Take Two Tuesday: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) ...or, how I learned to stop worrying and love comic book movies that aren't Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Well, this is a first.  “Take Two Tuesdays” is a series that I hope I won’t have to use too much, because the goal of a “Take Two” review is to reevaluate a film I’ve already reviewed here – put another way, backpedal on a review.  I’m usually pretty consistent in terms of my opinions on movies, but every once in a while I’ve been egregiously wrong.  A few examples that come to mind are The Shining and Anchorman, both of which I appreciated much more the second time around; on the flip side, my recent excursion through the Star Wars prequel trilogy proved to be way less fun without my childhood lenses in place.  So in those rare moments when my current opinion contradicts a review I’ve already published, “Take Two Tuesdays” will be my chance to set the record straight.

In this installment, it’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  The headline here?  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is better than I gave it credit.

In my earlier review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I bemoaned the overfull quality of the film, calling it “a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.”  The kindest word I had for the film was “serviceable,” but I lamented, “‘serviceable’ just isn’t good enough any more.”

I’ll be honest:  in the wake of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, my comic book movie radar needs some serious readjusting.  It’s probably my second favorite comic book movie of all time at this point (you know the first), but it’s making the others look bad.  I noticed this problem after seeing X-Men: Days of Future Past.  While I waited for the inevitable postcredits stinger, my first thought was, “Eh.”  Immediately, I checked my premises; aside from one or two very small bits, I hadn’t had an unkind thought during the film itself.  The only thought I could rally behind that lukewarm off-the-cuff reaction was, “It wasn’t Winter Soldier.”

And that’s no way to review a movie.  On its own merits, X-Men: Days of Future Past was a smash success for me, and that’s the review I wrote.  Reapproaching The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with a similar sensibility (and a clearer sense of how all the moving pieces fit together) yielded comparable results.  It is, perhaps, the sequel I was waiting for after The Amazing Spider-Man.

The positives I cited still stand – Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have extraordinary chemistry together, Jamie Foxx’s Electro is a vastly original and highly entertaining nemesis.  And I have better things to say about Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn; I love that the film takes him down a different path than James Franco’s, and his character arc is much more compelling the second time around.

I remain, however, disgruntled about two pieces, though in revisiting the film they loom less large than I had perceived.  On the subject of DeHaan, I’m still miffed that the film doesn’t spend as much time developing his third-act twist, and I’m still sore about the “I’ll be back” cliffhanger.  I would have much rather spent more time with him than on my second grievance:  I still maintain that the subplot surrounding Peter’s parents is mishandled in the film.  These scenes don’t contribute anything to the narrative, don’t bear logically on the plot at hand, and ultimately don’t even resolve themselves.  Either the film needs to foreground this subplot – it is, after all, the opening scene of two films now – or drop it in favor of something more closely connected to the central story.  If it doesn’t pay off in The Inevitable Amazing Spider-Man 3, I think we all know when to get our popcorn refill.

In hindsight/retrospect (not sure which one), these are much smaller issues than I had initially felt.  I had a blast with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, especially the first hour (I know, because I got my refill at the moment when Peter digs out his father’s briefcase).  But the rest of it didn’t disappoint; I found myself laughing, caught up in the entertaining parts of the film and asking myself, “When exactly did I space out the last time?”  I couldn’t find that moment.

I feel the same way now about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as I do about X-Men: Days of Future Past.  It doesn’t revolutionize the genre, and it isn’t The Winter Soldier.  But it doesn’t have to be.  I had forgotten that a film needs only to entertain and, time permitting, say something important.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 more than succeeds at the former.  And the bits about hope at the very end tickle the Dark Knight Rises enthusiast in me just fine.

In short, I’ve upgraded this one to “buy on DVD.”  (That’s high praise coming from someone who still doesn’t own The Amazing Spider-Man.)

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Are we still in the first Golden Age of comic book films?  Or, post-Avengers, are we seeing a renaissance of comic book movies that wrestle with heavy thematic material in the way that previously only Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight Trilogy” had?  I suspect the latter, though the X-Men franchise has always used the mutant metaphor to wrestle with issues of tolerance and persecution.  With Days of Future Past, the seventh (seventh!) film in the series, though, X-Men kicks it up a few notches for one of the better outings in the series.

While former enemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellan) have united against the threat of mutant-exterminating Sentinel robots, they send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) into the past to 1973 to unite their younger selves (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender) against the path to dystopia:  if Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) kills the Sentinels’ creator Bolivar Trask (an inspired casting choice in the form of Peter Dinklage), the future is doomed.

Days of Future Past is equal parts sequel (to The Wolverine’s post-credits sequence and to First Class), prequel, and timey-wimey reboot, and with two principal casts working the same plot in two timelines, the film very easily could have spiraled out of control – both in terms of runtime and narrative.  But to returning director Bryan Singer’s credit, the film is tighter than that alleyway in Inception’s Mombasa chase scene.  Singer is obviously a fan at heart, and his passion for the project grants him a gifted hand at the wheel.

There is, throughout the film, a very present and nagging sense that much of the time travel in the film is designed to pull two profitable timelines together and, in the process, clean up some of the less popular missteps from films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand.  Fanboys and casual filmgoers alike will not complain there, so long as the film is anchored by a compelling central narrative that feels more like storytelling than like sweeping up.  This is actually a time-honored tradition in comic books, with the richer comics giving us more than just continuity clean-up.  By giving us characters and stakes to care about, Days of Future Past justifies its own existence beyond a simple “pretend those other films never happened” attitude.

Aside from a beat just before the third act begins, Days of Future Past never meanders, never bogs itself down in excess exposition or backstory.  Some of it doesn’t even jive with the past films, but thank heavens the movie doesn’t tie itself to its own inheritance; we know enough to jump into the world without having our hands held, and the filmmakers know it.  (Note to Zack Snyder when it comes to including Batman in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice – we know the origin already.)  Instead, Singer and company cut loose and have fun with the source material.

