Wilmington and Ebert on "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones"

It is not what's there on the screen that disappoints me, but what's not there. It is easy to hail the imaginative computer images that George Lucas brings to "Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones." To marvel at his strange new aliens and towering cities and sights such as thousands of clones all marching in perfect ranks into a huge spaceship. To see the beginnings of the dark side in young Anakin Skywalker. All of those experiences are there to be cheered by fans of the "Star Wars" series, and for them this movie will affirm their faith.

But what about the agnostic viewer? The hopeful ticket buyer walking in not as a cultist, but as a moviegoer hoping for a great experience? Is this "Star Wars" critic-proof and scoff-resistant? Yes, probably, at the box office. But as someone who admired the freshness and energy of the earlier films, I was amazed, at the end of "Episode II," to realize that I had not heard one line of quotable, memorable dialogue. And the images, however magnificently conceived, did not have the impact they deserved. I'll get to them in a moment.

The first hour of "Episode II" contains a sensational chase through the skyscraper canyons of a city, and assorted briefer shots of space ships and planets. But most of that first hour consists of dialogue, as the characters establish plot points, update viewers on what has happened since "Episode I," and debate the political crisis facing the Republic. They talk and talk and talk. And their talk is in a flat utilitarian style: They seem more like lawyers than the heroes of a romantic fantasy. In the classic movie adventures that inspired "Star Wars," dialogue was often colorful, energetic, witty and memorable. The dialogue in "Episode II" exists primarily to advance the plot, provide necessary information, and give a little screen time to continuing characters who are back for a new episode. The only characters in this stretch of the film who have inimitable personal styles are the beloved Yoda and the hated Jar-Jar Binks, whose idiosyncrasies turned off audiences for "Phantom Menace." Yes, Jar-Jar's accent may be odd and his mannerisms irritating, but at least he's a unique individual and not a bland cipher. The other characters--Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padme Amidala, Anakin Skywalker--seem so strangely stiff and formal in their speech that an unwary viewer might be excused for thinking they were the clones, soon to be exposed.

Too much of the rest of the film is given over to a romance between Padme and Anakin in which they're incapable of uttering anything other than the most basic and weary romantic cliches, while regarding each other as if love was something to be endured rather than cherished. There is not a romantic word they exchange that has not long since been reduced to cliche.

No, wait: Anakin tells Padme at one point: "I don't like the sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating--not like you. You're soft and smooth." I hadn't heard that before.

When it comes to the computer-generated images, I feel that I cannot entirely trust the screening experience I had. I could see that in conception many of these sequences were thrilling and inventive. I liked the planet of rain, and the vast coliseum in which the heroes battle strange alien beasts, and the towering Senate chamber, and the secret factory where clones were being manufactured.

But I felt like I had to lean with my eyes toward the screen in order to see what I was being shown. The images didn't pop out and smack me with delight, the way they did in earlier films. There was a certain fuzziness, an indistinctness that seemed to undermine their potential power.

Later I went on the Web to look at the trailers for the movie, and was startled to see how much brighter, crisper and more colorful they seemed on my computer screen than in the theater. Although I know that video images are routinely timed to be brighter than movie images, I suspect another reason for this. "Episode II" was shot entirely on digital video. It is being projected in digital video on 19 screens, but on some 3,000 others, audiences will see it as I did, transferred to film.

How it looks in digital projection I cannot say, although I hope to get a chance to see it that way. I know Lucas believes it looks better than film, but then he has cast his lot with digital. My guess is that the film version of "Episode II" might jump more sharply from the screen in a small multiplex theater. But I saw it on the largest screen in Chicago, and my suspicion is, the density and saturation of the image were not adequate to imprint the image there in a forceful way. Digital images contain less information than 35mm film images, and the more you test their limits, the more you see that. Two weeks ago I saw "Patton" shown in 70mm Dimension 150, and it was the most astonishing projection I had ever seen--absolute detail on a giant screen, which was 6,000 times larger than a frame of the 70mm film. That's what large-format film can do, but it's a standard Hollywood has abandoned (except for IMAX), and we are being asked to forget how good screen images can look--to accept the compromises. I am sure I will hear from countless fans who assure me that "Episode II" looks terrific, but it does not. At least, what I saw did not. It may look great in digital projection on multiplex-size screens, and I'm sure it will look great on DVD, but on a big screen it lacks the authority it needs.

I have to see the film again to do it justice. I'm sure I will greatly enjoy its visionary sequences on DVD; I like stuff like that. The dialogue is another matter. Perhaps because a movie like this opens everywhere in the world on the same day, the dialogue has to be dumbed down for easier dubbing or subtitling. Wit, poetry and imagination are specific to the languages where they originate, and although translators can work wonders, sometimes you get the words but not the music. So it's safer to avoid the music.

But in a film with a built-in audience, why not go for the high notes? Why not allow the dialogue to be inventive, stylish and expressive?

There is a certain lifelessness in some of the acting, perhaps because the actors were often filmed in front of blue screens so their environments could be added later by computer. Actors speak more slowly than they might--flatly, factually, formally, as if reciting. Sometimes that reflects the ponderous load of the mythology they represent. At other times it simply shows that what they have to say is banal. "Episode II-- Attack of the Clones" is a technological exercise that lacks juice and delight. The title is more appropriate than it should be.

