Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
(2002) dir. George Lucas
viewed: 07/02/02 at Fremont Theater, San Luis Obispo, CA
If you had told me at age 10 or so that when a new Star Wars movie would come out that it would take me over a month and a half to finally get to the cinema to see it, I would really never have been able to comprehend such a possibility.
And yet, it was so.
I was indeed a rabid Star Wars fan as a kid, but even by 1983’s Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi, I was getting over it. When the first two came out, I was at prime target audience age, 8 and 11, respectively. But by 1983, the whole thing was already wearing thin. Some nearly twenty years later, when the second wave of films started coming out, I was a much more cynical film student, and the film was much, much worse.
One actual excuse that I have for waiting to see this film is that I had been hoping to catch a digital screening of it and the times that it played didn’t sync up with my schedule. I held out a while, but when the opportunity arose to see it in the beautiful Fremont Theater of downtown San Luis Obispo, I decided that that was good enough. The Fremont is a beautiful art deco single-screen cinema that I always enjoy seeing films in.
What can I say about this film. These Star Wars films are ridiculously over-analyzed, not necessarily by theorists or hardcore academics, but by far too numerous fans, etc., so much so that almost any ground I would cover would easily have been pre-tread by thousands already.
I guess that has been part of my problem with this film series as an adult (and former film student). The experience of these films for me as a child was one of genuine excitement and rapture. But this intense sensation was not unique at all. The films are so adopted by so many in such more intense and massive proportions, that my feelings seem well-diminished in comparison.
And this feeling of cynicism is probably not uncommon either. It is probably akin to every intense experience that one has that one later realizes is not personal but universal. Maybe it’s simply tied into an evolving world view that sees the self as less of something distinct and more just a jot in the mass of humanity, not even distinguished by some of the more extreme sensations that have played out in life.
Have I digressed, or what?
This film has some terrible acting. And awful dialogue. In the more personal love scenes between Anakin and Padme, it is downright embarrassing and atrocious. It’s stunningly bad. The worst part might be the love scenes where they are frolicking in the field. It’s like a deoderant commercial. Only worse. It almost is beyond description.
That said, the whole first half of the film is pretty awful in that way. Somehow, the second half manages to redeem itself considerably. That is not to say that any of the bad things about it get any better,…the pace and narrative just pick up and the film moves more quickly. It’s a good distraction from its poorer qualities.
The funny thing is that I wound up enjoying it, seeing the storyline’s puzzle pieces click into place, tying into the whole epic story that had begun years before. So I would have to say that, yes,…despite myself, I did enjoy it.
A professor of mine many years ago pointed out that he thought that the original Star Wars trilogy was in some ways a personal representation of the locales of George Lucas’s life. Tatooine is Modesto, the desert town that was also the location of his American Graffiti (1973), also his birthplace. Later, he used the redwood forests of northern California as the edenic location for the finale, in which case the representation was quite literal.
I can’t recall all of the details of this analysis, hokey as it is, but Lucas does use real landscapes for location shooting that he transforms and envisions as unique planets. Each planet in the films has a corresponding place on Earth that it both “is” (was literally the location for the shoot) and “represents”, commenting on each location by what type of action takes place there or what type of characters inhabit it.
So maybe my professor wasn’t too far off in looking for the more personal story told behind the big epic.
Anyway, it was better than I thought it was going to be. And worse, too.
