20th anniversary of Episode II - Attack of the Clones

He's always had the most positive attitude, it seems, out of virtually any prequel cast member, even including the likes of Liam Neeson, Ian McDiarmid, and Ahmed Best. Although, I award those guys pretty high marks, too. But it's somehow more significant when it's the young Canadian heartthrob, playing the central character, who legitimately thinks the prequels hold up and isn't afraid to gush enthusiasm for them -- especially when he was so often the subject of fanboy derision himself.


Oh, brother... You'll start Pyrogenic off on that one!!!

It's a sleepy crawl. Life is but a dream. It kinda reads like Mace Windu or Qui-Gon Jinn explaining the plot to a young Anakin. 

"They continually speak to us, telling us the will of the Force."


Y'know, it's quite the gateway in general. The EPISODE II numeral alone is extremely beguiling -- reminiscent of Thomas Young's famous double-slit experiment or the Pillars of Hercules. Anakin, the film's central character, even stands between a pair of pillars at a critical turning point in the story:



And in the next scene, Obi-Wan uses another double-pillar arrangement in an attempt to lasso his prey: -- the bounty hunter Jango Fett -- on a slippery water world. In this establishing wide shot, you can see the various pillars that are about to come into play:





Jango even perches himself over a double light-panel and tries to knock Obi-Wan off-balance:



And the two men end up falling off the landing platform and precariously toward the vast ocean below -- through, yep, another (illuminated) double-pillar:



You can see there are even other double-line symbols dotted around. As there are in many scenes in Star Wars. They're literally everywhere. Pause and reflect.

Also: Seeing Jango getting molested by Obi-Wan on a water planet, and then the out-of-control reek on a desert world, is worth the price of admission by itself.



Yee-igggh-bler-igggh-grrgh-ifggh.

Yes, AOTC also has plenty of satisfying sounds in it.

Oh, and another reason that AOTC is awesome and all arguments to the contrary are invalid. This shot:



AOTC is just full of beautiful, weird, goofy, funny, gorgeous, exotic, trippy, wacked-out-digital-shit shots -- "It's so dense..."

I've long thought that AOTC has not only an odd pace and melancholic tone (sandwiched, as it is, between the deceptive innocence of TPM and the Dantean tragedy of ROTS), but an incisive and curiously cynical (almost social-realism) take on mentorship and the conflict between the generations. All that giddy emphasis on falling is very symbolically powerful, too. But above all, you underline what a surprise and a wonder AOTC is, due to its many interlocking layers and the peculiarly "feminine" qualities you mention. 

That's right. It's a perfect middle movie: as conflicted, as multifarious, as steely, as cunning, and as brash and unapologetic as Anakin himself. And in the perpetual process of becoming. Funny, people praise the original film (ANH) for placing a viewer in the story in media res (i.e., in the middle of things), but this is exactly what AOTC does -- what it embodies. Only, in AOTC, the flashbacks that typify a media res narrative are occurring in the characters' own heads. They're all torn by their pasts and conflicted about their futures. A most maddening mix. It's the one Star Wars film that, in many ways, celebrates the crazy chaos of the human condition the best.

Speaking of gateways, my favorite shot in AotC and probably all of Star Wars has always been the moment when Anakin and Padmé are taken to the Geonosian arena. While Anakin and Padmé pledge to each other, this must have been when I pledged myself to Star Wars, a love that has never truly ceased since even though I have put it on pause once or twice. Despite getting lost sometimes, I always come back to the good side, like Anakin at the end. I was once led astray and put my fandom on hold for a couple years, until the 3D rerelease of TPM which brought me back. But AotC was instrumental in reasserting my fanhood as well, since it was the first film I watched once I purchased The Complete Saga set.

This image makes it look like Anakin's got an angel's wings. He is Star Wars' equivalent of a fallen angel, after all. I also like Hayden's comments about how he found a good working relationship with George.

Happy Birthday, Attack Of The Clones. When I am honest to myself, you're my favourite of them all.

I never understood the complaints from certain "professionals" about the difficulty of acting against bluescreen. I mean, it's acting at its most basic level. Acting is playing pretend and they find it difficult? They might be in the wrong line of work.

I never understood the complaints from certain "professionals" about the difficulty of acting against bluescreen. I mean, it's acting at its most basic level. Acting is playing pretend and they find it difficult? They might be in the wrong line of work.

Very nice. It's possible to tire of anything -- even Star Wars. But it's weird how AOTC, perhaps more than any other SW movie, serves as a reminder and a clarion call for what's so compelling and addictive about the franchise (or the Lucas Saga, at least) in the first place. It's so goofy, so gauche, so gorgeous. And hell, if you're suddenly finding it fugly, it just means your brain wants you to pay attention to the other episodes again. Then back to AOTC you return and all is right with the world again -- or only as right as AOTC paints the world to be.