Movie review, 'Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones'
by Michael Wilmington

George Lucas has the last laugh, or at least the penultimate chuckle, with "Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones" (which opens at 12:01 a.m. Thursday at many local theaters). The fifth movie in his long-running series of grandiose, light-hearted space operas and the second in chronological order is the most visually spectacular and exciting of all "Star Wars" movies to date.

Lucas carries the "Star Wars" saga 10 years past the much-maligned "Episode One — The Phantom Menace," extending the yarns of old favorites such as wizened master Yoda, adventurous robots C-3PO and RD-D2 and newer additions such as the youngObi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), his cocky protegee Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and the beauteous Padme, Former Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman).This movie should thoroughly please old fans and even create new ones, even if it probably won't win over critics who believe the series has turned into the movie equivalent of a slick, vacuous theme park.

The story shows Jedi samurai Obi-Wan and Anakin defending ex-Queen Amidala (now a mere Senator, like Hilary Clinton) in a series of increasingly apocalyptic skirmishes, as more and more is revealed of a vast conspiracy to undermine their republic: a plot hatched around the creation of a formidable humanoid army cloned from surly bounty hunter Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison). Actually, it's the same set of archetypal adventures, swordfights, cliffhangers and blastaway battles and counsels of war that have marked every "Star Wars" movie.

Yet, defying the curmudgeons, who (with some justification) damned his 1999 "Phantom Menace" as a cliched, over-juvenile disappointment and bore, Lucas has stretched his imagination and technical mastery to the limit — jam-packing his movie with churning excitement and visual — if not verbal — wit. Lucas harks back to the youthful brio that informed 1977's "Star Wars" and some of the darkness that made "The Empire Strikes Back" the series' consensus critics' favorite. You can tell that he and his technicians are having more fun with this one, and they keep treating us to blowout action sequences, fantastically detailed alien worlds (an Italian renaissance hideaway that looks like a Maxfield Parrish villa, a long sandy Tattooine homage to "The Searchers") and hilarious aliens who recall old Astounding Science Fiction Magazine covers by Kelly Freas.

Nothing in the first four movies quite matches the continuous visual bravura of this one, which is almost as much a digital age marvel as the '77 "Star Wars" was of an earlier era of miniatures and models. For most of its 2-hour span, the movie keeps topping itself, not dramatically, but with one pure, explosively delivered, ripely detailed action set-piece after another — from a hell-for-leather nighttime skycar-chase through the metropolis of Coruscant's noirish spires and skyscrapers (a knockout scene that suggests "Blade Runner" crossed with "The French Connection"), through a terrifying fight on a slickened hull in a planet of eternal rain to an extravagant mock-Roman show-battle before evil Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) in an arena full of robots and rhino- and spider-monsters: a set-piece that suggests a Looney Tunes version of "Gladiator."

Some of the plucky spirit of the first movies are revived, and other things too — especially Yoda (now digitally created but still voiced by Muppet master Frank Oz), the little green reverse-speaking warrior-savant who actually brings down the house in one unexpected turn toward the movie's climax.

This is a landmark film, for technological bravura (and its trailblazing digital filmmaking and projection process) if nothing else. If it can be easily faulted for cardboard characters and clunky dialogue, then it should be recalled that these are defects of the entire series — which takes most of its cues from the old "Flash Gordon" serials, as clunky and cardboard as they come. The dialogue in "Clones" isn't any worse (or better) than the dialogue in the first "Star Wars" and, in treating the Flash vs. Emperor Ming plots as if they were worthy of a David Lean-John Ford epic visual style, Lucas supplies a straight-faced humor that his detractors mistake for straight-lowbrow lunacy.

The appeal of the "Star Wars" movies has always lain in their mix of grandiosity and naivete, the mammoth scale that Lucas brings to the kind of space opera story that in its '40s-'50s heyday was almost always encumbered with the cheesiest of effects and the campiest of low-budget techniques and acting.

What's more interesting about the movie is the way it piles on epic sweep and links up more strikingly with the "future events" of the first trilogy. So we see Palpatine, the future Emperor (Ian McDiarmid) wheeling, dealing and betraying in the Senate, setting in motion the crises that will turn the republic here into the evil Empire. We see heroic young Anakin wooing Amidala in a courtship we now know will result in the births of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia — and we see Anakin displaying an arrogance, temper and penchant for dictatorship that will ultimately turn him into dark warrior Darth Vader, tyrant/father of trilogy No. 1. As for the acting, it's as serviceable and archetypal as most of the performances in "Lord of the Rings" or any other "Star Wars" movie. Nobody is as irritating as Jar Jar or the child Anakin were in "Phantom Menace," and if Anakin and Amidala are not classic lovers — if one of their scenes suggests "The Sound of Music" with armadillos — they're pretty enough to win us over. Oz's Yoda and Anthony Daniels' C-3PO are likably wise or twee and Lee makes almost as fabulously cruel a villain as James Earl Jones' Vader. As for McGregor, he makes a nice transition from callow warrior in "Menace" to a more preternatural cool — with canny foreshadowing of Alec Guinness' older Obi-Wan.