At times, that fun is a little too juvenile for me, as in the case of the speedster Quicksilver (Evan Peters).  When the casting was announced, it seemed a bit of one-upmanship with Joss Whedon’s Avengers 2, where Peters’s Kick-Ass costar Aaron Taylor-Johnson will be playing the hero.  Peters’s interpretation of Quicksilver is actually quite entertaining, and the special effects used to present his abilities are stunning.  That said, as cool as it is to see a man move quickly enough to reposition a bullet in midair, the beat when he pauses to give an assailant a wedgie is more Ratner than Singer.  It’s an incredibly nitpicky nit to pick, but it’s a poke in the eye during an otherwise winning eyeball kick of a set piece.

As in First Class, the scene stealer is Fassbender’s Magneto, who’s less “early days” McKellan and more of an original stamp on the character as derived from his Holocaust origins.  Lawrence gets a few solid scenes in as the revenge-embittered Mystique – not too far from Magneto, in that respect.  While those two play extensions of their First Class iterations, McAvoy has the harder task by carrying the emotional arc of the film, rebuilding himself out of despair and toward the Patrick Stewart we know he’ll become.

The inevitable sequel X-Men: Apocalype (teased in a nifty stinger) will focus on the First Class cast, which is fine, obviously, plus we’ll probably have Hugh Jackman along for the ride as Wolverine – again, fine.  The part is essentially his by now, and he’s more than earned it.  I hope, though, that we haven’t seen the last of the “classic” cast; seeing Stewart and McKellan and a few other familiar faces reminds us just how spot-on those casting calls were.  In this respect, Days of Future Past is a lot like checking in with old friends while meeting some new ones, and it’s my hope that we don’t walk away from the former as we gain the latter.

X-Men: Days of Future Past doesn’t reinvent the superhero wheel, and it doesn’t transcend the genre into something utterly inspired like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but it does its job more than capably well.  It’s vastly entertaining and engaging, well-acted and well-crafted.  It doesn’t have the metaphorical depth of past outings like X2, but that depth is supplanted by an emotional one that hooks the audience without preaching to it.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is rated PG-13 for “sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity and language.”  There’s plenty of slicing and dicing and exploding and the usual whizz-bang stuff; male rear nudity is seen once, and we get a reference to the F-bomb heard round the world from First Class.

Godzilla (2014)

It really doesn’t get much more summer blockbuster than this – an enormous and very loud creature destroying stuff in spectacular (meaning “like a spectacle”) fashion.  Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, the umpteenth entry in a franchise now sixty years old, is not a perfect movie, but it is a more than enjoyable popcorn feature with plenty of eyeball kicks.

Fifteen years after a nuclear meltdown, physicist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is convinced that the quarantine zone is a cover-up for something much more sinister.  His son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), however, believes his father is crazy.  While Ford is content to move on with his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and their son, a mysterious scientist (Ken Watanabe) hopes to study a series of strange caverns and organic pods growing within...

I almost don’t want to reopen this old wound, but Godzilla is very nearly the film that I wanted Pacific Rim to be.  Where Pacific Rim was a rather empty and noisy experience, bereft of many of Filmmaking 101’s basic storytelling elements, Godzilla is much more smartly crafted.  Edwards, working with some very talented performers and with a solid debut screenplay by Max Borenstein, does good work pulling the audience into his story which zigs when it ought to but every once in a while zags in an unexpected way, which I really mustn’t spoil.

Let me get the bad news out of the way before I continue with the “effusive praise” bit, because I really did enjoy the film despite being aware of its shortcomings.  And I’ll do these in relatively rapid-fire order, because they’re not overwhelming problems.  Firstly, the film is, toward the middle, a bit too long; there’s maybe one subplot or character too many, and the narrative does meander a bit heading into the final act.  Conversely, there’s not enough Cranston in the film; Taylor-Johnson is not an incredibly charismatic protagonist, while Cranston continues to play at the top of his game.  And finally, there’s very nearly not enough monster stuff in the film – I think I could have used a few more minutes of action for this to be a perfect popcorn movie.

One senses, though, that Edwards is deliberately holding back on the creature-feature scenes.  Instead of bombarding us from frame one with terrible beasties in combat as Pacific Rim did, Godzilla imbues a very Spielbergian sense of awe by withholding the monsters for so long, teasing us with hints of exposition and glimpses at parts of the whole.  It’s very reminiscent of Cloverfield in this respect, and it allows us to get attached to more than just the visual elements.  We get lured into the story and end up caring about what happens.  I said “I think” in the previous paragraph because I’m not sure I actually do want more Godzilla in the film; one thing that really struck me as I exited the theater was just how much restraint there was in this film and how judiciously Edwards doled out the combat sequences.

And this is a very smart hand at the wheel.  Edwards films some very beautiful scenes here, as when the HALO jumpers trail red smoke into the drop zone over an eerie chorus straight out of the trailer for Ridley Scott’s Alien.  The homage to the original Toho films, when Godzilla lumbers through San Francisco’s Little Tokyo, is another highlight, but the real eyeball kicks come from the immense sense of scope, very finely intoned by Watanabe just before the film’s third act begins.  There is a terrifying sublimity to Godzilla, which most lesser horror films tend to overlook.

Not Edwards.  If he’s in any way involved in the inevitable sequel, perhaps he too will one day be crowned “king of the monsters.”

Postscript:  absolutely see this on the largest and loudest movie theater screen you can.  I’m talking about genuine chills running up my arms at the Godzilla roar.  I can’t imagine Godzilla working nearly as well on a smaller screen.

Godzilla is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of destruction, mayhem and creature violence.”  There’s a ton of property damage, stuff blowing up, people running in terror, people getting stepped on by monsters – in the words of Godzilla vs. Biollante’s rating, “traditional Godzilla violence.”

Under the Skin (2014)

Under the Skin is one of the most disturbing and simultaneously perplexing movies I’ve ever seen.  I don’t mind being disturbed by a film – indeed, every once in a while, I actively seek out such a moviegoing experience – and there is something quite haunting about the film.  But Under the Skin is ultimately too thin on narrative to be truly effective.

