This is the second part of a three-part series. Check the description for part 1
if you want to see that as well - but these are kind of like Black Mirror: they
work by themselves but they could be connected... okay here we go...
Star Wars Episode two SOUNDS incredible.
The sound design is jaw-dropping. Things sound like they should, often covering up
some of the stranger CGI by making you believe that things are real. It's miles
beyond Phantom Menace's Gungan CGI problem and actually alleviates some of
the tonal issues that we saw in that first film. The issue with Attack of the
Clones is that for a film about the relationship between Anakin and Padme,
and the conflict of love and Buddhism, Attack of the Clones sure doesn't know
what attraction looks like, or what the space samurai actually believed in.
At its core, the problem comes down to whether or not the Jedi can be in love.
iIt's played off as a joke by Anakin, but it's a fundamental storytelling problem
that's never addressed.
ANAKIN: Possession is forbidden, but compassion, which I would
ANAKIN: define as unconditional love is central to a Jedi's life. So you might
ANAKIN: say that we are encouraged to love.
Welcome to Part Two: relationships and
motivation in Attack of the Clones. For the most part there's a universal
agreement that Attack of the Clones is the worst Star Wars film... I disagree but
more on that in part 3 of this series. Criticisms of Attack of the Clones
ranges from a repeat of Phantom Menace's core problems: bad acting; bad scripting;
bad directing; but for the first time, and also the last time in a Star Wars film,
it has a sin that I think is unforgivable. Somehow Attack of the
Clones lacks attention to detail. Attack has some cool ideas amongst a muddy
awkward story but almost every single moment that your 12 year old self loved
is undercut by details that are just... wrong. For example, in this dynamic battle
sequence between Obi-Wan and Jango Fett the attention to detail is stunning. From
the various gadgets the Jango employs to Obi-Wan's ingenuity, it's great fun
to watch as these two combatants beat each other in a bare knuckled brawl. Both
fighters are in their prime and it's a joy to watch. Except for one thing Obi-
Wan's laser sword is ignited in the rain. There's no steam... there's no satisfying
hiss.. there's nothing. In the middle of an incredible scene no one bothered to
think about how a lightsaber might work in the rain. They made Jar Jar fully CGI and
put in a chef with too many arms who's definitely a racist stereotype but they
didn't do the iconic weapon of the franchise properly.
There's about 20 of these minor errors throughout the film and they're mostly
forgivable if they're contained within a work that nails everything else, and
unfortunately Attack of the Clones does not nail everything else. So, let's start
by asking the obvious question: what is Attack of the Clones trying to achieve?
ANAKIN: your presence is soothing.
It is, at it's core, a film about a relationship.
Anakin is this teenager full of hormones while trying to adhere to the Jedi code
despite being mentored by the apprentice of a Jedi who never followed the rules
all the while falling in love with Padme. The conflict the film proposes should be
interesting. It's a complex web of intention that should lead to some
fascinating interactions between Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Padme - a love triangle between
two lovers and the Buddhist pursuit of nirvana -
or, in this case, balancing the force... whatever balance means.
Here's a few easy
conflicts that we never see that I generated in the first few minutes of my
research for this video. Anakin breaks the rules and is
challenged by Obi-Wan. Anakin retorts by referencing one of the many times
Obi-Wan has broken the Jedi rules without recourse. This would make even
more sense if in the first film Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon were the same character and
Anakin was the apprentice, but that's neither here nor there.
Obi-Wan challenges Padme's
encouragement of Anakin's affections and their friendship is frayed a little
stretched thin by Obi Wan's hypocrisy. Anakin and Obi-Wan have an argument that
isn't unprotracted by Obi-Wan dismissing Anakin immediately - because this happens
the entire length of the film, repeatedly - for some reason they never commit to an
argument.
So despite squandering the complexity of
these ideas Attacks Stars with a potentially compelling premise for the
relationship between Anakin and Padme - and this relationship forms the core of
the films. Padme needs the protection of Anakin and Obi-Wan, and as Anakin's
feelings grow, so to do his powers to protect her. It's an enticing setup that
always tricks me into thinking it'll go somewhere interesting. The turning point
in the film's understanding of relationships and attraction is in this
scene and it happens pretty early when Anakin talks to Padme about Obi-Wan.
ANAKIN: don't get me wrong, Obi-Wan is a great mentor. As wise as Master Yoda and
ANAKIN: as powerful as Master Windu. I am truly thankful to be as apprentice.. but in some
ANAKIN: ways... a lot of ways
ANAKIN: I'm really ahead of him! I'm ready for the trials
This is a good use of the
teenage angst angle as Anakin is eager to use this to vent his frustration at Obi-Wan, at
the same time endearing himself to Padme.
ANAKIN: he feels it I'm too
ANAKIN: unpredictable. He won't let me move on.
PADME: that must be frustrating.
