The Clone Wars:

The Supreme Chancellor Palpatine builds battle droids and clones on Geonosis to be the muscle to enforce the Federation's wicked ways. In EPISODE II the clone factory is attacked by the Jedi.

Kevin's review: (opening night):
There's so much going on you don't know where to look next, like some giant visual pinball machine in constant kinetic motion. The big problem is it doesn't add up to much. I came out of the movie theater feeling disappointed.

There's only two stories going on in all this digital muddle: Palpatine wants to sweet talk Anakin into becoming the next Sith to replace Count Duchu, and the marriage of the slave boy Anakin to Queen Amidala must remain in secret, but she finds herself pregnant when he returns from the Clone Wars. Each of these stories are short-changed while the visuals are overloaded, so you end up with an ice-cream sundae with two teaspoons of ice-cream and a gallon of whipped cream and five hundred cherries. The most important part of an ice-cream sundae is the ice-cream; Lucas forgot the ice-cream.

First the big story: Palpatine is supposedly held prisoner by Count Duchu. Why? It's never explained. Two Jedis go through a long-winded space battle to find him. They dodge all manner of strange droids--buzz droids and vulture droids that stay on the wings and sap into the R2 droid servicing the plane. Obi and Anakin talk back and forth, but it's not even banter. It's a lame sort of I need to say something here. But it's not important. The movie talks way too much. The huge question we want answered is why does Anakin turn? He's like Lady Macbeth and has nightmares about his wife dying in pregnancy. The special effect for the nightmare sequence is pathetic. Since believing this nightmare is so important why is the effect so bad? Amidala announces she's pregnant, he's happy, then cut, nightmare--she's going to die. Why? Because he can forsee the future? His Jedi force allows him? There's a lame tension between Anakin and Amidala. What's wrong? Nothing. Tell me. I had a dream. Was it bad? Yes, the dialogue is this primitive. You don't believe it for a second. The big mistake here is Lucas has missed something in his attempt to be Shakespearean. Anakin's fall isn't worthy to be Shakespearian, because he's not fighting for anything. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth needed to kill King Duncan to take over. It had been foretold by the three witches. Anakin is supposed to be the chosen one to bring balance to the force, but his ambition to not to bring balance to the force. His ambition is to save his wife from dying. Why is he so convinced she will die? And then he talks to his shrink Yoda and evades the sage's advice. How can Yoda possibily help him if he's not honest. Having said that everybody seems to know this secret marriage: Obi guesses it, Palpatine acts like he knows, and acts like he knows Anakin's nightmare. How? Oh, he's a Sith, or he's bugging Anakin's bedroom? If a Sith has this power, it's never been established earlier, or explained once he does it.

So, the two stories can never amount to anything, because we don't believe for one second where they're going. One might argue who watches STAR WARS for the story, the acting? It's all about the lifesaber fights, the ships moving in space, the rousing John Williams music, the father/son conflict, the cute and funny robots. They don't do any of these that well. Williams score is forgetable and recycled. The robots aren't cute. C-3P0 seems to be on Prozac, R2-D2 has a couple of very funny moments with the elevator not working. The big, bad guy is General Grievous, a skelton with a cloak and a persistent cough as if he's about to croak from consumption. But this is STAR WARS not LITTLE WOMEN. He's CGI and moves great, that's a big thing this movie did well. Almost every political move is a set-up or trap for the enemies of Palpatine to get caught in like some perpetual Venus fly-trap. Yoda has to help some Wookie separatists to fight, and the Clones are attacking them horribly. There's a great moment when Yoda feigns dead and zaps them. He's got some great moves attacking two guards at a door, too. Yoda is good, but that backwards talk is really grating at times. The holograms are quite good, the cityscapes are good and involved, but really there's only a few locations they come back to: The Senate, Amidala's apartment and Palpatine's office. Palpatine wants to bring peace by gaining special powers from the Senate. The movie is obviously a statement about tyranny destroying democracy: how a Napolean takes over in the confusion and disarray of the French Revolution, or a Hitler takes over the Third Reich and Mousollini taking over ruling Italy. Amidala in Earth History was the name of the Queen of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies before Italy was unified. But this is Political Science 102 at best. For all the intended political back and forth, you wonder how anything ever gets done or people survive more than a week doing anything. It's a grim galaxy full of corrupt political hyenas. Anakin tries to keep noble about his Jedi code which apparently is simply to help other people. But we never see them helping others directly. It's always a meeting, which turns out to be a trap, which leads to a laser fight. And does that get tiresome quickly. A typical scene is when evil Palpatine is fighting Mace Windu, Mace can only arrest him like a good cop, or good knight. Given these rules, Palpatine will easily win every time. No contest. Anakin gets on his high moral ground, then proceeds to allow Palpatine to walk away with everything. And all for Padme, who he will not allow to die. How does he know for sure, that selling his soul to the Sith devil who claims he can teach him the dark side of the force and bring Padme back to Life. She's not dead. They never foreshadow that Anakin is a hopeless dreamer and believes his visions. And this great love for Padme? We never see it. She runs to him a few times pleased to see her; he seems to snarl a lot. They're not exactly happy when they're both living. He sulks and won't communicate; she's pushy and wants to know everything. Where is the love?