Scarlett Johansson stars as a being (alien?) who drives around in a van picking up stray men and luring them back to her place with the promise of sex.  The abject loneliness of the road and the emotional distance when she eventually kills these men begins to wear on her, and she begins to look for human emotion within herself.

At least, that’s what I think the film is about.  Director Jonathan Glazer and screenwriter Walter Campbell, in what other sources are calling a very loose adaptation of Michael Faber’s eponymous novel, have given us a film that is very highly stylized (and quite engagingly so) but is otherwise compromised by its inability to tell a story that requires the full runtime to tell. 

I would like to commend Glazer and Campbell for not writing a film solely based around the premise of Scarlett Johansson taking her clothes off.  I sense that this is the kind of film that Under the Skin could have become had filmmakers with less interest in filmmaking actually been at the wheel.  I don’t put Glazer in that camp, because it’s apparent that he has something to say about a lot of different themes, but I don’t think he handles these themes especially well.

There are moments in the film that work spectacularly.  The densely metaphorical seduction/murder sequences convey quite imaginatively what is happening through the intense use of visual language, and while we never quite know why Johansson is abducting these men, these sequences communicate in horrifying dread a sense of their ultimate fate.  Indeed, Glazer is ostensibly a master of visual language, able to convey weighty ideas without the use of dialogue. 

Take, for instance, what I see as the pivotal turning point in the film – the interaction between Johansson and a man with neurofibromatosis, in which nothing but Johansson’s performance indicates that her burgeoning compassion for him forces her to spare his life.  It’s a masterful sequence, made all the more powerful by the fact that the actor in question, Adam Pearson, is in fact not an actor at all.

It’s scenes like that one (or the genuinely funny moment when Johansson’s character attempts to eat chocolate cake for the first time) that suggest Glazer has something to say, but in the end Under the Skin never really says anything substantial.  He’s obviously commenting on the nature of sexual predators – the moment when Johansson meets a shady forest patrolman, who asks her the same questions she asked of her prey, indicates as much – but it’s quite unclear what the comment is.  Similarly, the film never quite acknowledges the purpose – or, really, the existence – of the man on the motorcycle who drifts in and out of the film, with some unspoken link to the main character.

I don’t regret seeing Under the Skin, but I’m on the precipice of regret because the film is very nearly incomprehensible.  It does contain several arresting moments, but it isn’t as enjoyably surreal as, say, the work of David Lynch.  While Glazer is a master of silences, the pacing of Under the Skin is more glacial than it needs to be, though it will lodge someplace in the back of your skull for a few days after seeing it as you puzzle through just what it all means.

>Under the Skin is rated R for “graphic nudity, sexual content, some violence and language.”  Several men and women undress fully and are seen naked; though the lighting and cinematography are quite dim, the nudity is unmistakable.  Furthermore, the film deals with themes of seduction, rape, and sex killings, which are seen in disturbing metaphorical visuals with no blood.

Licence to Kill (1989)

Where I thought The Living Daylights was a welcome return to form for James Bond if a little unmemorable, I have much nicer things to say about Timothy Dalton’s second outing as the British superspy.  Although Licence to Kill isn’t a perfect Bond film, it does make me wonder what a third Dalton entry might have looked like.

After his old pal Felix Leiter is attacked on his wedding night, James Bond (Dalton) springs into revenge mode against the man responsible, drug lord Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi).  Cut off from official British support and on the run from his own friends as well as Sanchez’s, Bond teams up with Sanchez’s pilot Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) to bring the kingpin’s empire down around him.

If The Living Daylights was a throwback to the Sean Connery era, Licence to Kill is definitely a precursor to the current Daniel Craig incarnation.  Dalton’s Bond is dead serious here, more so than in his debut film.  In fact, Bond only starts cracking one-liners at the very end.  It’s entirely consistent with the tone of the film, which is really quite grim, though it does seem a little less like James Bond and more like a generic action hero.  Either way, Dalton is an infinitely compelling lead; his determination and moral outrage is very well played, and it’s great fun to watch him scheme against Sanchez.

That level of intellectual sophistication is another very welcome tonal shift in Licence to Kill.  Where some Bond films have been content to let Bond blunder into the plot (or, more frequently, have the plot assigned to him), Dalton’s Bond takes charge almost immediately, shooting out when necessary but also – and this is something I’d love to see Bond do more often – setting up dominoes and tricking Sanchez into knocking them over.  It’s nearly impossible for me to reconcile the fact that this film is directed by John Glen, who previously inflicted Octopussy upon us.  It’s probably Glen’s best directorial outing; he keeps the pace moving for the entire runtime with no real dead spots.

In a weird way, Davi fills the humor void left by Bond with a litany of droll puns; for example, after feeding a man to a shark, he notes wryly, “He disagreed with something that ate him” (a line from Fleming’s Live and Let Die novel).  Elsewhere, he carves out a romantic rival’s heart and calls it “my little valentine.”  Davi and/or the screenplay is obviously trying to set Sanchez up as Bond’s true opposite number, though the comparison doesn’t quite work with such a humorless Bond.  It does make Sanchez a memorable villain, a nice change of pace from the world-domineering evildoers who’ve preceded him in this franchise.  (Keep your eyes peeled for a very young Benicio del Toro as Sanchez’s creepy crony Dario.)

Licence to Kill is a very gritty Bond, and for me that’s really not a bad thing.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this film is actually quite underrated in the Bond canon.  True, it’s not an honest-to-goodness Bond film without the punchlines, but it melds enough of the Bond trappings – including a much-enhanced role for Desmond Llewellyn’s gadget-happy Q – with classic late-80s action flair to create an entertaining and enjoyable Bond film.

