childhood fantasies redone

Rating: 10/10 (16 May 2002)

Some friends and I were waiting 2 hours in line last night to show our support for struggling film company Lucasfilm's latest amalgamation of collective conciousness's hopes and dreams entitled Attic of the Clowns. In line I wondered what people would think of the series thirty years from now. What my children would think of it. (Though waiting in line for Star Wars movies will likely not add to my procreating anytime soon.)
I couldn't help but breathe deep in an effort to calm my fluttering heart. So many years of boredom would hopefully be soothed in the two hours, thirteen minutes. I would soon enjoy utter and complete Star Wars release.
People complain that they know what's going to happen and therefore these prequels are tarnished. But one must not look a these films, or any film, or anything that can purport to being art, from that perspective. If twenty years from now I'm sitting with my children watching all six films in a row, (which I guess Lucas was going for as opposed to us watching the last three then the first three) that won't be the point. And if the films are held up as touchstones for generations--which in our culturally barren and getting more so each day world, that could very well be possible--they're not going to care what order they come out in. actually, I saw Jedi first (at age four in the theatre), then Star Wars, then Empire, then Phantom Menace. And I imagine that the love scenes I see passing between Portman and Christensen will still make me green with envy as they are living in a world where actions matter, and I'm worrying about bills and what to say to my wife to bring the love back to our marriage. That's all beside the point, as viewing the movie changed all my rhythms of existence and experience of time, as films should.
People also complain about the love story element of this movie, but that's because they're comparing it with films, stories, and plays of our time--of works they're comfortable with--and here I think that Lucas's love story's sterility and alienness actually further the believability of the piece. True, some of the dialog seems generated on a BASIC program, but the complete otherness of their love forced me into a place where I believed they were existing in a world where the rules we understand and take for granted simply don't apply. Perhaps it would have been best if they did not speak at all.
In fact, it reminded me of what love was like before the hyperkinetic notions of romance we understand as the-only-way-to-love-today existed. In medieval European times (on which the pacing of these films are based) courtship was fast, often silent, and loved ones didn't speak. They had no need to. They weren't trained to exist by television and scripted fabrications and patterns of existence.
Compare the love scenes in this to those in Kubrick's Barry Lydon for a different AOTC romance comparison than, say, to "Dawson's Creek." They love in a totally different fashion and as far as I'm concerned, the more difficult to understand, the further our regular lives are placed from the Star Wars universe and the more believable it becomes. The characters and events should not operate on the same grounds that we do. And for the most part, they don't. I even found myself wondering, "do these people have sex in the same way we do?" "Do they even do that?" and such questioning of these basic principles and assumptions great art do make.
As for the climactic battle sequence, the attack of the clones, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The points of the film that did relate the Star Wars universe to ours brought it down a notch for me. If these people are so technologically advanced, why would they still be fighting ground wars? The last ten years of military exercises on the part of America seemed more technologically advanced than most or all of the Clones stuff and a single bomber in our Great American Arsenal could have rendered the great clone army and the great robot army moot. And why would Jedis risk their lives fighting robots on a ground war when 1990 United States War Machine could take out an Iraqi soldier from 5 miles up?(By the way, good referencing the Vietnam helicopter infantry in that finale scene, Lucas) If Jedi's have the technological wherewithal to fold space, why can't they accomplish similar things? One can't delve into such scientific minutia in certain parts of the film (e.g. explanations and displays of cloning) and not elsewhere. To make this all work, we have to be experiencing the movie as not relating to our understanding of physics at all, but that they evolved differently and perhaps were unable to perform such military actions, unable to feel and express such Earthling affection. They still fight in medieval fashion. There aren't even any trenches here, they must love in such an alternate manner as well. Perhaps that the only way these people are built. Who knows, accept their reality for what it is and enjoy the film. I certainly did.