May 17, 2002
A short time ago (3:00 PM EDT, 16 May) in a theater not far from here (Loews at the Waterfront)...
Well, it was better than Phantom Menace. Of course after Phantom Menace I would've been happy to see a bunch of Ewoks... Anyway, in some places it was even a good action movie.
I'm beginning to wonder if my dissatisfaction with the prequel trilogy is caused by the fact that I know how it has to end. Everybody knows that Anakin grows up to be Darth Vader, everyone knows that Padme Amidala's gonna sprout a set of twins who are Luke and Leia, everyone knows that Chancellor Palpatine becomes the Emporer and is also Darth Sidious. Everything else is really just filler.
But I think there's more to it than that. These last two movies just didn't seem like Star Wars movies. Sure, they had all the characters, but they just felt wrong. I have to agree with some of the online reviews I've seen: Lucas appears to be more concerned with how cool the backgrounds look than with the story itself. If he'd spent half the time he invested in effects on the script, I think the movie would've been much better.
As it was, the story seemed to take a back seat to the purty pictures. George, you need a well-written plot to make a movie interesting, to make it good. If all I wanted was cool imagery, I would've played a video game.
Anyway, onward into Spolier Country:
The only really good scenes I saw in the whole movie were toward the end: The Jedi fighting a seemingly endless wave of battle droids, followed immediately by Yoda showing up with the clone army (aside: I'd always figured the clones were the bad guys), and the Yoda-Dooku battle (more on that later). Everything else was just ... there. The love story between Ani and Padme were fairly well-done, but the dialogue made me gag in a couple places. People don't even talk like that in old B-movies.
Well, it advanced the story. We now know how Palpatine consolidated his power, and how he's apparently orchestrated the whole thing (on one side as Palpatine, on the other as Sidious). We saw the first part of Anakin's conversion to Vader, with him losing his arm in the fight with Dooku, a leak I unfortunately read and was thus waiting for. I probably would have seen it coming anyway, since Lucas seems to have gone to great pains to parallel Empire Strikes Back.
We saw the plans for the Death Star. This is both good and bad -- good, because it had to have been in planning for a great many years before its costruction and appearance in Star Wars; bad because Lucas retconned away the computer image from SW. Remember how the plans the Alliance dug up had the main weapon in the equator while it was about 45° latiutude on the real deal? The assumption was always that the rebels had very old plans. The "blueprints" shown in Clones, though, had the weapon in its final position: We're being asked to believe that the Rebels had 20-year-old plans to go on, and trusted them.
Anyway, some short takes:
- I'm pretty sure I saw an Imperial Guardsman in the background in the scene where Palpatine is ordering Amidala back to Naboo.
- The clone's transport ships look like an early version of star destroyer and the clones' helmets are very much like the stormtroopers'. Do the clones become the bad guys in Episode III?
- A fucking wild man, Yoda is. The little green mofo can really throw himself around in a lightsaber battle. And absorb Dark Side ligthing. And move very large and heavy pillars that are going to fall on Our Heroes. Practically all at the same time. Now we know why Obi-Wan held him in such high regard in Empire.
- We've all seen the first (second?) three movies, George. You can lay off the heavy-duty foreshadowing.
Well, that's about it. In conclusion, worth a matinee showing (although I'd skip Saturday if I were you) but not worth eight bucks to see at night. Go rent Empire instead.
May the Force be with you. Or something.
