Attack Of The Clones

Got my tickets for Thursday and await it patiently.

Raspberry?

My theory about the way Lucas directs his actors is that if you're handy enough to handle minimal direction, you'll find your own spin on things to bring the character more to life (thus the various subtleties Liam Neeson brought to his part, say, or how Harrison Ford steps up in the original Star Wars so easily). I'm guessing Christensen needs more active direction than Lucas normally applies (ever since the first trailers I've had my doubts about the performance), so I'm coming in with that frame of mind.

Six hours to go! I've heard that neither a Two Towers nor new Star Trek trailer is attached to the copy at the theater I'm going to, which puzzles me greatly. Apparently I'll get the Matrix teaser, the new James Bond, Minority Report, couple of others.

My biggest concern was Christensen, so I was keeping a very careful eye and ear on him throughout (whereas I knew Ewan would do a fine job straight up, and did). There are one or two sequences I would rewrite if I had the chance (I was seriously thinking the fireside romance side would have Anakin admitting all the overheated prose was his clumsy attempt at expressing himself, which would have a little more human), but you know, he did a pretty damn good job. Importantly, I think, scenes that in the various trailers seemed forced or halting actually made much more sense in the finished film, in terms of explaining his reactions. No, no Oscars, but no raspberries either...if anything, he helped make Darth Vader that much more of a human character in retrospect. Let's see if he can really shine in III with more experience under his belt.

The hints of the 'future' throughout were at times amusing, at times creepy and chilling. The obvious homage to Blade Runner throughout the Coruscant sequence worked well, the machinations of Palpatine perversely elegant up to the concluding moments. What happened to C3P0 in the final battle sequence was an amusing touch, and Yoda, well...it's clear what he can do now. :-) It ended on just the right note of hesistancy (and credit to John Williams, the main love theme sounds perfect as a balance of romance and mourning). I approve, I do. :-)

What do you think of George Lucas's justification for crappo acting and dialogue? Kind of interesting, I thought.

Two words: Wookie porn.

Here's a good page for more info -- and plenty of screenshots!

Overall I found it more funny than painful so I am not going to whinge about spending money to see it. Besides it was hilarious watching the shortland st actors in there. Is there no escape?

Fave bits/thoughts:

i) The advertising, clubs and diner. I was pleased to see this attention to detail, as I have often wondered about the things other than the war and politics.
ii) The C-3PO/ battle droid.
iii) Yoda!
iv) Anakin being well on his way to the darkside
v) Dying in unfortunate ways runs in the Fett family. Mace Windu better watch his back in episode 3.
vi) Ewan was quite good!
vii) Natalie Portman, cool outfits! The kids in the cinema were getting bored at all the love stuff.
viii) The Jedi ain't really that good at seeing the future or sensing the darkside.

Can't wait to see it again!

'Attack of the Clones' is a cinematic turd. A quick inspection of it and you can tell what films Lucas has been studying for inspiration. Gladiator, Titanic(witness Lucas and pals discussing the boat movie's success in awed tones on the Episode 1 documentary 'The Beginning'), and was the (pretty rubbish) droid factory sequence really inspired by 'Chicken Run'? Looked like it.

Still, bloody great fun. Ace battles and space ships and lots of really great noises.
Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, sorry Count Duckula, sorry Count Dooku was cool. Tone darker. Yoda... was it David Fincher who said that the series was having to be carried by a muppet? Well, Yopda's no muppet now. I still can't figure out just how they made that scene work. Ewan's hair an improvement (that bit where he was hanging onto the little flying droid though was just daft). Father and son Fett were (properly) wicked. Fat cafe owner creature was brilliant, one of the truly great CG aliens that have a real presence and life, like Watoo and, now, Yoda. Oh, and Portman's spray-on outfits as well. I liked.

but I don't know, I mean I REALLY liked The Phantom Menace but in some non specific way this one hasn't done it for me in the same way.

Why YES I'm obsessed. Now leave me alone. ;-)

Another thing that I thought was great about the movie was how the good characters are shown busily doing things to shoot themselves in the foot. Jar Jar and Padme do some wildly inexcusable stuff here, particularly given that we know what the eventual outcome will be. I really like the theme running through this prequel trilogy of good people making precisely the wrong choices and the eventual nastiness that can lead to (although a large portion of me can't help but wonder how the majority of the galaxy's life was different under the Senate as opposed to the Empire).