Licence to Kill is rated PG-13 for “for action violence and drug content.”  This is definitely the bloodiest Bond to date (and maybe still is to this day):  men are fed to sharks, exploded in compression chambers, ground up in a shredder, shot, impaled, exploded, and lit on fire – all in unflinchingly graphic detail.  (I cringed twice, and I’m made of relatively stern stuff.)  Drugs are mentioned, sold, and processed on screen, though none are used.  As far as sexual content goes, this is probably Bond’s least libidinous outing.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Goldeneye (1995) on June 7, 2014! 

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

If I ever get accused of making up my mind about a movie before I see it, I’ll point to The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  I desperately wanted to love this film, even after and in spite of the disappointment I faced with the first film in the reboot franchise.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not a catastrophe by any stretch of the imagination; there are things it does quite well, things that might have made the film an unqualified success, but the parts that don’t work did impede my enjoyment enough.

Fraught over his promise to her father, Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) doesn’t know where his relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is going, nor does he know what to make of his former best friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returning to New York to inherit his father’s company.  What’s more, Peter is still wrestling with the mysterious disappearance of his parents all those years ago.  As Spider-Man, though, he knows that the arrival of the demigodly Electro (Jamie Foxx) spells bad news for the city.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s greatest undoing is its obvious ambition; like an overeager patron of a fifty-year buffet, director Marc Webb and a quartet of screenwriters load up their plate with no fewer than seven running subplots, borrowing from wide stretches of Spidey’s comic book mythology.  And like at any buffet, there are entrees that taste great and other dishes that add only empty filler to the meal.

Let’s start with the bad news.  A lot of my complaints about the first film still stand, particularly about the subplot regarding Peter’s parents.  In a film that has so much going on, a subplot that has no direct link to the main plot should have been excised or made more relevant; it does serve to tie up a loose end from the first film, but it’s a conversation-closer rather than a motivator for the characters.  Furthermore, it’s the focus of much of the film’s middle, which means that the plot of the film screeches to a halt while Peter looks at computers until he finds the right file.

The Parkers subplot is the only thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 has too much of, and it certainly interferes with the pacing of the film because nearly everything else feels underrepresented and rushed.  While DeHaan is quite good as a Harry Osborn vastly different from James Franco’s interpretation, the script pushes him through one too many character transformations and then bails on him with the knowledge that he’ll be back for another film.  Similarly, Foxx is – pardon the pun – electrifying as Electro, an iconoclast whose hero worship collapses when Spider-Man forgets his name, but the film shuffles him offstage so that the aforementioned computer scenes can take precedence.

It bears comparison to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, which juggled a healthy amount of subplots and struck a commendable balance between Peter Parker’s angst and his superheroic struggle against Doctor Octopus (played brilliantly by Alfred Molina).  Raimi knew where to draw the line between plots and came out with a fantastically tight narrative; Webb’s is a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.

I don’t, however, object to the brief treatment of Paul Giamatti as The Rhino.  His scenes are fun bookends that get us in and out of the film rather deftly, and they’re cleverly scripted to tell us exactly what we need to know about Spider-Man at those moments.  He might be back for future sequels, but if not this is a perfectly fine way for movies to acknowledge the wider comics mythology without getting bogged down.  (See also Batroc in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Scarecrow in The Dark Knight.)

One thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 does especially well, though, is the relationship between Peter and Gwen.  Perhaps because of the real-life relationship between Garfield and Stone, these scenes are the most genuine and the most compelling in the entire film.  Garfield is pitch-perfect as the tormented teen, truly conflicted about the tension between his feelings and his dangerous lifestyle; he downright masters the chatty Web-Slinger persona, too, giving Spidey a New York edge to his wit that Tobey Maguire seemed to lack.  And Stone – well, you’ve probably read my blog long enough to know that I think she can do no wrong, and she continues to ace it here; we can feel her frustrations with Peter but also know from whence those feelings arise.

And I’ve spoken well of Foxx’s performance as Electro, and the scenes with him are honestly among the best in the film.  Webb, previously best known for his eloquently beautiful (500) Days of Summer, proves himself a solidly capable action director to boot.  I’m not sure quite what to make of Hans Zimmer’s dubstep-inflected score, but the action sequences in which the bass line drops and Electro pummels Spidey are probably the best such scenes in any Spider-Man film, realistic without a fanboy-tongue-in-cheek wink (as the Raimi films always seemed to do).  Or maybe it’s just that they’re set at night? 

Either way, in these moments Webb gives us the Spider-Man film we want.  And if the film had been a little more focused on these pieces instead of pushing toward too many finish lines, it might have even exceeded Spider-Man 2 in the realm of comic book films.  But your mileage, true believers, may vary.  Perhaps this is the future of the Spider-Man franchise, and I’m wrong about its misdirection.  Maybe I’m stubbornly clinging to a previous generation’s Spider-films, but I sense from the critical reception that the problem isn’t with me.  

I'm willing to be wrong - I want desperately to be wrong about this film, but the problem is that this Spider-Man just isn’t amazing enough.  It’s serviceable, but in a world where Captain America: The Winter Soldier is playing a few screens away, “serviceable” just isn’t good enough any more.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action/violence.”  We have a lot of zapping, kicking, and punching, with a little bit of burning and exploding; one character death might be traumatic and certainly ups the angst quota for the film.

Come back on Wednesday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month as Timothy Dalton makes his curtain call as James Bond in Licence to Kill!

Return of the Jedi (1983)

At the end of the Star Wars trilogy, it’s virtually impossible to top The Empire Strikes Back, which truly is a perfect movie.  But fortunately Return of the Jedi isn’t a fumble – think Godfather III without Sofia Coppola.  It’s a fitting conclusion to the Original Trilogy, though a few beats feel repeated from Star Wars.

The Empire has begun constructing a second Death Star, but before the Rebels can launch their attack Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) must rescue their carbonite-frozen friend Han Solo (Harrison Ford) from the slimy clutches of the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt.  After that memorable first act, Luke must contend with the revelations about his father while all his Jedi training tells him he must face Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) one last time while his friends launch an assault on the Death Star’s shield generator on the forest moon of Endor.

