Attack of the Clones Is Just That

"Why was this film ever done?" one man asked another as the screening ended. He was talking about The Believer, but the question also suits George Lucas' second Star Wars prequel Attack of the Clones. So little audience compulsion was inspired by 1999's prequel The Phantom Menace that this follow-up just seems like a retailer's obligation?the handkerchief you get for buying the tie you didn't need. And yet, the mostly adult Ziegfeld audience couldn't contain their anticipation. Grownups cheered the first flicker of the 20th Century-Fox logo just as three-year-olds cheered the Nintendo logo that began a screening of Pokemon. The Star Wars phenomenon demonstrates how capitalism triumphs over culture. There are several generations now who attend to this saga ritualistically. Could they have invested anything more than nostalgia in Lucas' franchise? Or, given the topsy-turvy state of global economics, has imagination itself been franchised?

The only honest review one can give Attack of the Clones is to say that it is the least boring Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back. But Empire was enjoyable?at times, even rousing?while Clones passes painlessly before one's eyes. The storyline brings Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) to adolescence, revealing his romantic attachment to Queen?now Senator?Amidala (Natalie Portman), and shows the first stirring of his moral conflict. But the narrative feels reticent, as if staving off its inevitable darkening. Lucas (who cowrote the script with Jonathan Hales) seems to be in a holding pattern before he's figured out exactly how to shape the humanity of his myth's great villain. That's what gives Clones the air of insignificance. The story doesn't move forward emotionally?the Jedi knights are still fighting the Federation, Darth Vader's persona is still waiting in the wings, Luke and Leia have yet to be born. Unless you're one of the non-thinking Star Wars completists, it's hard to find any excuse for Clones' bait-and-switch?I mean, bait-and-stall?except to demonstrate Lucas' marketing temerity.

After the unfair drubbing Lucas took for the magisterial if leaden The Phantom Menace, I'd like to see him keep his imaginative promise. And I don't mean bringing back Kermit's cousin Yoda. ("Begun, the clone war has," Yoda burps.) But perhaps because the production of Clones has been complicated by techie infatuation with digital-video photography and projection, Lucas has not fulfilled his story's great potential.

Maybe he's afraid of it. Having pandered to the kiddie audience like the rest of Hollywood, Lucas seems to have lost the courage to educate it, as Anakin must also be educated morally. I'm not talking about cheerleading the digital-video change-over?that's a delusion that only seems progressive. No one who sees Attack of the Clones can seriously say it looks as good as the sharp, wide vistas, subtle colors and forward-thrusting perspectives of The Phantom Menace?all courtesy of the sharpness of film. Fools will mistake Clones' various f/x for the triumph of digital video, but this very different, cartoony video imagery is not the gateway to a new cinema or an advanced way of seeing, but merely an intro to?and accommodation of?the industry's forthcoming soft-image technology. It lacks saturated colors and deep darkness. Lucas got so hung up in smoothing cinema's transition into lowest-common-denominator television that he failed to supply Clones with the crucial heroic dimensions.

That these must, of necessity, be tragic dimensions means a plot that intensifies Anakin's transformation. Instead of getting close to the young knight's ambivalence, queering his romance with Amidala, Lucas stays with hollow generic spectacle: emphasizing a huge battle of armies distinguished only by good-guy white space suits vs. gray-black metal legions of clones. This takes Lucas back to the comic book simplicity of the first Star Wars. Fans couldn't tell camp from ineptitude and didn't care. It seemed Lucas hadn't thought through how much he wanted to pay homage to comics, sci-fi and adventure serials, or to what extent he would illustrate an enlightened, modernist response to mythology. (That was John Boorman's sophisticated achievement, collapsing time, character and myth in Excalibur.) The turn that the Star Wars series took when Irvin Kershner directed The Empire Strikes Back wasn't simply Oedipal but expressed the 70s-era oppositional attitude toward authority?complicated by a frightening loss of innocence. In that stunning, almost operatic moment of Darth Vader's revelation, Luke saw that he was an heir to history. Like a post-60s revolutionary, he realized his own fallibility when face to face with corruption.

