Chat corner 113: Attack of the Clones

[annathecrow]

Welcome to the Monday chat corner!

This week’s topic is the second part of the Prequels trilogy, “Star Wars: The Attack of the Clones”, which came out in 2002. I can’t believe the movie is old enough to drink now!

If you’ve been around when we talked about the movie last year, has anything changed in your thoughts? Any new fic you wrote or read, any new fanart or fanvid you’ve made or seen?

And if you haven’t, what are your thoughts? Yay/nay/meh?

For extra credit, give us a question you would ask other SW fans about the movie, silly or serious. I’m not collecting them for next year I swear

 

Comments

[annathecrow]

I'm fascinated by the way my relationship to this movie changed since I joined SW fandom and became actively fannish. I used to hate it, and I still think it's a trashfire of a film, but where I used to cringe, nowadays I... okay, I still cringe, but I also keep coming back to all the characters and relationships and storytelling moments buried under the mess. This movie has so much happening, especially character-wise! Honestly I don't believe all of it is intentional, and some of it might be 100% "death of the author" level viewer interpretation, but it's so much fun to pick over.

That "pile of shiny mess" feel also motivates me as a storyteller - and, yeah, the tragedy (and ~tragedy~) drives me to scratch that itch of "if only they didn't XY" by writing fix-its.

So... yeah. AotC isn't the movie I like the most, but I think it's the one I get the most enjoyment out of as a fan. Which, knowing this was the movie that caused Teenage Me to abandon SW, is very lol-worthy :D

[havendale]

I tend to be “meh” to “nay” on AOTC, although I’ve come around very slightly on the Anidala romance. The dramatic romantic dialogue is … not good, but one thing I do think Lucas is good at is lighthearted banter à la Han and Luke or Anakin and Obi-Wan: whenever he stops trying to do Serious Drama and instead lets Anakin and Padmé make silly jokes and tease each other (“Don’t worry, we have Artoo with us!”), the result is sort of endearing. I can believe these are two people who genuinely like each other and who, being rather sheltered and lonely, might interpret the first romantic sparks as a reason to run off and get married next week. The problem is that Lucas doesn’t want to do lighthearted banter, he wants to do Serious Drama.

One thing that still puzzles me about AOTC is Padmé’s reaction to Anakin’s massacre of the Tusken Raiders. Ghost!Qui-Gon is horrified and even Anakin seems disgusted with himself by the end of the workshop scene. Meanwhile Padmé (who has hitherto been shown as one of the nicer people in the GFFA) is not only not horrified, but seems to regard it as an understandable “human” thing to do. Maybe it’s a grim bit of foreshadowing: an unhealthy relationship can cause you to betray your own moral code by accepting things you otherwise wouldn’t, as we’ll later see when Anakin’s friendship with Palpatine causes him to overlook the signs that Ol’ Sheevy is bad news. Or maybe Padmé is secretly a Sith Lord. But her part of the workshop scene gets so little narrative weight that I don’t know what we’re supposed to make of it.

My really petty AOTC complaint: it does undercut the seriousness of the arena scene a bit when Padmé’s white jumpsuit ends up ripped in the most fashionable way possible. It’s a minor offence on the Scale of Sexism in Star Wars, but still. Go from chic workwear to cute crop top with the swish of a monster’s claws!

[extrapenguin]

Padmé’s white jumpsuit ends up ripped in the most fashionable way possible
I think your Sith Padmé theory covers this as well! Naboo is the planet of fashionable people. Darth Padmé wouldn't be caught dead with an unappealingly shredded outfit! This is also why her refugee outfit is very "moderately successful businesswoman" whereas Anakin is wearing a poncho and looks like an exploited boytoy.

[havendale]

Come to think of it, this would also explain Padmé wandering around Mos Espa in a gorgeous embroidered dress and shimmery cloak…

[ironymaiden]

mimerki had a head-canon that Anakin unconsciously mind-tricked people and had been doing so his entire life. no awareness, no malice, but with the idea that Padmé literally couldn't help herself because he was using suggestion all along. the thing I like about this theory is the way he has more sway over her the more time they spend together

[ironymaiden]

when I watch this one, I do a lot of skipping so that it's a movie about Detective Obi-wan. the mullet is hot, okay

[sathari]

I will forever ramble on about how IMO the big problem with the entire PT is that George Lucas is not Aaron Sorkin and yet gave himself a plot for the PT that is much better suited to Aaron Sorkin. (Aaaaaand now I'm daydreaming about a PT a la the movie version of "Charlie Wilson's War" and kinda salivating, because it's not like Sorkin can't do snarky cute politically-fraught romances and action sequences, not to mention classic, classic cantina scenes, he can just also do the policy-wonking behind them.) So consider this my ramble on the topic.