I have a very vivid memory of the first time I watched Return of the Jedi – I was eating bubble gum ice cream (we had gone to Baskin Robbins between the Jabba and Endor scenes), and the lush greenery of the Endor sequence impressed me, since I had only seen Empire Strikes Back on a black and white television.  Now, I’m not that old, but I have a harder time looking objectively at Return of the Jedi than at the prequels, partially because of this childhood remembrance; I don’t have a problem, for example, with the cuddly teddy bear Ewoks (though I think that using Wookiees might have been more interesting), and the first act in Jabba’s palace is really more of an extended precredits sequence in the James Bond tradition.

But it all adds up to something really quite entertaining, even if it steps on the toes of Star Wars a bit with a retread of the Death Star trench run climax.  After the sturm und drang of Empire Strikes Back, Jedi feels refreshing without the whiplash of an abrupt course correction.  The Jabba sequence, more prologue than plot, really only serves to get Han Solo back into the story, but director Richard Marquand keeps it interesting by populating the scene with fascinating visuals and a fantastically confident performance by Hamill.

Hamill’s turn as Luke Skywalker, now a full-fledged Jedi Knight, makes me very excited for the as yet unnamed Episode VII, because by the time Jedi rolls around the core group of performers are obviously very comfortable in their roles; if Star Wars felt a little bumpy for the fresh-faced nature of the cast, the big three are their characters in this installment.  The Han/Leia relationship comes to fruition here, and Ford & Fisher play it very well, very naturally, with a nice reprise of the “I love you”/“I know” exchange. 

The stakes are upped by the appearance, finally, of Emperor Palpatine, portrayed with fine villainy by Ian McDiarmid.  For a role that’s mostly sedentary, McDiarmid exudes menace with every snarled vowel and malicious glint in his eye.  Furthermore, the Force-lightning trick works better here than in Attack of the Clones, because it’s the only weapon the decrepit Palpatine has beyond his words; it’s a fantastic surprise that the wizened old geezer can actually do real damage.  This new villain perhaps mitigates the overly adorable nature of the Ewoks, who manage to dismantle an Imperial garrison with sticks and stones; with Palpatine commanding the fleet from the air, the Empire continues to feel like a true threat.

But in spite of the compounded darkness in the film, Return of the Jedi is probably the most feel-good of the franchise.  Star Wars tastes good going down too, but the original film carries more of a sense of astonishment at innovation than comfort at the company of old friends.  Return of the Jedi feels like the band getting back together, with all the laughs and nostalgia that a fine epilogue should have.  For a series that begins as ill-advisedly as The Phantom Menace did, Return of the Jedi brings us back to where we ought to be – a definitive science-fiction epic for the ages.

Return of the Jedi is rated PG for “sci-fi action violence.”  More of the same from the last outings, really – lightsaber duels, a mechanized hand is severed, explosions and blaster fire, and one skimpy metal bikini.

Thanks for joining us today for “Star Wars Day”!  We’ll be back tomorrow with a review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and then again on Wednesday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month!

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

If Star Wars is a perfect movie, it may seem hard to believe that The Empire Strikes Back is a more perfect movie.  The Empire Strikes Back follows religiously in its predecessor’s footsteps, though it turns the excellence up to eleven with a darker yet more human story that takes its characters to their most emotional moments.

Three years after the destruction of the Death Star, the Rebel Alliance’s hidden base on the ice world of Hoth is discovered by the Empire, and the Rebels flee after a spectacular battle in the snow.  Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) journeys to Dagobah to continue his training as a Jedi under the tutelage of the diminutive Yoda (Frank Oz), while Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) fight their mutual attraction and the pursuing Empire.  All three become pawns in a larger game controlled by Darth Vader (David Prowse & James Earl Jones), who wants revenge for the Empire and holds a dark secret about what really happened to Luke’s father...

The Empire Strikes Back amps up everything that Star Wars did correctly but augments the gee-whiz science-fiction angle with a more grounded sense of characterization.  The characters in Star Wars seem a lot like archetypes, which isn’t bad for a high mythic narrative, but The Empire Strikes Back really plays up the personalities of Luke, Leia, and Han (and, to a degree, Darth Vader).  It’s really the result of stronger writing; I’ve chastised George Lucas all along for creating relatively flat characters (cf. the Plinkett rule), but Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay feels much more three-dimensional and even more engaging.

Subsequently, the core cast members all rise to the occasion.  The will-they/won’t-they courtship between Leia and Han is positively electrifying, and Fisher & Ford nail the dynamic with a healthy dose of wry banter and lingering glances.  Even before we fully learn that the two are in a Benedict/Beatrice standoff, the chemistry between them tingles, and you’ll be pulling for them to end up together long before Han delivers his iconic last line (ad-libbed, to boot!).  As for Hamill, he’s given the unenviable task of acting opposite a puppet for much of his screen time, but his work onscreen is so compelling that you might forget Yoda is a glorified Muppet.  (One senses that Yoda’s introduction is what Lucas wanted out of Jar Jar Binks, but as per usual Empire offers a masterclass in how to do a movie right.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that The Empire Strikes Back is one of the principal forerunners of our current grim-n-gritty approach to genre narrative.  Without Empire’s focus on the darker side of conflict, both internal and external, I doubt we’d have The Dark Knight and its ilk.  I don’t want to take away from Christopher Nolan’s accomplishment – he really did kickstart the movement in comic book films – but there’s much in Empire that feels comparable to the Nolan level of respect for the source material.  Director Irvin Kershner regards the Star Wars franchise incredibly reverently, telling a story with tremendous sincerity that aims not just to entertain but to follow a strand of very human logic and emotion that just happens to have dueling lightsabers, asteroid fields, and little green gurus.

