Tag: Attack of the Clones

Villains are critical to the success of any fantasy adventure. I mean, without some suitably bad-ass villain (bad ass-villain), what have we got to rail against? Needless to say, the prequel trilogy’s problem is that we don’t get a consistent antagonist throughout — although it’s Palpatine’s story, he’s only revealed to our heroes as the true villain at the end of the line.

In the mean time, the three films chew though a succession of minibosses who are not actually given enough time to breathe before they’re unceremoniously murdered — including one of my favourite character designs of all time, let alone of Star Wars, General Grievous.

We blast all over the three prequels here in this ostensibly Episode II-based chat so, once again, apologies for melting our own continuity.

No transcripts this time, and no additional thoughts either. We… er… recorded this one a while ago…

Okay, maybe I lied last time when I said Attack of the Clones was merely average — it does contain an absolute howler of a romance sub-plot. Anakin catches up with childhood crush Padmé Amidala and tries to win her over with the creepiest lines in the galaxy, but instead of rightly punching his lights out and running for the hills, Padmé… f-falls in love with h-him?

It doesn’t make narrative sense, let alone human sense. Alas, we can come up with all the “it would have worked if…” scenarios we like in our cosy, rarified little Writer’s Room (errr, Chris’s lounge), but this is and always will be canon. Blergh.

We start to drift into some Episode III chat in here so apologies for melting our own continuity. It’s an… er… homage to the source material…?

No transcripts this time, and no additional thoughts either. We… er… recorded this one a while ago…

The most damning indictment of Episode II is that it’s ultimately pretty average. There’s nothing truly unstoppably bad about it — there’s no massive in-your-face focal point of cringe to match poor old Jar Jar Binks. Maybe it’s death by a thousand cuts, lots of little things that snowball into a prevailing sense of malaise.

I’m quite excited for us to get to the original trilogy so we can expound positively at what went right rather than negatively about all the missed opportunites and blunders (or maybe we’ll need to discuss the spectacularly good Rogue One before the original trilogy now?), but narrative flow demands that we first examine the prequels — so here begins our journey through Attack of the Clones.

No transcripts this time, and no additional thoughts either. We… er… recorded this one a while ago…