On C3P0's amnesia and The Beatles...

Rating: 6/10 (18 May 2002)

Episode II: Attack of the Clones is fine sci-fi entertainment and a definite improvement on its predecessor. But does it deserve the Star Wars brand name?
Gone is the bold economy of the earlier works; I am reminded of the scene in the original film in which Moff Tarkin informs Vader that the Emperor has dissolved the senate. One line, that's all we need to know, back to the fun stuff; the background politics are sketched in and give the movie extra weight and character, but they do not intrude upon the central action. It doesn't matter if we miss all mention of the senate, or if we are too young to know what a senate is and understand the effect its disollusion will have - all we really need to know is that a bad guy has a beautiful girl locked up and she needs rescuing. In AotC, there are an awful lot of officials looking very grave and saying and awful lot of things to each other in a very grave and official way. All political manoeuvrings are up there on screen and consequently the entire film is a slave to them. Gone is the gung-ho swashbuckling adventuring of a motley band of rebels - these guys have government endorsments. (And this is significant: George Lucas is no longer the rebel fighting against the rigid and out-dated studio establishment with his low-budget motley crew, he's one of them now, he is Hollywood hierarchy.)
The plotting: The original trilogy was an epic tale of good against evil, drawn from myth and legend and ancient tales. It was elemental, it spoke to us all. Every part of it - the characters, the situations, the plot - was an archetype, and that's what made it great, a real feeling of an age-old story playing itself out against the backdrop of space. To be sure, everything about AotC is fine: the characters and story are good, the visuals superb... but it's a TV mini-series. It doesn't speak to race-memory as the original trilogy did, it merely does everything it should to take the story from point A to point B. The overwrought political machinations, the complex character motives, the somewhat lacklustre set-pieces all belong to a 10-part serial explaining to us what happened leading up to the actual movies.
The set-pieces: it's all fine fun, but where are the great, indispensable moments? Maybe, at a push, the final duel of the first film and Yoda going nuts in this one, but that is all. Do a couple of poisonous centipedes, a rainy brawl, a dangerous conveyor belt and some gladiatorial action even compare to the trash compactor, the space station which blows up planets, the assault down the trench, the snowy battle against lumbering tanks, the father-son revelation, the Sarlaac pit, the speeder bike chase etc. etc. - indelible scenes which turned cinema upside down and yet at the same time seemed to have been around forever? The original trilogy was teeming with defining, iconographical moments, whereas pretty much everything in TPM and AotC has been... adequate.
Add to the plot complexities and diluted pacing Lucas's seemingly compulsive quest for ever-tightening spirals of internal continuity. In the original film, R2D2 and C3PO were the lowly "everymen" with whom we could identify and who just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time - they found themselves parties to a magical adventure beyond their wildest dreams. They were merely two droids, any old droids, knocking about the ship at the start of the story but who ended up part of something special. They were proof that any of us could have what it takes to be heroes. But now what? C3P0 was built by Darth Vader and spent 12 years on a farm he had no recollection of sometime later when he just happened to drop by there again by sheer one-in-a-billion chance; R2D2 was in it right from the outset and wasn't in fact lying in the original film when he said that he was the property of Obi-Wan Kenobi in order to get the message to him - it seems that Old Ben (in similar fashion to C3PO) was suffering some form of advanced amnesia when he claimed never to have owned an R2 unit! So in fact, when we join "innocent bystanders" R2 and 3PO at the start of the original film, there's a whole lot they're not telling us.
In many respects, Star Wars reminds me of The Beatles. Yes, Free As A Bird and Real Love were nice tunes in an airbrushed, MOR kind of a way, but compared to I Am The Walrus, Hey Jude and Strawberry Fields Forever, they are worlds apart. And the reason is the same: like The Beatles in 1995, George Lucas is no longer lean, hungry and desperate to prove himself against the stodgy might of the old establishment with his pioneering spirit of invention - he's middle-aged, comfortable and has the whole world at his disposal... and that means a whole lot of polish for very little wood.