As in Revenge of the Sith, the third act of Empire is frankly astonishing.  (The key difference being, of course, that the rest of Empire is unproblematically dynamite, as well.)  Underlined all the while by a tour de force score by John Williams, which works beautifully even through the headphones of an iPod, all the film’s plotlines come to a boil on Cloud City, with Han and Leia trapped in Vader’s web.  Emotions are running high – love, betrayal, fear, resolve, Vader’s menace.  As Luke comes to the rescue, it’s impossible not to get caught up in the good-vs.-evil plot, even though we know the forces of good are horribly outnumbered.  The revelation of Vader’s master plan and his darkest secret are exceptionally memorable, very well-crafted by all hands on the creative deck.  It’s a moment that sweeps you up, 34 years later, making you feel as excited as the first time you heard the words, “No, I am your father.”  And even having the prequels tell you that already, even after it’s been homage’d very nearly to death, Jones’s delivery is still powerful enough to send a chill through you.

The film ends in a very grim place, though as the credits roll there’s a breathtaking feeling of having been taken on a whirlwind journey through a galaxy of exciting possibilities, guided by an able pilot in the form of – no, not Han Solo, not even George Lucas – director Irvin Kershner and his able copilots Brackett and Kasdan.  The Empire Strikes Back was long my favorite movie of all time (up until, at least, I finally saw Casablanca), and it’s still Top Ten material for me, standing solidly in the ranks of the perfect movies.

If nothing else, it’s fine context for the strangest thing that Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) has ever done.

The Empire Strikes Back is rated PG for “sci-fi action/violence.”  A few lightsaber duels transpire, and two result in dismemberment.  Darth Vader force-chokes a few minions to death, and a character is frozen in carbonite amid fears that he might not survive.  Other laser blasts and explosions occur, as do a few kisses.

We’ll be back in two hours for the final installment of this review series, a look at Return of the Jedi!

Star Wars (1977)

Even if you strip away all the bells and whistles of the myriad “Special Edition” rereleases, at the core of Star Wars (now known also as Episode IV – A New Hope) is what I’m ready to label a “perfect movie,” a deft example of genre-(re)defining science fiction that never hits a sour note as it tells a relatively simple story with graceful aplomb.

Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is a farmboy with dreams of space travel when the Rebellion against the malevolent Empire arrives on his doorstep in the form of two droids – R2-D2 and C-3PO – carrying data that could spell the end of the Empire’s latest technological terror, the Death Star.  Luke and his new mentor Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness) charter the Millennium Falcon, captained by roguish Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his Wookiee copilot Chewbacca, though their flight is derailed by an effort to rescue Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) from the very embodiment of evil, Darth Vader (movements by David Prowse, voice by James Earl Jones).

After all the disappointment we’ve endured over the last few hours’ worth of reviews, it’s amazingly easy to fall back in love with the franchise from the very opening shot of two starships in combat – which brilliantly tells us everything we need to know without a single word of dialogue:  an enormous Star Destroyer bearing down on the miniscule and outgunned fleeing Rebel ship.

I do want to judge the Original Trilogy on its own merits and not quite in comparison to its prequel successors, but Star Wars does such a deft job of storytelling that it’s a wonder this is the same George Lucas who would later inflict Jar Jar Binks and ultimately meaningless political posturing upon us.  Star Wars is elegant in its simplicity – there are good guys and there are bad guys, and any special effects in the film are entirely at the service of the plot (rather than the other way around).

In fact, even before Lucas went in and revised the films with all his computer trickery (some of which is actually an improvement, especially the scene between Jabba and Han, which was absent from the initial theatrical release), Star Wars has aged spectacularly well.  Though I’ve seen the movie umpteen times by now, this most recent rewatch still captured all the movie magic for me, and it’s probably the most fun I’ve had with a movie since Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  There’s action, adventure, humor, romance (even if it’s uncomfortable knowing that Luke and Leia are related), a remarkably tight screenplay, and a slew of first-rate performances – the constellation required for a perfect movie.  And let’s not forget the John Williams score, the (mostly) unsung hero of the series, which swoops and soars when it needs to but pulls out the heavy brass lines when villainy is afoot.

If the film feels in any way familiar, remember that Star Wars distilled preexisting myth narratives and simultaneously reinvented them; it’s impossible to imagine a film in the mythic realm that hasn’t been influenced by this classic tale.  Even without the prequels, the introduction of Darth Vader, gliding over the bodies of fallen Rebel soldiers, is instantly iconic, and Jones’s vocal performance is genuinely chilling.  The rest of the cast, too, are doing pitch-perfect character work – Hamill naïve but determined, Ford charismatic yet cocky, Fisher resolute and courageous, and Sir Alec Guinness as the scene-stealer among them all, wise and pragmatic.  Each of these roles is legendary, but the addition of all of them together in a tightly-plotted and intensely focused screenplay results in... well, how many ways can I say “perfect movie”?

Science fiction at an undeniable apex, Star Wars proves a worthy inauguration to a long-lasting franchise, even nearly forty years after the fact.  Take it on its own or as the first/fourth chapter in a longer narrative; Star Wars is a perfect film.

Star Wars is rated PG for “sci-fi violence and brief mild language.”  A few folks get blasted by laser fire and explosions (both in person and in spaceships); one is choked to death, and another is briefly choked by The Force.  A planet and a space station explode, killing all aboard.  The expletives are of the “damn” and “hell” variety.

We’ll be back in two hours with (Star Wars: Episode V –) The Empire Strikes Back!

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

The road to Episode IV has been paved with disappointment, bogged down as it is by bizarre narrative flights, bad writing, and even worse acting.  By the time we reach Revenge of the Sith, the final prequel, it’s difficult to tell why the film feels like a success – has it truly accomplished what the prequels set out to do, or are we just weary and relieved to see Darth Vader on screen?

As the Clone Wars conclude, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) pursues the villainous cyborg General Grievous while Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) comes under the wing of Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid).  But Palpatine’s intentions are less than noble, and his promise that he can save the life of Anakin’s pregnant wife Padmé (Natalie Portman) leads the young Jedi inexorably toward his dark destiny.

