Attack of the Clones
Oct. 13th, 2012 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackGood
I know lots of people didn't like it, but the basic plot of "Fake plot against the republic, defeated in the nick of time with emergency powers and clone army, but oh no, Palpitane has acquired emergency powers and is scheming to take over the republic" seems pretty good to me. It's a good plot for a middle of the trilogy because it gives a big emotional victory, while still setting up an "oh shit" problem to be solved in the third film.
(There are a couple of flaws, like if everyone voted to give the chancellor emergency powers and approved of the clone army, we're not quite shown why they thought he needed them. But this is all details.)
Bad
The outline of the Anakin plot is also good, and I hear it's very scary if you're quite young and genuinely unaware of what's going to happen. But the emotional impacts are in the wrong place, or more precisely, missing.
When Anakin kills the sand people, what should have happened is that the audience saw enough to hope that Shmi would survive, and to pray Anakin will be able to rescue her, and to see the sand people being cruel to her, and then have a sand person warrior kill her at the last minute after all, and have Anakin start to give the usual hero speech about how he's not a vigilante, and have us aching for revenge, and THEN have him fulfil it. Then we really feel the temptation, and only then get the sickening realisation that he's gone way beyond revenge, slaughtering civilians and children as well. The sort of evil thing anyone might do once.
As it is, we're still thinking "what do you expect when your mother was left as a slave for ten years, you idiot?" when we suddenly see "wow, he abruptly became completely evil with no warning, didn't he?"
You could also show some smaller emotional outbursts earlier in the film, rather than going straight from "bad romance" to "murder".
Someone did make the point that if this works, it makes Luke's anger in the original trilogy much more scary, because it makes it seem actually possible he could turn to the dark side, which never actually seemed likely to me. You could go further and show Luke exhibiting dark jedi powers or something, maybe.
Silly
Lots about the film is quite fun, just as lots about it makes no sense.
I can't be bothered to enumerate it, but the moment that happened to amuse me as I write this was when Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme were captured, chained to massive stone pillars, and fed to dinosaurs, and they broke the chains, defeated the dinosaurs, and broke out. But wouldn't it have been easier to escape five minutes earlier BEFORE they were tied to the pillars and BEFORE the dinosaurs were released?
I know lots of people didn't like it, but the basic plot of "Fake plot against the republic, defeated in the nick of time with emergency powers and clone army, but oh no, Palpitane has acquired emergency powers and is scheming to take over the republic" seems pretty good to me. It's a good plot for a middle of the trilogy because it gives a big emotional victory, while still setting up an "oh shit" problem to be solved in the third film.
(There are a couple of flaws, like if everyone voted to give the chancellor emergency powers and approved of the clone army, we're not quite shown why they thought he needed them. But this is all details.)
Bad
The outline of the Anakin plot is also good, and I hear it's very scary if you're quite young and genuinely unaware of what's going to happen. But the emotional impacts are in the wrong place, or more precisely, missing.
When Anakin kills the sand people, what should have happened is that the audience saw enough to hope that Shmi would survive, and to pray Anakin will be able to rescue her, and to see the sand people being cruel to her, and then have a sand person warrior kill her at the last minute after all, and have Anakin start to give the usual hero speech about how he's not a vigilante, and have us aching for revenge, and THEN have him fulfil it. Then we really feel the temptation, and only then get the sickening realisation that he's gone way beyond revenge, slaughtering civilians and children as well. The sort of evil thing anyone might do once.
As it is, we're still thinking "what do you expect when your mother was left as a slave for ten years, you idiot?" when we suddenly see "wow, he abruptly became completely evil with no warning, didn't he?"
You could also show some smaller emotional outbursts earlier in the film, rather than going straight from "bad romance" to "murder".
Someone did make the point that if this works, it makes Luke's anger in the original trilogy much more scary, because it makes it seem actually possible he could turn to the dark side, which never actually seemed likely to me. You could go further and show Luke exhibiting dark jedi powers or something, maybe.
Silly
Lots about the film is quite fun, just as lots about it makes no sense.
I can't be bothered to enumerate it, but the moment that happened to amuse me as I write this was when Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme were captured, chained to massive stone pillars, and fed to dinosaurs, and they broke the chains, defeated the dinosaurs, and broke out. But wouldn't it have been easier to escape five minutes earlier BEFORE they were tied to the pillars and BEFORE the dinosaurs were released?