STAR WARS: EPISODE II—ATTACK OF THE CLONES

STAR WARS: EPISODE II—ATTACK OF THE CLONES. George Lucas, dir., exec. prod., story, and screenplay—with Jonathan Hales. USA: JAK Productions, LucasFilm Ltd. (prod.) / 20th Century Fox (main dist.), 2002. Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Pernilla August, Jack Thompson, Christopher Lee, Anthony Daniels, featured players. Industrial Light & Magic, SpFx. {Source: IMDb}

This second film of Lucas's Second Trilogy continues oppositions of the organic with the mechanical and technological, and combinations. Note Obi-Wan Kenobi in Jedi garb battling armored Jango Fett (bounty hunter), the clone army of armored humans vs. the 'droid army of robots, and, most importantly, the sequence where we see clone fetuses as humans within bottles within a large machine within the huge machine of a Modernist metal habitat upon stormy seas (cf. Brave New World, listed under fiction). We get to see more of the world-city introduced in Episode I (q.v. above), including some down-scale, somewhat po-mo, BLADE RUNNERish, industrial sections; the city is in visual dialog, so to speak, with more natural worlds of water, sand, clouds—and with space. The spherical spaceships of the Trade Federation can be usefully compared and contrasted with the spherical shuttle from the space station to the Moon in S. Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (q.v.; see also, BLADE RUNNER). The clones of the "Grand Army of The Republic" will become the Imperial Storm Troopers in later films in the saga but are here ambiguous: note clone troops in the Jedi vs. 'droid battle as US Marines to the rescue (in flying machines like Vietnam-era "Hueys" + Cobra-like helicopter gun-ships) and near the very end of the film marching in Wehrmacht-like/robot-like masses into Imperial-size space craft. Anakin Skywalker's severed arm is replaced by a prosthesis, in the first step toward his becoming more machine than man. The serio-comic scene of Padmé Amidala, Anakin Skywalker, C3PO, and R3D2 in an industrial zone shows a very po-mo images of machines making machines, plus insectoid droids and a very direct allusion to Jacob Epstein's sculpture Rock Drill (see frontispiece to The Mechanical God).

(RDE, SpenceC, 21,22/V/02, 26/V/05)