I mean, look at this image:

It's got all the Freudian sex-canal/birthing-undertones/overtones you could want, and it's gloriously abstract and digital -- and, of course, exceptionally well-composed. It's basically a digital expose/exploration of the world: of consciousness itself. Look. Some things are moving from darkness to lightness. What things? Digital things. Or real things sucked into a digital matrix. There is the sense of a fierce overseeing intelligence at work. The Maker. The universe as sublime aesthetic process. 

Anyway, yes, the music is something of a marvel in this small passage. Also, the actors are quietly on fire in this scene. Also, also: Natalie's pear-shaped bottom.

Craggy copper:

And what part of the prototypically female anatomy does this opening resemble?

It's like when Anakin and Obi-Wan bust into Padme's bedroom, chasing down the "bad" guy.

Oh, this movie!!!


Great observation, Samnz ! I've always said "Force lines", but your interpretation is excellent. I mean, it could allude, bringing both those interpretations together, to Anakin's ascent as a Force Ghost at the end of the Saga -- no? In any case: Art Deco apartment buildings for the win!

And yes, I really like those comments from Hayden in the article. I didn't want to spoil the interview by including them, however. It's a relatively short interview. In retrospect, that may be the most interesting part. 


*geek hat firmly on here*

I'm not certain about the top two images, but I'm pretty sure the bottom image is from a film camera -- not the Sony CineAlta HDW-F900/HD CAM digital capture system that Lucas employed to "film" the movie entire. You can see very fine tones that the digital system wasn't capable of capturing/reproducing (e.g., Hayden's chin, the sunlight glinting at the edge of his collar), and none of the colour inaccuracies (or colour-splotching) in the flesh tones that the digital system produced. Note that Hayden's Jedi tunic is captured quite well, whereas all the movie frames, even high-quality ones, tend to show much less contrast and tonal range in the browns.

Another tell-tale sign is the limited focal plane and more "three-dimensional" aspect to the image. Note that Natalie Portman's fingers and the balustrade in the foreground are out-of-focus, the actors are in-focus, and then the background is heavily out-of-focus again. That kind of focusing wasn't possible with the lens/sensor combination of the digital cameras. With heavy de-focusing, you get an aesthetic background blur, as seen in the latter image of Anakin moving in to kiss Padme. The term itself even has a name (and has been a source of great obsession for some people in the digital age): bokeh.

Some complaints about early digital cinematography were that early digital cameras created a very flat look to the images: i.e., virtually everything was in-focus at the same time (high depth-of-field). For whatever reasons, a "sexy" image is usually held to be one that has some pronounced degree of de-focus: e.g., subjects are crisply rendered and "isolated" against a blurred-out background. Since the camera system that Lucas used for the movie itself couldn't do this (except with post-production digital trickery), AOTC ended up having a bevy of flat-looking images with little separation between subject and background. But, with a genius like Lucas, it doesn't matter much, since he is able to use clever compositional techniques to balance the various elements of his images. In other words, there is more to cinematography than fantastic tonal range, or how much of the image is de-focused behind the actors in a given frame. 

A final note:

A film camera, or a variety of cameras using film, seem(s) to have been used to capture behind-the-scenes and posed material for Episode II. Only the movie itself was shot digitally. Some people have even rumoured a "back-up" film system being used to shoot the actual movie! However, on Episode III, not only was the digital system that Lucas used for II upgraded, but many behind-the-scenes images seem to have also been captured with a digital camera system. It is very obvious, if you have J.W. Rinzler's "Making Of" book for ROTS, that many of those pictures were taken with a digital camera, since they often show a high level of digital sensor noise. Look at behind-the-scenes pictures for Episode II, by comparison, or for Episode I, and the tones are very different, along with the grain structure of the image (digital doesn't really have grain, just noise). Episode II is a transitional movie in so many ways -- and even the way it was filmed/photographed reflects that transitional process.

For all I've said about Ewan's attitude, I feel we must cut him some slack, since Natalie and Hayden got to go to Spain, Italy, and Tunisia, while Ewan was stuck in the bluescreen world of Kamino. He also missed out -- if that's even the right term -- on Tunisia in Episode I. Jake, Liam, Natalie, and Ahmed all went there, but not Ewan. On Episode III, the Tatooine scene at the end was accomplished (as Ewan has milked for sympathy) with greenscreen. He never got to go to any of these locations. Fair, he went to Australia with the rest of them, for principal photography (on II and III) at Fox Studios in Sydney, but his character was continually stage-bound. Ewan has done plenty of his own travelling, but maybe this aspect got to him and served to amplify, in his mind, how fake/artificial/constrained the prequels felt to make (versus his expectations going in).