The only good reason to continue the Star Wars story would be to investigate that fall from grace, and in doing so upgrade pop culture by seriously complicating notions of heroism, patriotism, family and society. Those are the valuable lessons of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and Ford's The Searchers, movies Lucas has acknowledged as influences. To make space operas any less substantive means giving in to the marketplace and to technology. Not only should Lucas be encouraged in a bolder direction, but his fans (whether young or simply childish) must also be initiated into the thematic potential of pop culture. The best moments of Clones almost accomplish this, ironically, through Anakin's teenage petulance. Arguing politics with Amidala, he says "People should be made to agree." "That's dictatorship," she warns. And Anakin answers, "Well, if it works." Christensen has a teen idol look, politically naive, living only on libidinal and superficial instinct. He makes this the first hormonal Star Wars (with a bit of Steve McQueen/Justin Timberlake egotism), yet Lucas cools down the flirtation with Amidala through cliched love montages. He makes a more damaging mistake when staging Anakin's derring-do for thrills rather than horror, then cutting away from his moment of wrath.

Anakin's adolescent turmoil should be poignantly recognizable. His adventures should teach him moral basics, "the difference between knowledge and wisdom." He seems as sadly young and misguided as the boy drug-dealer in Kershner's RoboCop 2. Despite patented stiff line-readings ("Lucas lines," a friend calls them), there's a heartstopping moment when Anakin mentions "Compassion, which I would define as unconditional love." Such fleeting instances suggest the complex movie Clones ought to have been. Luc Besson already perfected the multiculti angle in the alien-chic The Fifth Element, and it must be admitted that The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has preempted Lucas' most fanciful monsters, like the spiky Cheshire cat and the rhino beast with a broken tusk that Anakin, Amidala and Obi Wan (Ewan McGregor) fight in an arena. All that's left for Lucas to do is re-imagine sci-fi movies as fabled glimpses into the history of human aggression. If he doesn't, the upcoming episodes will only be clones.

The Believer directed by Henry Bean The Jewish Nazi protagonist of The Believer fears becoming a clone. But it's a fear that seems irrational?hell, lunatic?except when you trace the movie back to its middle-class origins. Writer-director Henry Bean must have a comfy life that allows him the luxury of paranoia. This debut film is no more than an excrescence of bourgeois power. There's not enough trouble in the world, so Bean whiles away time, money and celluloid conjuring his worst fears. You can bet the comfy David Mamet gets riled daily (and his movie Homicide suggests he blames every non-Jewish person he sees), but Mamet has the uncommon gift of being genuinely agitating. Bean's a wannabe agitator. So he tortures himself with a gloss on American History X?a protagonist Danny (Ryan Gosling) who goes from yeshiva boy to skinhead?because of his own apparent embarrassment over Jewish liberal circumspection.

"Jew! You say it a million times, it's the only word that never loses its meaning," Danny says. Ol' Dirty Bastard might disagree. And there's no ODB track as ludicrous as Danny's sensitivity-training scene where Bean makes jokes/points off elderly holocaust survivors. Missing Woody Allen's or Mel Brooks' wit, one's reminded that humor can be better than the "brilliance" or "smartness" that Bean fakes. The survivors chide Danny as a "pischer with dreams of hatred and killing. What can we learn from you?" and he responds, "Kill your enemy." Recalling the vengeful Jeff Goldblum character Bean devised in Deep Cover, it proposes ferocity as the key to Jewish self-defense. But didn't that attitude go out with Norman Mailer's wish to "not be the nice Jewish boy" and his eventual cultural triumph?

The Believer (a Grand Prize winner at Sundance) is actually an example of how middle-class sophistication secretes its own self-hatred. Its real subject is just cultural embarrassment?like those critics who dismiss the superb Gentleman's Agreement as inauthentic to Jewish-American life, disregarding its ethical and esthetic beauty. Danny has b&w Nazi movie fantasies of oppression and revenge. Bean no doubt wants to counter Gentleman's Agreement as well as Spielberg's Schindler's List by whipping up his own mini-holocaust. But he falsely gauges ethnic pride, anti-Jewish bigotry and Danny's insanity. This story of a boy who comes to love his people by hating them is the most ridiculous ethnic fantasy since Monster's Ball. To answer the question "Why was this film ever done?": The word for The Believer is not controversy or daring, but stupidity.