Yes, the theme of incorrect choices causing further problems is a fine one, and clearly the last film will just hit the nail on the head squarely on that front (and arguably Luke faces that problem too -- his running off to fall into Vader's trap in Empire, then nearly giving into the Emperor's wishes in Jedi).

I like your vision of Mace there...I think the question of who the Jedi are actually serving and for what purpose is going to be a key theme of the final film, if not the key theme.

Has anyone noticed the fatalism that haunts Yoda? I think he already knows what is going to happen, I mean he is the most powerful jedi on the light side after all. The future cannot be changed. And after all the prophecy is for one who will restore balance to the force, which at the time of Clones is stacked in the favour of the lightside.

Oh and how will R2 D2 and C3PO get programmed (though, I have a sneaky suspicion that R2 and Obe Kwon do recogonise each other in Star Wars but 3PO has def had his memory wiped).

UNCLE OWEN (meeting the Jawas and buying C3PO, thinking to self): "That's odd, we had a translator droid that looked a lot like this one and even talked the same all those years ago. Who knew? Anyway, R2 units..."

I was thinking this initially, but while "order" and "democracy" are in ascendancy, Yoda and Mace have a conversation stating that their Jedi powers are waning because of the growing power of the Dark Side.

Padme ain't gonna die none in the film, I'm guessing. Remember that in Jedi Leia remembers her mom from a young age, and Portman has said that she'll be pregnant in the next film rather than already a young mother.

Joei and I said the exact same thing about Jango Fett's head, BTW. :) And I now see how the 'NSync cameo could have worked without being forced and painful (hopefully, they would have been made up as those blue aliens with the twin aardvark snouts sprouting out of their forheads).

I still have not seen this yet, might do on Wednesday but it's not something I've been dying to see. Maybe if there were more Yoda porn I would be more interested.

In the first 3 movies the Jedi were a mysterious lost knighthood with mystic powers, but now we know that they were actually thirty nerds with carny haircuts who sit around in a circle stroking their chins on The Planet of Traffic and do the odd David Blaine trick in bars.

Darth Vader was this ominous force of darkness - but he turns out to be a whiny, horny bedwetter with a rat tail. He looks like he should be selling sno-cones. He's a puppy.

It was a real mistake to make a prequel series like this - the end is a foregone conclusion so Lucas has tried to jazz it up with an utterly uncompelling convoluted plot about political intrigue. Does anyone really care about these trade federations and backroom machinations? The Lord of The Rings film was able to convey a complex history with factionalism and twisted loyalties while keeping the action urgent and exciting. Clone Wars plot was too contorted, too obsessed with explication - it never gets rolling on its own. It never feels like a story that needs to be told.

It's just a piece of garbage.

It said in the paper that George Lucas has definitely dropped the idea of making episodes 7-9 and the the next one will be his last Star Wars. This is a bit of a shame. I liked the idea of dragging out an ancient Mark Hammill and Harrison Ford in a kind of 'Grumpy Old Men' like reprise. Maybe someone else will make it.

I don't know why I'm getting drawn into this.

Palpatine's are. Control of the whole society and destruction of the Jedi.

Without trying to sound too much like Joseph Campbell, sometimes it's not what you're telling but how you're telling it. When it came to the Greek tragedies, for instance, everyone already knew the story -- question was how to tell it.

In this case, I find the confusion to be part of the attraction of the story. We do know what's going to happen to an extent -- they don't, and that makes their fate all the more distressing. Also, like I muttered, it seems clear that the Jedi as an organization suffered to a large extent from hubris and are about to get cosmic payback.

(clue tolkien = heidegger w/o hobbits => BUT WHERE ARE THE HOBBITS??)

Jedi Council: Restore balance to The Force. Are currently attempting to achieve this by mistakenly helping the people who are pushing The Force out of balance in the first place.

Dooku: Allied with Palpatine. May have secondary goal to grab power, but so far is playing out as second-in- command in a startlingly-elegant manipulation.

Trade Federation: They are making a purely selfish power play in the interests of revenge and profit. Initially they attempted to use internal corruption in the Republic to achieve this (EpI) but didn't realize how tangential they were to their allies' plans. They've now rededicated themselves towards exacting vengeance upon the people who have wronged them (Amidala and Palpatine) and seizing power (financing their robotics supplier to build up their army and develop a world-destroying weapon).

Anakin: Wants to make everyone do the right thing. Current problem areas lie in that this is an inherently fascist view and the allegedly benevolent person he wants to support is actually an evil power-crazed bastard. Also, he's a tempestuous brat with a deadly weapon.

