Adam Fields (weblog)

1. When the leader says “Everything’s fine, go wait on the LAVA PLANET”, be suspicious.
2. The Dark Side of the Force is called “The Dark Side” for a reason. It’s not like “The Dark Side of the Moon”.
3. Robots with cutesy voices are annoying, not adorable. That goes double for aliens with cutesy voices. Triple for robots with cutesy voices and smoker’s cough.
4. For some reason, robots talk to each other in English, instead of using wifi or bluetooth or something.
5. Coruscant OB/GYN technology leaves something to be desired. [Update: "Luke" and "Leia" are clearly the Naboo words for "Morphine" and "Epidural"]
6. 20 years seems like nothing when you’re ruling the galaxy.
7. Don’t forget what happened to your mother in the last movie, or there will be extra exposition.
8. Darth Vader is not scarier with an artful allusion to Frankenstein.

Great fight choreography, but man… what a piece of garbage.

Over beers after watching Attack of the Clones, I posited two theories that were not explicitly mentioned in the movie, but which make it much more interesting.

1. Padme doesn’t love Anakin, but has instead been coerced into thinking that she does with Jedi/Sith mind tricks. Anakin as much as says this, and it explains all of a) her rapid change of heart, b) why she falls for Anakin in the absence of any redeeming qualities and c) all of the bad dialogue.
2. Yoda is complicit. Rather than being an idle participant or “the good guy”, he’s an integral part of the plot. There’s a fair amount of evidence for this. Someone high up in the Jedi order erased the existence of the cloner planet from the archives. Yoda thinks the Jedi are too set in their ways and crumbling as an institution, and need “balance” restored (which is not necessarily good). It’s not believable that he could stand in Palpatine’s presence and not pick up on something. He clearly lets Dooku get away in the fight at the end, feigning being “distracted” by some tiny falling beam. We know he survives the purging. All training leads back to Yoda (Anakin trained by Obi-Wan trained by Qui-Gon trained by Dooku trained by Yoda. For that matter, big open question – did Yoda train Palpatine? If not, then who?)

I’m curious to see if either of these is acknowledged, or at least not contradicted by the third movie (I’ve got my tickets for tonight).