Chris Curtis dot Org

Hello, my name is Chris and I’m a Star Wars fan.  I saw Episode II (”Attack of the Clones”… I still don’t like the title that much) last night.  Waited in line quite a while and had excellent seats.  This movie was everything The Phantom Menace should have been and wasn’t.  I’ll have to see the movie again to be sure, but—for me at least—it’s right up there with Empire as the two best SW films so far.

Read on for some more thoughts (and some spoilers).

I’ve been avoiding learning anything about this movie for the last several months.  I still haven’t seen any of the trailers or commercials (though now I need not change the channel.) and I avoided them because I wanted to go into the movie knowing as little as possible about the plot.  I’m glad I did that because I had only the vaguest idea of what to expect, and thus couldn’t really be too disappointed except in the whole overall “Star Wars” sense.  Luckily, the movie didn’t disappoint.

AotC has it all: space battles, land battles, droids, clones, lightsaber fights, massive battles, small battles, assassination, duplicity, a sappy love story (and it is pretty cheesy), and even a gladiator arena!

Jedi kick ass.  Yoda really kicks ass. Jango Fett is awesome. It’s really cool to see stormtroopers (er, I mean, “clone troopers") kick some ass… and they can even hit the broad side of a barn!  Senator Palpatine is starting to look a lot more like Emperor Palpatine.  We get to see our first Royal Guardsman!

I did, however, have a couple of problems with the movie.  First, why in the world did Shmi Skywalker die like that? “Hi mom, it’s Anakin.” “Oh, Ani, I love you.” ::croak::  I mean, she just up and dies for really no reason.  Couldn’t she have died in the escape attempt?  Or at least make her appear more injured than a couple of cuts and some dirt.  Poor scripting.

I was about to complain that it wasn’t clear why the Clone Army was ordered in the first place.  However, I think I just realized the reasoning behind it.  Not sure why I didn’t see it last night… Palpatine wants to rule the Republic and not just be a figurehead.  To do this, he’ll need a military since the Republic is very decentralized and rather “independent”.  To justify having the army, he’ll need opposition, which is where the Trade Federation, et al, and their droid army come in (again, but somehow this time it works a lot better than in TPM).

Being the good “Evil Overlord” that he is, though, Palpatine thinks ahead.  He knows that once the “huge threat” (read, droid army) appears, he’ll need something with which to fight it.  So he has his new apprentice (a Jedi master seduced from the Council, no less!!) secretly go off and order an army of clone troopers created and trained, all under the guise of working for the Jedi Council.  The huge threat appears and then Palpatine conveniently has an army with which to fight it.  Thus begin the Clone Wars.

Oh, and one last thing.  The Galactic Empire, Emperor Palpatine, death, destruction, and dictatorship… Somehow deep down we all knew the real reason, but it was good to see that Lucas didn’t let us down: It’s all Jar Jar’s fault.

Posted Friday May 17, 2002 in Rants by Chris Curtis

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