All the performances though are secondary to the overall vision. This is visual storytelling of a high order, and though we've heard and seen it all before, it has never been with quite this childlike awe and incredible elaboration. "Attack of the Clones" celebrates a certain youthful spirit in both moviemaking and movie watching; because it's as much phenomenon as movie, audiences will either ride with or reject it. I was happy to take the ride.

"Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones"
4 stars
MPAA rating: PG for sustained sequences of sci-fi action/violence. Some of the action is more intense and frightening than the rating would indicate, including a decapitation scene.
Ewan McGregor...Obi-Wan Kenobi
Natalie Portman...Padme Amidala
Hayden Christensen...Anakin Skywalker
Frank Oz...Yoda
Ian McDiarmid...Supreme Chancellor Palpatine
Samuel L. Jackson...Mace Windu
Christopher Lee ...Count Dooku

A Lucasfilm Ltd. production, released by Twentieth Century Fox. Director George Lucas. Producer Rick McCallum. Executive producer George Lucas. Screenplay George Lucas and Jonathan Hales. Story George Lucas. Cinematographer David Tattersall. Editor Ben Burtt. Costumes Trisha Biggar. Music John Williams. Production design Gavin Bocquet. Supervising art director Peter Russell. Set decorator Peter Walpole. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

I think Lucas probably has a very good meta-narrative going, but he's not so great on the character side of things. For me, the characters are what make a movie, so it's not looking good.

I've heard more than one of these critics praising the original trilogy. The fact is that Luke is annoying in A New Hope -- whining throughout the movie.

I have to admit, I am very much looking forward to seeing him! I got a sense from a really short clip from a Christopher Lee interview that the character isn't a simple bad-guy, that he has some legitimate concerns about the Jedi Order and part of his character's function is to point those weaknesses out. That will be fun, although I will have a hard time not snickering when I hear his character say, "You must join with me, Obi Wan..." Hehehe, now where have I heard him say something like that before?

Massive spoiler for those who are yet blissfully unaware (highlight to read): SPOILER Count Dooku is the new Sith apprentice! His Sith title is Darth Tyranus, as we find out toward the end of the film when he meets his master, Darth Sidious (the real one, not yours truly :-)END SPOILER

With that in mind, Dooku is set to be the most complex character of the saga, only surpassed by Anakin. I suspect that Dooku's motives are VERY elaborate, and not merely "I'm bad and I'm gonna kick your tail". No, Dooku will do that too... but at heart, I do believe he's got a higher good in mind, in a sort of "Doctor Doom"-ish sense.

Just got back from the early showing, this was a great movie! The best battles and light-saber duels ever.Jar Jar is only a bit player in this one, maybe about 20 seconds of dialog. Lucas paid attention to fan's complaints and made a much better movie.

Oh, it's a GREAT movie, but it could have been a LOT better still. I'm very disappointed with a number of things (the scenes that were cut, the wooden/forced romantic scenes, some other stuff).

And Jar Jar had a much more impressive role in the script. Hope he gets more time on the DVD.

Yoda! The theater went wild when Yoda brushed aside his tunic to reveal his lightsaber then went absolutely nuts when he engaged Count Dooku in an unforgetable light saber duel. That alone was worth the price of admission.

The theater went wild when Yoda brushed aside his tunic to reveal his lightsaber then went absolutely nuts when he engaged Count Dooku in an unforgetable light saber duel.My oldest boy and I just got in from seeing it. I did chuckle when Yoda reclaimed his walking stick and started creeping along, after that "brisk" lightsaber fight!

We'll go together, ok?

It's a deal! However, I don't know if I can promise to wait till you get back from Alaska, so we'd better see it quick! ;)

The theater went wild when Yoda brushed aside his tunic to reveal his lightsaber then went absolutely nuts when he engaged Count Dooku in an unforgetable light saber duel

Same here. By far the best part of the movie. Yoda is the best! But Anakin spoke and acted like an obnoxious spoiled brat ("That's not fair!"etc..) and Obi-Wan Kenobi wasn't charismatic at all.

A good movie, though, worth seeing.....once...unlike LOTR.

How many months before TTT?

Lucas had to be very, very careful with the Yoda/Dooku duel, to prevent it from looking ridiculous. He was, mostly. The look on Yoda's face at the start of the duel was priceless.

That was NOT my favorite part though - Anakin matter-of-factly describing what he did to a group of freebooters was the part that most transfixed me. Niiiiiice foreshadowing.

Some parts of the story dragged a bit, and Samuel L. Jackson DON'T got game, but the tech was awesome. Go see it - you know you want to!

So, any bets on the title of Episode III? I'm putting my oar in for "The Fall of the Jedi.".

It is not what's there on the screen that disappoints me, but what's not there

But it's what is on the screen that you are supposed to be reviewing! He did this same thing with Lord of the Rings, and he was DEAD wrong there. He didn't like it because it wasn't made the way he thinks he would have made it. This makes no impression on me.

Dan

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