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| And the scene... the big scene that everyone’s already bookmarked as “the” scene of the movie... well, it lives up to the hype. Yoda versus Count Dooku may well be my favorite image from any STAR WARS film, something I can honestly say I never imagined. Dooku is a figure of genuine menace, his powers established firmly by the time Yoda arrives, but he is nothing next to the might of the little green giant. What could have been funny or silly or absurd is intead moving and powerful and hysterically cool all at once. It’s the summer’s kick to beat, and no one’s got the ammunition to do it. I’m going to have to see this film about a dozen times just to get this particular Scooby Snack. Everything else is just bonus as far as I’m concerned. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that this is like PHANTOM MENACE, where Darth Maul was a great last-act presence who was basically just waiting around for the rest of the movie. This film makes the most of Yoda throughout, and puts the rest of the cast to equally good work. McGregor is reliable and solid and witty, and he definitely plays it like a guy who is getting genuinely tired of the responsibility of training Anakin. He’s not just an Padawan, and Obi-Wan’s not just any master. The shadow of Qui-Gon Jinn hangs over both of them, always present, always reminding the both of them of a promise made over a dying man’s body. Anakin bristles constantly under Obi-Wan’s attention, and in private, he curses his master even as he calls him “my father.” Obi-Wan obviously feels great affection for his apprentice, but he is also exasperated, even exhausted. He complains constantly to Mace Windu and Yoda about Anakin and his temperament, to no avail. And in the heat of battle, he often has to babysit Anakin, making sure he doesn’t spin wildly out of control. Christopher Lee is magnificent as the mysterious Count Dooku, a resigned Jedi, Qui-Gon’s one-time master. He has a scene with Obi-Wan that is wonderful, a testament to how much menace can be built simply by performance, without any other tricks to help out. Lee radiates power, barely kept in check, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. When he unleashes the full range of his abilities, he’s Dracula and Saruman rolled into one, and Lucas and Robin Gurland deserve credit for having had the inspiration to cast him at all. I’m not as sure what Jimmy Smits is doing in the film. He’s a placemarker, a visual cue that Bail Organa is probably going to have a bigger role next time out. He’s not in enough of the film to really judge, one way or another. One thing’s for sure... in space, no one looks cool in a turtleneck. Jar-Jar Binks (voiced again by Ahmed Best) is back, also in a very brief role, and I actually found him less annoying than C-3PO (the omnipresent Anthony Daniels) in the overall movie. Jar-Jar plays a crucial role here, one that he doesn’t realize he played. Manipulating the Jedi is a process that takes years and years of careful positioning and planning, while manipulating one poor confused Gungan can be done quickly, in the course of one fateful conversation. And once he plays his role, things are set into motion that cannot be stopped. He’s a tragic figure here, while C-3PO is supposed to be this film’s comic relief. Let me be quite clear: George is not a funny man. In particular, there are two jokes in this film, back to back, both delivered by C-3PO in the battle arena, that are so monstrously awful that I wish I could personally supervise their removal before the release of the film. I’d like to make sure that the footage is destroyed, so it can’t be put back into the film to retroactively crap up the movie later. It’s shamefully bad stuff. Of course, to put it in perspective, it’s two lines. It’s less than 10 seconds of total screen time. And the larger sequence that it’s part of, the Battle Of Geonosis, is so spectacular that only a total moron would harbor any sort of larger grudge. I’d much rather focus on that spectacular conflict, and on the way the film’s last act is built. I’d much rather marvel at something that comes as close as possible to rekindling my initial marvel at the world that Lucas created as is possible, I think. When I said in my script review for ATTACK OF THE CLONES that the title would seem like the only possible title after seeing the film, I had no idea how accurate that was. Reading that final battle and seeing it don’t compare in any way. This is BLACK HAWK DOWN with droids and Jedi and Clonetroopers and lasers and lightsabers and missles and transports and... and there’s just so much stuff! And it’s so amazing, so overwhelming in scale, and the moments like the big round ship crashing back to the surface or the hazy sort of hand-held moment where there’s so much dust that everything is red, they’re all so amazing, so convincing, that it makes you want to run outside afterwards and just get in line to see it again. This is a war, face to face, that we’ve never seen played out like this in these films. And it’s still just a warm-up for the real Clone War ahead. Yoda says as much in the film’s final moments. As bad and as crazy and as out of control as this seems, this is just the prelude to the coming Purge of the Jedi, and the official birth of the Empire. Those events, still to come in EPISODE III, seems so ripe with potential that I get giddy even contemplating the wait from now until 2005. I’m full of questions now... right this moment... like, for example... Whose voice yells out “No, Anakin, no!” after Yoda’s vision of the Tusken slaughter? Is it Qui-Gon? Obi-Wan? Is it a voice from the past, the future, or from another plane? I feel like I could just go on and on. I haven’t even mentioned Jango Fett (Temeura Morrison) and his son Boba (Daniel Logan), or how good I think Morrison is in the film, or how nice the chemistry between them seems, or how Boba plays almost like a variation on Butch from the old LITTLE RASCALS films, a sneering punk just begging for someone to bloody his nose. The way he laughs as his father tries to kill Obi-Wan, the way he operates a weapon system he can’t even see to fire, he’s just trouble. The final image of him in the movie is beautiful, the best of the proposed versions I read and heard. I haven’t talked about all the sequences that we know were filmed that simply aren’t in the movie, implying that we’ll probably see some great DVD extras later this year. I didn’t miss anything that was cut. I knew it was gone, but many of the edits seem to have really helped accelerate the film. I’ve said before that THE PHANTOM MENACE plays like a series of meetings, and the beginning of this film seems like it could be more of the same. Many meetings are taken here, no doubt. But Lucas remembered to open it up, to give us real experiences this time. It’s not just going and coming and flying and landing and walking and talking and leaving again. |