man as the herald of a new unity for the nation — before its opening, it said, “America was a splintered nation”. What the magazine meant thereby was that different people were going to different movies. When Spider-Man opened, however, crowed Time, suddenly everyone was going to the same movie, and this “mass event” gave rise to a new “national conversation”.
Hooray for Hollywood, you might say. And hooray for a nation whose “national conversation” could be restored by something as simple as a blockbuster movie with a relentless marketing campaign. Never mind September 11; never mind the ongoing crisis of race, the lack of closure in the “war on terror” and the expensive and pointless internal repression that is the “war on drugs”. Spider-Man changes all that. The United States is at one with itself once more.
In another article in the same issue of Time, the imminent advent of Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones was hailed as another “event movie” to bring the nation together. Towards its end, said Time, “the film ascends to a kinetic life so teeming that even cranky adults may rediscover the quivering kid inside. That kid doesn’t think about the labor that went into all those cybersaber dances. He doesn’t think at all. He just stares up in innocent awe, at one with movie magic.”
Now no one’s saying we should stifle that “quivering kid”, that we should always be the cranky adults we are most of the time. I plead crankiness, certainly, and I yearn for movies that really do turn off that adult for as long as it takes to get the movie through the projector. The first Star Wars movie did that lightly and efficiently enough. Attack of the Clones, however, did not soothe this cranky adult.
It did not awaken my inner quivering child and reduce him to a state of “innocent awe”. It bored my inner quivering child to near-catatonia. If my inner child was quivering, he was quivering with ennui and a desire to get out of the movie theatre and go and do something more stimulating. Like shop for clothes, or CDs, or … oh, anything. My inner child started aching for a cigarette from about 45 minutes into the two-and-a-half-hour movie.
And I know why. It’s not just because my inner child doesn’t actually want to stop thinking and be reduced to a state of vacuous drone-like receptivity. It’s because my inner child wants more than just computer-generated eye candy, more than one spectacular fantasy landscape after the other. My inner child wants well-choreographed hand-to-hand combat with glowing, sizzling lightsabres; he is quivering for a grandiose space battle as gripping as the finale of the first Star Wars movie. Most of all, my inner child wants a compelling story.
Writer-director George Lucas seems to have forgotten all about the story in Attack of the Clones. So obsessed is he with what his computers can do, so dazzled by his own technical powers, that a tale that should be totally enthralling has been reduced to a mechanical dance of marionettes. The fact that this is one of three prequels to the Luke Skywalker part of the saga is an obstacle, yes; and we know that, in the course of these three new episodes, handsome young junior Jedi Anakin Skywalker is going to go over to the dark side and become the dreaded Darth Vader. No surprises there; the whole planet, and probably a few others beside, know that. But then we know the outcome of Macbeth, too, and still it can be riveting to watch the unfortunate thane head inexorably towards his doom.
Sitting through Attack of the Clones, waiting for the next eye-popping landscape and the next preposterous hairdo, one is free to contemplate the many missed dramatic opportunities. We follow the progress of Jedi knights Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, with a hairstyle ever closer to Lucas’s own) and his apprentice Anakin (Hayden Christensen) as they try to protect Princess Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) from a renewed assassination attempt, while separatist planets led by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) attempt to secede from the galactic federation.
What tension there should be between Obi-Wan and Anakin! We know that some day in the future Anakin will slay Obi-Wan — there should be more of a frisson to their interaction than one lame “you’ll be the death of me” joke. These two men represent the poles of the moral universe, but they are about as opposed as Mork and Mindy.
We know, too, that Anakin and Amidala, staring so puppyishly into one another’s eyes, will one day become the parents of Luke Skywalker, saviour of the universe — but that this very liaison will lead to Anakin’s destruction. Even if we don’t buy the fear-of-sex undercurrent, we should feel some sympathy for this love-that-cannot-be and some suspense at the pair’s romantic pussyfooting — rather than giggling at Christensen’s over-use of his small sideways grin, or sighing with impatience at Portman’s portentous platitudes about democracy.
There is a big problem with the acting and with the script. Basically, there ain’t none. The movie brightens up a bit with the arrival of Christopher Lee, doing pretty much what he did in The Lord of the Rings — except that that reminds one how entrancing a long fantasy-epic can be if the viewer is able to care about the characters. The idea of the green homunculus Yoda, once a glove puppet and now in the full maturity of his computer animation, fighting a lightsabre duel, is appealing — but the execution feels perfunctory.
Attack of the Clones certainly looks great, but in a static way. It has no momentum at all. There are some good set-pieces in which it briefly jolts into life, but they are derivative. Everybody knows Lucas is recycling old myths and science-fiction serials; now we know he’s recycling other people’s movies too. The Roman-type arena scene is fairly gripping, but it’s stolen from Gladiator. The gigantic production-line on which Anakin, Amidala and their attendant robots find themselves fighting for their lives is good, but we saw it first in Chicken Run.
The first Star Wars was so appealing as an adventure story because of its narrative drive and its lack of pretension. Now Lucas seems to believe he’s writing scripture. And my inner child, for one, is not quivering to be back in Bible class.