There’s a point in the film, the moment when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader, when it almost feels like this is the prequel we’ve been waiting for – the film totally dispenses with all the cartoon chicanery and gives us, in fairly rapid succession, (spoilers?) the fall of the Jedi order and a climactic lightsaber duel between Vader and Obi-Wan on a volcanic planet, which explains the necessity of the suit.  I’m certain that a large degree of the third act’s success is the John Williams score, which carries us through the emotional trauma of the scene and bludgeons us with “The Imperial March” as the Empire rises.  The action is really quite impressive, as the Vader/Obi-Wan duel is juxtaposed with Yoda’s fight against Palpatine.

Unfortunately, there’s a pervading sense that this is a moment the trilogy has not quite earned.  It’s remarkable as a tonal shift, a third act that really feels quite out of place for a series that began with a cartoon fish-rabbit version of Stepin Fetchit.  And it draws into stark contrast all the things that the trilogy has done wrong – as Darth Vader cuts down all the political conspirators from the previous two films, one feels a sense of frustration that all those machinations had distracted us from what should have been a compelling yet inevitable tragic fall.

It’s even more painful that Revenge of the Sith, rather than focus on this first-rate third act, introduces a whirlwind of new plot elements – including General Grievous – before realizing quite quickly that the trilogy has done next to nothing to set up the Original Trilogy – the pregnancy that will bear Luke and Leia is a passing subplot, and the characters who need to die because they don’t appear in the Original Trilogy are shuffled off with little fanfare.  Notable exception – the Jedi Order itself, killed off during the aforementioned third act during a beautifully grim montage.  It’s not that Grievous and company are uninteresting material, but they’re perhaps better suited in some of the Expanded Universe material.

The greatest pain in the midst of the third act is that it throws into sharp relief just how poor of an actor Hayden Christensen is.  He has his moments, to be fair, though I wonder how much of the work is actually being done by Williams’s score and the special contact lenses Christensen wears.  Revenge of the Sith is really the only prequel where any acting actually gets done; McGregor embraces the showboat nature of Obi-Wan’s character, Portman does a good bit of emoting, and McDiarmid really chews up the scenery as the snarling Palpatine.  But Christensen continues to yell without much emotion, leaving the characterization work in the hands of the other elements of production.

But I don’t want to take away that sense of accomplishment from Revenge of the Sith.  It’s holding 80% over at Rotten Tomatoes, which might be an overestimation.  The third act, however, is fully worth that, if only because it finally takes the audience where it wanted to go all along.  That’s a little bit funny, actually; usually we criticize prequels for merely setting up the original film, but in this case the world built in the Prequel Trilogy is so poorly misjudged that we’re glad finally to be rid of its ill-advised detours and distractions in favor of the more familiar – and more successful – elements of the Star Wars universe.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi violence and some intense images.”  Two characters are burned alive in surprisingly graphic detail; others, including several children, die bloodless and off-screen deaths (including an implied decapitation).  Palpatine’s transformation into the wrinkly-faced Emperor is a bit disturbing.

We’ll be back in two hours with Star Wars (also known as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope)!

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)

Compared to The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones is a little more of what I’m looking for from a Star Wars prequel, delving deeper into Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace into the throes of the Dark Side.  But while Clones rectifies some of its predecessor’s excesses and missteps, it’s not an unequivocally good film, hampered as it is by bad acting and deliberately opaque plotting.

Ten years after the events of the previous film, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his apprentice Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) are assigned to protect Senator Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) after an attempt on her life.  The search for the assassin leads Obi-Wan to the bounty hunter Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison) and an army of clones, while Anakin and Padmé attempt to avoid the romance burgeoning between them.

I’m not sure if George Lucas or his newfound cowriter Jonathan Hales is to thank, but Attack of the Clones improves on The Phantom Menace in two ways that are guaranteed to facilitate an enjoyable moviegoing experience – less Jar Jar Binks and more action.  Everyone’s least favorite CGI character is virtually absent from this film, and in his place are more action sequences, including a great battle between Jango Fett and Obi-Wan, a gladiator-style arena scene, and an opportunity for Yoda to throw down in a duel with, of all people, Christopher Lee.  As setpieces, these are good fun and quintessential Star Wars, even if the end gets a bit messy with so many lightsabers flying about that the plot becomes somewhat indistinguishable.

As for the plot, Lucas and Hales do commit the cardinal sin of cinema – abandoning mysteries.  In the Star Wars universe, this is especially problematic when the work of addressing plot points is relegated to the Expanded Universe of novels and comics – where, I’m told, the mystery of Sifo-Dyas and the clone army is explained.  But this instance crosses the line between immersive multi-platform storytelling and, honestly, lazy writing.  It’s introduced with some fanfare – this is essentially Obi-Wan’s major plot thread, and he makes some to-do about how the mystery defies reason, but it’s dropped.  (The answer, according to the Internet, is more complex than need be, though I could think of several easier options right off the bat.)

The biggest problem with Clones, though, is Hayden Christensen’s performance as Anakin.  Although the prequel trilogy is supposedly anchored by Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side, Christensen’s portrayal is entirely unconvincing.  In the moments when he’s not blatantly underperforming, his scenes of intense anger often come across as a petulant child shouting in order to get what he wants.  That statement, however, does a disservice to child actors, who could actually muster up plausible emotion.  To be fair, much of the romantic dialogue in the film is astoundingly hamfisted, and many of the finest actors might be stymied by lines like “I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me.”  But whether we blame the poor writing, the languid direction, or a simple inability to emote, the film’s emotional center feels somewhat creepy with Portman – who’s trying, you can really tell – inexplicably falling for a man who seems to admit he’s been stalking her.