And, re: Padme's response to Anakin and the Tuskens... honestly, I always have interpreted it, somewhat subversively, as "Lucas couldn't admit, possibly even to himself, how badly fucked up the Jedi Order was in terms of dealing with human emotions and galactic injustices, and nowhere is it more apparent than in this moment." Because having Padme have any more of a nuanced discussion with Anakin starting with things like how his own guilt for not having paid attention to his dreams about his mother had left him with an explosive fucktonne of guilt that he then took out on the Tuskens probably leads into "Why did you ignore those dreams that the force was sending you?" "Because my Jedi Master told me to", which gets into how baby!Anakin as of TPM had dreamed of being a Jedi who came back and freed all the slaves and, well, that's not a thing the Jedi would even do for his mother (and also possibly any issues Padme might have had with herself at that point about the fact that a planetary-Queen-turned-Senator might have been able to do something about slavery going on on planet that was comparatively near enough to her own that she ended up quasi-crashing there some years back), and... well, yeah.

Also, I think I said this last time, but for a long time I've headcanoned Anakin and Padme's secret marriage as being the result of shared righteous indignation on top of the hormones/infatuation/etc. and the fact that they just got out of another pitched battle together. Because Padme's canonically a pacifist-by-policy and had opposed the creation of a Republic Army, and Anakin's just watched his mother die and also the clone armies are uncomfortably close to slaves, and I have this headcanon where he's lying in a hospital bed after he's gotten his new arm attached, and she's pacing around, and after something like the fifth time she's rambled something about war and he's rambled something about slavery, they look at each other and they're like, "Kriff it, these people don't have any moral authority over us any more, let's just get married." When in fact it probably would have been better if they'd both broken with the Order and the Republic and gone public with their objections, but, you know, they're embedded in a sick system and rebelling privately rather than overtly--- it is that sort of thing that happens where people don't actually do what the system tells them to but don't outright oppose it either.

Something else I love to play with here is the culture of Naboo--- for Padme being a Senator is part of her objection to being involved with Anakin, as well as the fact that he's a Jedi, and then I veer off into wacky headcanon about Naboo. Specifically, that they've decided to harness the youthful idealism and "fix everything!!!!"-ness of adolescents into letting them do just that, and "run for something" as a teenager--- i.e., don't rebel against the system, have the job of making it better!--- is baked into their culture. Then you're supposed to step out of public life when you're a bit older and focus on the "private sphere" and having a family, and only return to the public sphere when your own kids are grown, by which time you're more likely to take on an advisory role (as we see with Padme's council in TPM). And also that that was what happened to Palpatine--- he resented being expected to leave public life in his thirties and from there that led him to other outlets for his ambitions, namely the Sith. (I'm aware that the latter especially has been thoroughly Jossed by the canonical Palpatine backstory novels, but that's my headcanon and I'm sticking to it. Also ask me about Palpatine as a failed baby!Jedi.)

A question I would ask other Star Wars fans is... maybe along the lines of "Assuming we're taking the basic premise/plot of the movie as-is, what would be your favorite things to fix about it?"

[yourlibrarian]

they look at each other and they're like, "Kriff it, these people don't have any moral authority over us any more, let's just get married." When in fact it probably would have been better if they'd both broken with the Order and the Republic and gone public with their objections, but, you know, they're embedded in a sick system and rebelling privately rather than overtly--- it is that sort of thing that happens where people don't actually do what the system tells them to but don't outright oppose it either.

This is definitely the Andor version of this story 🙂 However I completely agree that there are many layers to all this for anyone who wants to explore it (and could do so either via fic or, as Lucasfilm did, through TV).

I can't say there's any single thing I'd want to fix because the story as it's given is already more of an outline than a real story. Clone Wars ran for 7 seasons in between 2 films and could still have told far more. Mostly, I'd just want more between films 1 and 2 which, at the moment, is the least explored part of the film arcs.

[fleurviolette]

Attack of the Clones was one of those movies that defined my childhood. It introduced me to Star Wars. I remember watching it in a theater and getting immersed in a galaxy far far away.

Yeah I know it’s an unpopular opinion on here but oh well.

[extrapenguin]

This is the film that somehow inexplicably made me not see the Anakin -> Padmé attraction. Padmé going "oh no, I mustn't!" at the hot bodyguard dude only to kiss him because she thought they were about to die? Reasonable. Anakin ... somehow came across like he was only doing stuff because he thought that was the thing to do. But hey, at least Anakin backs off when Padmé tells him to in the bondage dress scene, so it's leagues better than ESB on that count at least.

In the realm of fanworks created, on the Tusken topic, I wrote a meta on it and then turned that into a fic, Desert Sons.

As for Padmé, I don't actually necessarily see her not giving a fuck about the Tuskens as a character contradiction. She's from Naboo, where the humans have been marginalizing the local indigenous population forever, and she is also filthy rich. (She's wearing a different dress in every scene and her family owns a castle with servants.) I summed up my Anidala thoughts in a vid last year: Common People, which does mostly use AotC footage, with a fair chunk of TPM.

[fleurviolette]

Side note, have you read Darth Plageuis?

[extrapenguin]

I haven't – it's on my TBR list (along with the Maul novels and the second half of NJO), but my TBR list is, uh, kinda long.