Padme Amidala: Believes in the Republic and in executing her duty to her people as their chosen representative. She either doesn't recognize the level of corruption running through the current system or (more likely) is being manouvered out of the way so that her opposition on key matters can be neutralized. (See Jar Jar in EpII, her stand-in in EpI.) She is also torn by the forbidden love she feels for a little boy who stands on the brink of toppling in the wrong direction. She gives in to this love, partly out of fear of death and partly because she seems to think that she can help moderate Anakin's increasingly erratic emotional outbursts.

This is what I walked away from the movie with, without reading any fan-fiction or indulging in any more discussion of the film than you've seen on this board.

Capybaras!

http://www.rictus.com/viz/photos/nature/capybaras.jpg

While the first films were all about free will and the individual's ability to change the universe, the new ones are all about predestiny and fate.

Not arguing with anything fritz says here, but these are the very things that have most pleased me most about Eps. I and II. All this trade stuff is great (ha ha I am a boring eurocrat!). Also an "unhappy ending is guaranteed" is far more interesting to me than the "happy ending is guaranteed" aspect of IV & VI.

At the Lars', when r2 plays back the message from Kenobi, I really wanted dialogue to follow like anakin saying "Who is he, he's gorgeous". message, what message? etc i think the trigger was 3p0's "He says he has a message from one Obi Wan Kenobi" or something equivalent and I fell about.

I agree with whoever it was who said that this film cribbed heavily from Gladiator--not just the sequence in the arena, but the spectacle of Anakin ranting about Obi-Wan supposedly holding him back reminded me of the previous film's portrayal of Commodus as a whiny Gen-X stereotype. And the Jedi fight scenes were Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with light sabers.

(I suppose Joseph Campbell and other Star Wars mystics have already noted the Oedipus motif in Luke eventually having to battle his father?)

There's supposedly a bootleg edit of The Phantom Menace that heavily cuts out Jar Jar and otherwise tightens up that film. I'd like to see an edit of AotC that reduces to a minimum the relationship scenes between Padme and Anakin. Okay, their love is forbidden by Jedi code and their offspring are presumably foreordained as part of the "bring balance to the Force" prophesy. But I think those sequences would have been improved if Britney Spears and a random boy band member had been playing the roles. Is there any chance that the direction of the third film could be taken out of Lucas' hands, on the grounds that an influential cultural legacy is at risk?

I'm not that zealous a Star Wars fan, but I expect to see the third film when it comes out. However, if TPM and AotC is what Lucas can do with millions of dollars, state-of-the-art special effects, and presumably any writers and actors he wants, it's probably for the best if he doesn't make episodes 7-9.

A mock petition has been circulating for some time that urges him to hand the reins over to Peter Jackson. ;-)

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Hey, France - Uruguay is starting.

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Nicole, stop describing Ned.

This past week I have told countless people to put away their drink, turn off their damn cell phones, to try and put things away correctly and in general stop acting like STUPID GODDAMN FUCKUPS when it comes to studying for finals. Right now I'm on the side of the stereotypes, woo-hoo! ;-)

But Nicole does have a point. She is, after all, friendly, helpful and cool, and not a stereotype. :-)

I kept wanting to heckle the screen but the theater we were in was deathly quiet and almost empty. the only time the audience really seemed to react was once c3po showed up, and the people I was with admitted that his jokes seemed more corny and forced than normal.

I'm not opposed to the whole serialistic space opera writ large project, but he's just doing it really fucking badly. his writing for characters in the high end of society is an enormous weakness - senators, jedi, royalty, etc., and they did most of the talking in this one.

Caught it again last week on the local digital theater, to see if the image quality is all it's meant to be (and indeed, it is). Also had fun catching some of the small touches and mistakes people had mentioned -- Jango Fett's helmet being dented a bit when he runs into his ship, the Coke can by Christensen's feet at the end of the lakeside/balcony sequence, Liam Neeson's voice after Anakin starts killing the sandpeople.

That said, where I was absolutely impassioned enough to see Fellowship something like seven times during its theatrical run, I'll probably only see it once more in theaters with a friend who has been waiting to catch it herself.

Hmm...I dunno, that's the kind of thing that seems a lot easier to do with music, say (quick download, three minutes listening, can do at home). But I admire yer dedication. :-)

Putting slangy dialogue in McGregor's mouth when he's doing a Guinness impression, tho, aiiiiieeeeeee! Esp when he stops in at Mel's Diner.

Count Dookie shoulda done better