Despite Anakin's long, long apprenticeship with Obi Wan and saving the Chancellor, the Jedi don't trust Anakin. They fear he is too close to the Chancellor and anticipate almost every single move. It's like an elaborate chess game, and just as dull to watch. You never quite know what's happening in this movie, even when it's explained to you, or Obi leaves, but doesn't really and rides a huge monster lizard to quietly overhear Grievous' next diabolical plot move. Nobody of course hears that loud f**kin lizard! And these Jedi seem to be able to jump down five flights into a waiting vehicle, or onto a platform somewhere, or in the last big action sequence Obi duffs it out with Anakin over a lava flow. That whole planet Mustafor seems to be an active volcano with droids carrying buckets like they are mining the lava. Where are the farms growing crops from the rich soil? Wookie world was nice with it's huts like Vietnam. And some rock place had been built into a vast hole in the ground. Strange worlds, never really explained.

I did like many things. I liked Anakin better in this one. He was easier to read. But I could never believe this stupid dream of his. And why does Palpatine cut off Duchu, a Sith Lord, so easily to replace him with the younger and better Anakin Jedi Knight, then go back over to Lava world and scrape off Anakin and put him together again as Lord Vader in a black mask. Can't be too many qualified Siths around. Talk about outsourcing.

The screenplay is first or barely second draft at best. Polishing a first draft doesn't make it a final draft! You have tyo justify and explain all the scenes, characters and actions being in place. And make it all inevitable. Anakin's seduction by Palpatine is never explained. Unless that concerned father act is what Anakin badly needs. But Anakin seems to have a mother fixation, not an absence father fixation so they doesn't rattle any cage.

And overloading all the bells and whistles will only get you so far. I wonder what the rough cut was like two years before they added all the digital wizardry. For a franchise this huge, and this midnight crowd was psyched for a great film, but we got this one delivered instead. Thank goodness he stopped after 3 years or he'd still be tinkering with it. Yes, it fills in the blanks, but needed three enormous things: the acting should be above soap opera, the writing has to be way slicker, and the cross-cutting between two action sequences doesn't always make for better forward drive to the narrative. And I hated the look of the lifesaber: the light beam is too wide and not pretty. The $120 lifesabers from BEST BUY the dress-up guys in the audience were playing with for three hours before the movie started were better looking and more convincing. Lucas should learn a huge lesson from this movie. I can't beleive he released like this. He has to trust the force of his story and give it the necessary elements to tell it right. Five hundred cherries won't help a lack of ice-cream in this ice-cream sundae. The franchise is huge and generous millions upon millions. There's a lot of good will in the audience wanting to see something great. Lucas delivered something which could have been so much better. When a director ignores the screenplay he takes a huge leap of faith into the void. It's written and directed by George Lucas. He doesn't want to claim screenplay credit, it's "written by." Some scenes are so thin. Lucas allegedly had a 90-minute comic book film made of this story, and tons of animatics to envision the action. I guess he ignored the dialogue scenes. The big action sequences are the critical sequences in any movie, but the rest of the movie (the dialogue scenes) have to justify the action, make it credible, make us care. Lucas has become too mechnical in his writing: have the people in the scene stand over here by the greenscreen, now talk. The stiff THE PHANTOM MENACE serial had wooden acting, a hop along plot and awful props. Lucas is stuck in the 30's. His ROTS has wooden acting, a dense plot that a 14 year old at the Saturday morning matinee couldn't follow. Why did choose Tom Stoppard to do a script polish. Is Anakin a Hamlet who can't decide his own fate, but he can't act? Like the Macbeths he lacks a moral compass. The Jedi Knight code is supposed to be that compass. Controlling the force. But in the Saturday morning matinees the choice between good and evil was crystal clear. In Europe in the 1930's it is not.

THE PHANTOM MENACE was a Saturday morning serial at the movies. I have the entire collection on video.

The cliffhanger serials typically had simple acting (we may call wooden), but the plot moved along.

BLACK MASK was a popular pulp magazine which feature short stories which with big on easy to grasp bad guys, quick nasty action and ruthless underworld behavior. Atmosphere and mystery and a good read were lauded over making sense or character development. They were "pulp" not Tolstoy.

After the Dust Bowl destroyed the land in the mid-West, Route 66 was the way-out of starvation: to Los Angeles and to Portland.

In Europe, after WWI there was the rise of a phantom menace: facism. Hitler was gaining power in a hyper-inflation ridden Germany Mussolini was gaining power in Italy. Mussolini took over Ethopia, a move that later inspired Hitler to take over the Suderland and Poland. Together this menace went unrecognized; America and England didn't take it seriously enough, which ultimately led to WWII.

Kevin's take on STAR WARS 1-2-3 is that Anakin is the rise of Mussolini, who was to become the "junior ally" of Palpatine (Hitler). Mussolini's mistress (i.e. hidden woman, as in the wife doesn't know) was Clara Petacci. Their love flourished in Lake Como. Amidala and Anakin spend their secret romance there. Amidala is in history the name of a Queen of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Ironically, Amidala gives birth to Luke and Leia. Lucas has taken history and shaped it into a compelling mythology about the abuse of power, and how a country can be menaced and never see it coming. The Jedi Knights (good people with noble intentions) get slaughtered in the ruthless agrandizement of power. That is what STAR WARS is all about.