SFX OPINION SIMON PEGG
STAR WARS BLINDNESS
Star Wars Blindness, phrase.
pr star wors blInd-ness
1.A condition characterised by a refusal to accept the fact that Star Wars: Episode ll – Attack Of The Clones is shite, just because it was marginally better that Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace.
Ignorance is bliss and this is no truer than for those Star Wars fans who have only seen Attack Of The Clones once and liked it. Trust me, don’t see it again, you have Star Wars blindness. Enjoy it. I had it. I ran from the cinema like a man in a ‘60s film who’s just sexed up a bird. Running through the streets of Swinging London in his drain pipe trousers, leaping occasionally into balletic freeze-frames of post-coital felicity. That is until persistent, niggling flashes from the encounter filter back, and bringing him to a perplexed faltering stop, as the dreadful realisation dawns: the bird was a bloke. How could he have missed it? Wasn’t it obvious? The square jaw, the deep voice, the cock. So it was for me, scampering from The Odeon, Leicester Square, on the phone to my girlfriend, saying things like, “Yeah, it was alright” and, “The story was a bit shaky but the effects were amazing” and most tellingly, “It was much better than The Phantom Menace”, as slowly I realised, it was cock.
I used to think George Lucas was a genius. Then having witnessed the tea-time debacle that was The Phantom Menace, I realised this was not true. His genius was bunkum, flim-flam, special effect, created by budgetary restraint; invention mothered by necessity and a willingness to listen to others. Twenty years down the line, necessity and restraint digitally erased from his vocabulary and everyone around him too shit-scared to disagree, we get Episode 1, a soulless bungled exercise in disappointment. After seeing Attack Of The Clones, I momentarily changed my mind again. Maybe his genius was real. Not because AOTC was as good as the first film (or the fourth as he’d prefer we call it) but because it was marginally better than TPM. With the weight of 16 years of anticipation on his shoulders and knowing full well he couldn’t possibly meet our ravenous demands, he took a dive in the fourth (or the first as he’d prefer we call it). He purposefully made a shitty to drag down our standards and secure the path for the ensuing two chapters. He even tested the faithful by re-releasing the first films with special shit bits inserted designed to taint the memory. That’s it! That’s what did!
Did he bollocks.
Attack Of The Clones isn’t very good. Sure, it was a little more exciting in places than The Phantom Menace and featured a mercifully small contribution from Jub Jub the Trout Fairy. Sure, the special effects were ground-breaking, if not breath-taking and, okay, we got to see a “cake and eat it” version of Boba Fett in action, but these things just aren’t enough. It’s not even the obvious stuff that makes it truly bad either. The dodgy acting, resultant of an even dodgier script; the love scenes handled with all the emotional maturity of a child wafting a proud fart round a giggling class room. It wasn’t any of the niggling little doubts that you denied and suppressed as you attempted to like it. It was something far more intangible. It was love. Ours and Lucas’. The first three films are replete with short-comings. There’s some bad acting. Some clumsy plotting and plenty of irksome scripting, even some dodgy special effects but we love these films. And it’s only partly because many of us were kids. The films have balance and soul. They have the labour and spirit of a film-maker who, constrained by the available technology, concentrated that labour and spirit more evenly throughout, creating great characters, wonderful relationships and complex interactions set against a nevertheless impressive sci-fi backdrop.
There is a moment in Return Of The Jedi when the rebel fleet arrive at the new Death Star, only to discover that the shield generator is still operational. Realising they have flown into a trap, the rebel fighters execute a tyre screeching U-ey, only to fly into a symmetrical swarm of TIE fighters. For me, this moment alone out-wows the entire third of Attack Of The Clones. Why? Because amid all those pyrotechnics, are people (and aliens) I care about. With the new films, George invests so much energy into the packaging, he forgets the thing itself. What is the point of flashy, expensive wrapping paper when the present is a turd? George himself admits, in a documentary on the DVD*, that he wasn’t particularly interested in making a great film, just in creating spectacular visuals. What emerges is something as emotionally evocative as a firework display. I know I go on about this and I know I’m either preaching to the converted or shouting at the stubborn but many Star Wars fans have now accepted the truth. George can’t just use us as guinea pigs for his cinematic experiments. If you’re going to spunk your grand aesthetics all over us, at least take us for dinner and a movie first. Love maybe blind George, but we are not. SFX
* I know I’m a big fat hypocrite for buying the DVD but believe me I’ve bought porn and blushed less.
Typed up by Kelly (Wife of Rolex)