ANAKIN: It's worse - he's overly critical he never
ANAKIN: listens - he doesn't understand! It's not fair!
Because we never get to see Anakin's
gripes happening these feel unfounded and distance the audience from him
immediately even though it's not the intention - he comes across as a whiny kid
PADME: our mentors have a way of seeing more of our faults than we would like... it's the only way we grow.
ANAKIN: I know
PADME: Anakin...
The underlying problem with the scene is
that Anakin's predatory affection for Padme is the resolution not the conflict
of the scene. The scene moves from positive to negative when Anakin says
"only..." this means the conflict of the scene ends up being about Padme and how
she'll react to Anakin complaining about Obi-Wan rather than about WHY Anakin is
complaining about Obi-Wan... because the why is really interesting. The why is
that he wants Padma's sympathy and it's really hard to do that when you're a
teenager because you struggle with empathy. It's a great set up for a scene.
So instead of having Padme retort with a suggestion that Obi-Wan probably knows
what he's doing or that patience is a virtue, or literally anything that fits
with her character, Padme emasculates Anakin in the weirdest way possible... and
the film implies that she's showing affection by doing it. I don't understand
why. Is this how George Lucas thinks flooding works? Is it just bad
screenwriting and bad direction? I'm willing to lean to the latter for
Lucas's benefit because he does some decent nuance with Han Solo so I guess
he just forgot how romance works... if the scene was supposed to be predatory it is
but rather than awkward and uncomfortable to show Anakin's
immaturity it confuses itself by directly addressing the subtext. The
subtext being: Anakin is being predatory and Padme isn't sure how to feel about it.
PADME: please don't look at me like that.
But there isn't any subtext in this film
it's just text and the text is awkward.
PADME: it makes me feel uncomfortable.
This is an easy fix with a few basic script revisions and proofreading as any
writer will tell you, most dialogue does start off as explicit text then you parse
it multiple times you work the text into subtext until the conversation sounds
like people talking instead of characters exposing at each other. From
this point in the film the problem of subtext versus text persists in pretty
much every scene, save a few.
ANAKIN: the people you serve thought you did a good job -
ANAKIN: I heard they even tried to amend the constitution so you could stay in office.
As we follow the ongoing relationship of Anakin and Padme these awkward half
tense scenes occur more and more. There isn't anything explicitly wrong with
these scenes because if you've ever serially dated for a long time you'll know
a lot of romances are like this, but it's odd that every scene they share together
features the same weird tone even after the initial interaction... and it should be
weird if in the film they don't end up together and I know that they don't get
together in this film... but they get married in the next one but that's not because
of their relationship it's because... I'm getting ahead of myself. That was
confusing. Let's back up a bit. The film's insistence on rewarding
Anakin's predatory affection makes the entire relationship fill disjointed and
vaguely sexist, but it never manages to be offensive or even interesting. One
moment that speaks to why the strangeness of their relationship isn't
intentional is this moment when Anakin and Padme are talking about politics and,
this scene has been made fun of a lot, but it's dynamic and complex and one of my
favorite scenes from the prequels. Anakin reveals his political beliefs
tentatively and both the audience and Padme aren't sure he's kidding.
ANAKIN: we need a system
ANAKIN: where the politicians sit down and discuss the problems, agree what's in
ANAKIN: the best interest of all the people and then do it.
PADME: that's exactly what we do...
PADME: the trouble is that people don't always agree.
ANAKIN: well then they should be made to.
PADME: by whom? Who's gonna make them? ANAKIN: I don't know? Someone? PADME: you? ANAKIN: of course not me but... someone...
ANAKIN: someone wise. PADME: sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me...
It works because he offers such an innocent solution without sarcasm that we end up
thinking the same thing as Padme: is he making fun of me?
ANAKIN: no I'd be much too
ANAKIN: frightened to tease a senator.
It's really clever and subtle it uses both
dramatic irony and dramatic tension as well as character conflict to build a
compelling scene. They also have great chemistry in this moment because the
dialogue is so well written. It's genuinely one of my favorite scenes in
the prequels and maybe in all of Star Wars... until Anakin surfs on a CGI cow.
We don't talk about the CGI cow thing...
As a side note, some of the dialogue in Attack is uninspired to the point where
it hurts. For example: ANAKIN: tell us now!
That being said, I wanted to look at this
scene to demonstrate my point about attraction and relationships and how
this reveals the underlying problem with the film's characters, because for a
story entirely about the conflict of personal feelings and religion, Attack of
the Clones takes the only really crisis of this idea and immediately resolves it
during its climax. This is a really really good concept for the crisis-
climax-point: the choice between saving Padme or following the Jedi Code. It's a
bit lazy and on the nose doing it like this, but it works as a concept. The
problem, of course, is the execution this moment is the real conclusion of
Anakin's arc. This is where he has to face the building tension of his anger
at Obi-Wan and Padme and finally stand up for what he believes in, but the
moment just goes away with no consequences because Padme is
immediately fine and Obi-Wan just kind of tricks Anakin out of wanting to land
the ship by making him think about what Padme would do.
OBI-WAN: come to your sense! what do you think Padme would do were she in your position.
ANAKIN: she would do her duty.
It's a total cop-out... really what obi-wan should do is
ask Anakin what a Jedi would do then they can argue and it can be genuinely
interesting.
As an aside because in the next film when
Anakin says from his perspective the Jedi are evil we could kind of see where
he's coming from if this had happened because their ideology would be properly
exploited during an important narrative and emotional crisis of this film and
then built on in the next one which is just basic metafiction a basic
storytelling, but this doesn't happen. Attack of the Clones isn't interested in
the conflict between its two heroes however. Instead, later in Anakin's fight
with Dooku this conflicts between Anakin and his feelings and Obi-Wan is just
sort of faux resolved by Anakin getting immediately taken out by Dooku.
OBI-WAN: we'll take him together, I'll go in slowly on the left-
ANAKIN: I'm taking him now!
OBI-WAN: No, Anakin, no!
It's just lazy and then to add insult to injury Anakin loses a hand as he saves Obi-Wan
even though he had no other choice but to stop Dooku. It's just bad and it
muddies the resolution and I don't even know what the message is supposed to be
there. Should Anakin have let Obi-Wan die? This is made more complicated by the
fact that this recklessness appears to just be a set up for the next film's
opening when they fight Count Dooku again. That being said the brief moment
with the dual lightsaber fight is very cool if you can forget the past 30
minutes of pure CGI that we just watched. Attack is unforgivable for a lot of
reasons that everyone has talked about endlessly so I won't rehash problems
like Yoda, or the sexualization of Padme, the horrific CGI sound stages, and the
70s diner - that's been done to death but just remember they're still there and
they put a smudge on the film's potential not just as a Star Wars film but
as a production in general. Ultimately, my real problem with Attack is that it
never committed to the romance or the political conflicts one way or the other.
This film should have been entirely about Anakin and Padme's relationship
conflicting with the Jedi Order or alternatively been about Anakin's
arrogance conflicting with Obi Wan's hard-and-fast hypocritical morals.
Because to the film's credit the idea of a Jedi Order at the peak of their power
who can't become a militant force for the Republic, a peaceful governing body,
is actually pretty interesting. It's a really nice mirror of the collapse of
diplomatic resolutions post World War I during peace talks... just with space Samurai
in starships. The Jedi are so powerful that all they do
is sit around and debate. It's such a great idea that they could have done
something really good and really compelling with.
I guess what I'm trying
to say is that Attack of the Clones is a failure of genre and theme. As we talked
about in the last video Phantom Menace is bad because the direction and script
are stale leaving very little character conflict in any scene. Conversely, Attack
of the Clones fails because it doesn't observe genre conventions of a
coming-of-age story, a romance story, or a war story, or any conventions at all.
Contemporary literary theorists like Shawn Coyne and Blake Snyder rightly
assigned genre as a set of expectations that an audience have about a story
rather than a marketing category just to sell a book. For example, a romance story
has required elements: boy meets girl, there's a first kiss, there's a breakup
there's a complicated outside influence, the complication is destroyed and the
mating couple get back together, or realize that they never needed to be
together in the first place. Similarly, coming of age requires starting at
ignorance, trials, and the testing of one's worldview, then at the end the
protagonist receives what they needed at the cost of what they wanted or vice
versa. You can do both of these genres at the same time and do them well just look
at Edge of Tomorrow or 500 Days of Summer. They leverage and use internal
and external genres well. These concepts work if the central idea of a
film is consistent and then you overlay the genre conventions to help generate
structure and narrative drive. With Attack of the Clones the central premise
does sort of exist, but it's never focused enough to be of
any value for the film structure. Even when Anakin butchers the sand people the
love versus Buddhism thing isn't addressed at all.
Padme is even okay with his behavior to some extent.
PADME: to be angry is to be human.
ANAKIN: I'm a Jedi. I know I'm better than this.
Whatever tension was to be found from the biggest conflicts in the
film is never addressed in the text, or the subtext... which means that we have to
talk about an alternate reading of Attack of the Clones that's really
complicated and hard to talk about, but I'm gonna do my best.
What if we're all wrong about Anakin? What if Anakin isn't forgiven by those
around him because they actually forgive his actions, but what if they're scared?
What if Anakin is right? What if Obi-Wan is holding Anakin back from the trials
because Obi-Wan knows that as long as they work together Obi-Wan can rein in
Anakin from hurting others. Anakin does have a lot of the signifiers of being an
abuser. He isolates those he loves - although to be honest the plot does a
lot of that for him, a convenience that speaks to Lucas's
ability to construct this idea more than anything, but he still does he
deliberately goes out of his way to make sure that he can spend time with Padme
alone. Even attacks those around her when possible. He blames others for his
feelings: it's Obi-Wan's fault he feels frustrated and held back.
ANAKIN: it's all Obi-Wan's fault! He's jealous! he's holding me back!
It's Padme's fault he feels in pain around her.
ANAKIN: you are in my very soul
ANAKIN: tormenting me
This, in particular, this signifier is one that in real life is
very easy to spot and it makes sense that Lucas would write this into
Anakin's character. Anakin is hypersensitive about everything - he's
very quick to anger and very quick to become emotional. And then there's the
last one the cruelty to animals or children.
This is an interesting alternate read of this text in particular and it's worth exploring
further because it's obvious Lucas really wanted this to be a part of the
work. But the film is also trying to be a kid-friendly coming-of-age romance story
as well as a war film, a political thriller, and the kind of space samurai
exploration cowboy thing, so this idea never really lands and it's odd that it
stayed in the script in the first place. But it's worth keeping in mind the film
may be trying to address some more complex themes here but as always it
struggles and fails in the execution. The result of Attack of the Clones disparate
pieces is a film that's between so many things it never lands - this ironically is
a key tenant of Buddhism and the Bardo Thodol - a theme the prequel films attempt
to explore. Stay with me here. The Bardo Thodol is the Buddhist cheat
sheet for enlightenment. It provides the closest path to achieving Nirvana and
describes being as existing in transitions there is no life only the
time between being born before the arrival of death; there is no existence
only the time after coming to be before achieving Nirvana and being snuffed out
from being. The prequels try to examine these ideas through the lens of the Jedi
a religion of Buddhist analogues who sacrifice attachment in the pursuit of
powers - or eventually, like Qui-Gon become, one with the force. This is a direct
analog for achieving Nirvana. In Star Wars you become a force ghost returning to
the oneness of the universe. It's not really a subtle analog. In Buddhism you
return to the collective from which you were created in the first place thus
ending your suffering. Anakin is the promise of this ability for the Jedi to
achieve Nirvana. In a literal sense Anakin is prophesied to bring balance
to the Force, to end suffering, and the goal of Buddhism is to end suffering and
achieve Nirvana, so Anakin is the one to help the Jedi
achieve this. He's basically a Buddha but this is complicated by the Christ
imagery and direct metaphor. Doing both the Buddhism and the Christ myth is
complicated because the Christ mythology relies on the virgin birth which was
written in direct response to rabbinic and Gnostic mythology basically to
simplify some complicated concepts for the Christ figure of Anakin to work the
virgin birth has to be resisting some existing mythology or ideology that
Lucas was influenced by, but this isn't the case.
Anakin being born of virgin
birth adds nothing to the story it just complicates the Buddhism and the rest of
the themes. So if Anakin being painted with a Christ brush does a little but
conflate the Buddha analogue and half complete the Christ myth why keep it in
this story?
The themes here are so complex and delicate it's no wonder the
film struggles it took me a long time to research and understand these concepts
and I'm barely there, so I can imagine trying to combine this with an
examination of love, attachment, politics, space Samurai, and teen angst
and you've suddenly got nine films worth of content let alone trying to put that
into a two and a half hour film.
But more on that in part three.
From a stumbling middle build
to an uninteresting climactic fight scene, especially compared to the Darth
Maul fight, the biggest lesson from Attack of the Clones has to be to hire
editors and writers who will say no. People to cut bad or needless ideas off
of that root. People who will interrogate your dialogue. People who
will interrogate your scene work. In meetings they'll say things like "no the
inciting incident shouldn't be Anakin trying to sleep with Padme while she's
under life threat."
"No, we shouldn't half-ass the romance element it must
either be the central plot, or relegated to minor screen time, or discarded entirely."
"No, the progressive complication of the film should be in the film not off
screen." I could go on for hours. Basically, this video is a nice reminder of why
writers hire editors and study genre. Writing well is really difficult, and chances
are that you're not Stephen King or Neil Gaiman - you need to work with others to
make your projects better. And behind every great writer is a great editor, a
lesson that Lucas somehow forgot.
Ultimately, Attack of the Clones is too
much of everything, and worse than that it ends up saying nothing at all.
The Antagonist is me David McNeill. We are edited and produced by Digital and
Creative Media Works head to patreon.com/dcmworks to support us, or just
head to www.dcm.works to find links to our other shows, merch, and everything else
that we make. Thanks so much for watching I know this one was much longer than I
intended but I'm glad I got to cover some of the more complex topics. If you
did like this the best way you can help support the show is just to leave a
comment down below by letting me know what you thought of Attack of the Clones
and stay tuned for part three very soon.
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