Christensen is just one example of just how drastically this film lacks any human soul.  Lucas likes to boast about how much of the film is not real, how much is computer-generated – but it’s not something of which to be proud.  Much of Clones feels artificial and sterilized because it’s all so very unreal; while the CGI effects on Yoda and R2-D2 allow the characters to transcend their stodgier incarnations and literally fly around, one senses that it comes at a price, the loss of (if nothing else) a Benjamin-ian aura of authenticity.  It doesn’t help that some of the effects – mainly the ones to do with backgrounds – have not aged quite well and are very apparently the work of green-screen filming.  (You’ll understand Ian McKellen’s lament when you see just how synthetic some of these shots appear.)

But there are things in Clones that work, so I’ll rattle them off briefly.  The John Williams score is, again, top-notch, especially his “Across the Stars” piece that underpins many of the romantic scenes; in fact, put the dialogue on mute, and the score alone could carry the plot better than the acting.  McGregor starts to own Obi-Wan beyond a mere Alec Guinness impression, though he’s still more a slave to the logic of the plot than a full character in control of his decisions.  It’s a real treat to see Samuel L. Jackson swinging a lightsaber (purple, no less), and I’ll never say no to the distinguished pedigree of Christopher Lee, who manages to circumvent the clunky opacity surrounding the mystery of his character’s allegiances.

While Clones is still a far cry from the Star Wars prequels you really want to see, it’s a few steps closer to the right direction, perhaps due to some degree of delegation on the part of George Lucas (it’s no surprise that The Empire Strikes Back, certainly the best of the series, is the film with which he had the least to do).  Its greatest flaw, though, is reducing the greatest villain in the galaxy to a whiny lovestruck 20-something who misses his mommy – played, I might add, rather unsuccessfully.

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones is rated PG for “sustained sequences of sci-fi action/violence.”  The film contains lots of blaster fire (droids against clones), lightsaber battles (including one decapitation and one arm amputation, both bloodless), and a trio of scary beasties, one of whom mauls a character’s back, drawing blood.  Oh, and the occasional kissy-face.

We’ll be back in two hours with the final prequel film, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith!

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

The Star Wars prequels should have been a trilogy to match the scope of the original, heralded as new classics to stand proudly beside the old in telling the story of the fall of Anakin Skywalker as he becomes Darth Vader.  Instead, the trilogy begins with The Phantom Menace, a cartoonish mess of a movie littered with creative missteps, shoddy screenwriting, and an apparent stubborn insistence on annoying the audience.

Here’s what we know, though you’ll have to muddle through some truly murky exposition to get there:  Two Jedi Knights, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), are sent to Naboo to mediate a trade dispute between the Trade Federation and Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman).  When negotiations go sour, the Jedi and the Queen escape to Tatooine, where they meet young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) while the power of the Dark Side gathers around them...

Perhaps The Phantom Menace was a case of superlative expectations; the promise of the untold story of Darth Vader, arguably the most recognizable character in all of cinema, is a tantalizing one.  Perhaps we asked too much?  Unfortunately, no:  on rewatching the film with my ambitions severely lowered, I still found myself disappointed by The Phantom Menace.  The film is cluttered with dispiriting indications that George Lucas had lost his touch.  To begin, the film has no central protagonist, nor a clear antagonist (we never learn, for example, what “the phantom menace” actually is).  There’s a sense that Darth Sidious, master of the Dark Side of the Force, is the primary villain, though his motives and behavior are baffling.  It seems that his plan is to guarantee that he becomes the Emperor in time for the events of the Original Trilogy, which doesn’t actually make logical sense since these are prequels.

I could stop the review right there, because that sentence tells you everything you need to know about The Phantom Menace.  This film, and indeed the entirety of the Prequel Trilogy, proceeds very much like a paint-by-numbers series of events designed to set the stage for Episode IV, with little to no investment in the narrative itself.  There is no passion, no enthusiasm, no attempt to engage the audience beyond the superficial and frankly alienating special effects.  Little in the film seems real (more on that later), and consequently nothing seems to matter; Darth Maul aside, the film’s villains provide no threat to its heroes, and the whole movie proceeds like a very thinly written cartoon designed to sell toys rather than advance a plot.

If there is any passion in the film, it’s in Lucas’s love affair with his computer.  One senses that Lucas is truly astonished by the technical capabilities available to him – and rightly so.  As foul a character as Jar Jar Binks is, the digital effects used to create him are really quite amazing, even fifteen years after the fact.  He remains, however, the film’s greatest sin, an entirely useless character who exists solely to annoy the audience.  Jar Jar Binks serves no plot function and stumbles through the film via sheer dumb luck; more problematic in a narrative sense, he’s very close to an invisible friend, because most of the characters seem irritated by him and often choose to avoid him.  You could digitally erase him from most scenes and not tell the difference.

There are, to be fair, a few things that The Phantom Menace does defensibly well.  The first of these is the stellar score by John Williams, which I’ll argue throughout the day is the real star of the Prequel Trilogy.  When the film falls flat, as it often does, Williams’s music comes in to give us a sense of humanity, of breathlessness, of the personality the film so desperately lacks.  Williams creates a musical universe with plenty of new elements but with enough leitmotifs from the Original Trilogy to be recognizable.  In fact, that’s the template the entire Prequel Trilogy should have followed.

The film also includes two solid and memorable action sequences – the podrace and the climactic lightsaber battle.  The former shows a successful use of the CGI technology to create an engaging setpiece – which, to be sure, it is, being largely tangential to the plot but finally a relief after all the political posturing that precedes it.  The lightsaber duel is probably the best part of the film, though you’ll have to wade through nearly two hours of plodding politics; it’s exciting, it’s something we hadn’t seen before (Darth Maul with the double-bladed saber especially), and the Williams track “Duel of the Fates” is first-rate.

But a few good pieces aren’t enough to make The Phantom Menace a success.  In fact, it’s really only required viewing for the completist, and at any rate it’s certainly not the Star Wars film with which to introduce the franchise.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is rated PG for “sci-fi action/violence.”  There are explosions, laser blasts, lightsaber fights (with two deaths, seen clearly but not graphically), and a thrilling chase sequence in which several racers are presumed to die in explosions.  Most of the violence deals with robots.

We’ll be back in two hours with Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones!