Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

There’s this phrase in writing circles that I both love and loathe:

Kill your darlings.

I loathe it simply because it’s hard, sometimes damn near impossible. It’s always excruciatingly painful. I’d compare it to getting your teeth drilled, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. More like getting your teeth drilled with a rusty Black and Decker and dilluted novocaine. Killing your darlings means removing everything that doesn’t completely service the story, no matter how much you may love it. Very often the scenes that are easiest to write, the ones I get excited about, will be excised by the end of a story. Many times the scene I started with, the one that shattered my writer’s block with its invigorating content, ends up being redundant or gratuitous when all is said and done. I’ve avoided stories for months at a time because I didn’t want to go through with one of these executions. Even when I knew it had to be done, I figured if I avoided it for a time perhaps the scene would gain some relevance (i.e. justification) in the grand scheme of things. Alas, it rarely does, and I’m forced to tearfully cut away those moments I had grown to love.

Discipline is the operative word here. Good writers have it. Bad writers don’t. And good writers can still catch the bad bug from time to time. I immediately think of Thomas Harris, whose Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs are tremendous macabre thrillers without an ounce of fat on them. Everything serves the story. But Harris’ Hannibal is nothing if not gratuitous; what else would one call a scene in which Hannibal serves Starling her partner’s brains for dinner (while he is still alive)? Hannibal is proof that even the best of the best lose control of their creative instrument from time to time.

Nobody in their right mind would ever consider George Lucas a great writer. A great imagination? Absolutely. A visionary? Sure. But focusing grand ideas and mythologies into relevant scenes and exchanges of dialogue? Please.

Lucas writes dialogue as if it were an unfortunate requirement of modern cinema. Considering the number of references Star Wars makes to the silent film Metropolis, I get the impression Lucas would much rather be working in that era. Modern filmgoers expect genuine human emotion expressed in their dialogue. Lucas probably would have been much better served with one or two grandiose clichés splashed across silent film placards rather than the agonizing exchanges in Attack of the Clones.

The scent of sloth and apathy in each line of Clones’ dialogue sparks like ammonia. I specifically recognize the aroma because I fell victim to “character indifference” in my early days of writing. Who wants to worry about boring things like character and dialogue when in just a few pages you have that huge battle with a thousand Jedi and tens of thousands of robots and… You get the idea.

Lucas might just as well have put in “blah blah blah love” and “blah blah blah Force” and “blah blah blah Dark Side” considering how much time and care he seemed to put into his dialogue. One scene early in the film perfectly demonstrates this laziness. Obi-Wan and Anakin are talking after arriving on Coruscant to guard Padme. Obi-Wan comments that Anakin looks exhausted, and the young Jedi confirms that he has not been sleeping well because of frequent nightmares.

“About your mother?” Obi-Wan asks, to which Anakin nods.

“I don’t know why I keep dreaming about her,” he responds.

Well, gee, I don’t know. Why would you be dreaming about her? It’s not like you left her on a desert planet ten years ago, confined to slavery, while you went off gallivanting through the galaxy with your drinking buddy. Oh wait. Yes you did. This dialogue makes no sense. It's like Lucas knew he needed some dialogue there, so he inserted whatever sounded passable and moved on.The proper question for Anakin to ask would be “Why wouldn’t I be dreaming about my abandoned mother?” It should be all he thinks about. He should have gone back to retrieve her long ago. And why didn’t he? Well, because there’s that whole thing with the plot. The plot requires that she die horribly.

And ironically, the prequels’ tragic flaw is that slavemaster called predestination -- the requirements these films must fill in order to meet up with A New Hope. These requirements immediately hamper the creative process. The best writing flows organically from the characters’ actions, leaving infinite possibilities for a plot's trajectory. An author may have a vague idea of where the story is going, but a good writer won’t force a story in a direction it does not want to go. Lucas, from the get go, has to.

Lucas is basically playing a rigged game of Plinko, that perennial favorite from The Price is Right. Nobody would find Plinko appealing (save those fortunate enough to play) if the contestant got to stand in front of the board and knock the chips in a favorable direction if they got off track. Where’s the drama in that? The drama comes from those times when the chip swings all the way to the side of the board, with the audience screaming “No!” before it slashes its way back across and lands in the grand prize slot. Even with the destination set in stone, Lucas still could have taken us all over the map before bringing us back to center. Instead, he drags the characters and their performers around by a leash, servicing the plot at the expense of everything else.

Anakin’s mother is one of the most glaring examples of this. A writer with any sense would have had Shmi Skywalker living in the suburbs of Coruscant when Episode II began. Why the hell didn’t the Jedi step up and say, “Don’t worry about your mother. We’re living large here and we have more than enough to pay for her freedom?” Shoot, they could have paid double just to make sure that they freed her with no hard feelings. “Clouded, this boy’s future is,” Yoda said. Well, it probably would have been a little sunnier if his mother wasn’t enslaved.

I understand that Lucas planned on using Shmi’s death to exacerbate Anakin’s fear of losing Padme in the third film. That still could have been done without digging this immensely illogical plot hole. To me, losing his mother by chance would be much more rattling and horrifying than losing her because of blatant disregard for her well-being. For Anakin, the great hook of the dark side is the promise of saving his loved ones from the inevitability of death, not the danger of it. People die. We try as hard as we can to prolong lives, to protect and heal, but in the end we’re just delaying the inevitable.

Shmi’s death at the hands of Tusken Raiders spoils numerous dramatic possibilities because it’s logically inexplicable and thematically misguided. I’ve already detailed the ridiculousness of Shmi’s continued enslavement. The fact that she remains a slave as her son grows in power is absurd. But the real unfortunate part of this plot turn is how Lucas misses a more compelling (and logical) way of leading into Anakin’s dark turn after his mother’s death. In the third and final prequel, we learn that the major crux of Anakin’s turn is his desire to save his loved ones from death. By having Shmi die such a preventable death, Anakin’s concern and fear lack depth and scale. What would have been much more compelling from a dramatic standpoint would have been to rescue Shmi from her slavery, only to have her die from a natural illness once she avhieves freedom. Anakin would try everything he could to cure her, except for one thing – turning to the dark side. Having eventually failed to save his mother, his rising fear of Padme’s demise would then push him over that final line. We can empathize more with Anakin having watched him do all he can to save his mother. But the way Lucas wrote it, we simply wonder what he was thinking leaving his mother in the desert.

For a perfect illustration of how this theme can be played to perfection, check out season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In an Emmy-winning episode titled “The Body,” Buffy, the chosen one, the mighty hero, after dedicating her life to saving people from the external threats of vampires and demons, comes home to find her mother dead on the sofa having suffered a lethal aneurism. It’s blunt, immediate, and cold. The type of death that would scare the hell out of Anakin, and it would have made Palpatine’s promise of sustaining Padme eternally that much more appealing and comforting.

Of course, we might understand Anakin’s desire more if Lucas had given us a convincing love story to follow in Clones, but instead it feels like these two fall in love only (again) because the plot requires it of them. Whether this love plays convincingly to an audience clearly runs secondary to the story going where it needs to go. That’s very unfortunate considering the talents Lucas has in his leads. Portman made a name for herself over the past decade in The Professional, Beautiful Girls, and Cold Mountain, but watching her in Attack of the Clones it is hard to believe that is the same girl who won raves this past year in Garden State and Closer. Since Hayden Christensen came from virtual obscurity to play Anakin Skywalker, people got a poor introduction to his talent. Shattered Glass and Life as a House are more indicative of his abilities and proof of Lucas’ inability (or unwillingness) to work performances out of his actors. He’s more fascinated with the world of blue surrounding his leads.

And that’s the crux of my displeasure with Attack of the Clones. Forget the story and the “dialogue,” as much as they may have pained me. My main displeasure with Clones comes from that word I mentioned at the beginning of this article: discipline. Lucas has so many digital toys at his disposal, he has all the restraint of a six year-old on a Toys R’ Us shopping spree. And though it takes hours, if not days, to create digital representations of people in a computer, Lucas seems much more willing to go that route than to put a person in a costume and march them onto a set.

I have something of an aesthetic allergy to computer animation. Lucas and the wizards at ILM are clearly at the top of their “art” in the prequels, yet something essential is still lacking from today's digital effects. There’s a detachment between those effects and the audience, no matter how convincing the effects may be from moment to moment. No matter how convincing the texture of an alien’s skin may look, or the way their hair falls, there's an absence behind those unnaturally sparkly eyes that is unmistakable. They the eyes are the window to the soul. Never is that more true than with Lucas' digital creations.

One must concede that filmmaking as a whole is about pretense; nothing is truly real. Sets are constructed, lighting manipulated, and performances coordinated. Whatever makes its way to film is the product of thousands of hands doing their parts in big and small ways. But when filmmaking is at its best, we forget the façade and accept it as “real.” Unfortunately, in computer animated spectacles like Attack of the Clones, the façade draws too much attention to itself to allow for full immersion.Everyone heaped praise on the epic battle that concluded Attack of the Clones, but I found myself taken completely out of the film by it. By that point I was already slipping away after an hour and a half of two-dimensional writing and acting, but when Episode II suddenly became a glorified Xbox game I abandoned any hope for the film whatsoever.

One need only look at Lucas’ compositions to know that he heavily favored his beautiful vistas and elaborate settings over the emotions of his characters. Much of the film is shot in wide or medium shots, devoting 70% to 90% of the frame to background elements while keeping us at an emotional distance from the characters. I doubt the number of close-ups in this film is greater than twenty, and I would guess that half of those are devoted to Lucas’ digital creatures like Jar-Jar and Watto and Yoda.

(It should be noted that the most subtle and nuanced performance in the entire film comes from Watto, the stubbly cross between elephant and dragonfly, who used to own both Anakin and his mother. The moments where Watto discerns Anakin’s identity after ten years is the most convincing acting in the film).

Special effects always work best when they revolve around the films characters. For proof of that, compare the final battle of Attack of the Clones with the podrace from The Phantom Menace. The podrace is centered on one character, Anakin, and it is shot accordingly. We alternate between close-ups of young Anakin working in the cockpit to Point of View shots from inside the cockpit forward. We’re with Anakin through the entire ride, and it is one of the most visceral sequences in any of the Star Wars films – pure inventive, exhilarating fun with a character at its core.

The final battle of Attack of the Clones is shot in wide shots with thousands of computer generated “troops” battling with no coherent objective other than to blow stuff up real good. The battle goes several minutes at a time without a single human onscreen. There are lots of representations of humans, but very few real human beings. It’s just a big mess with no focus.

Compare that to the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. That sequence is every bit as grand in scale as the Kamino battle in Clones, yet it finds a way to focus each moment on characters, most notably Tom Hanks’s captain. When a bomb goes off near him and we lose the sound just as he loses his hearing, we’re taken into the battle with him. We absorb the horror of everything he sees, as he sees it, while the low drum of sound dissipates and his hearing returns.

In Attack of the Clones, the ground war is a completely gratuitous experiment in special effects; all of the major characters flee the battle almost immediately to pursue Count Dooku. What is the consequence of any of this noise then? People were impressed by this? Ok. But did the audience care? Were they concerned at all? Not like in Saving Private Ryan. And not like in Return of the King. Why not? Because the characters weren’t there to be concerned about. This is what Lucas has in mind for a climax? That’s like taking your starters out in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series. What point is there for spending twenty long minutes in the guts of this battle if it has no direct consequence for any of the characters we’re supposed to care about?

I talked to a guy in L.A. who once got a meeting with Steven Spielberg about one of his scripts. I anxiously asked him what it was like. Apparently, Spielberg just kept asking the same question over and over as he went through this man’s script:

“What does the audience feel here?”

Simple. Direct. The purpose of every scene ever put on film – to make the audience feel something. If Lucas had any integrity, he could answer this question only one way.

“Hey George, what does the audience feel during this massive battle between the droids and the clones?”

“Nothing, Steve.”

Final Grade for Attack of the Clones: D