A review by berenikeasteria
Attack of the Clones by R.A. Salvatore

2.0

I’m an old school Expanded Universe fan. As in, really old school. Pre-prequels. My idea of the Clone Wars are shaped by Corran Horn (who is about the same age as Luke and Leia) mentioning that his father was 10 years old when it ended and the Empire rose, and that it was a conflict spanning decades that his grandfather fought in. My mental image of the Clone Wars is of a Wild West-like time of lawlessness, not a shiny Republic beset by interminably dull politics, when the Jedi are a dying breed scattered across the galaxy, not a highly organised group tens of thousands strong with a central base of operations, and when Boba Fett was still Journeyman Jaster Mereel. In Return of the Jedi, I see Vader as being 60-something years old, not in his mid-40s, and the Emperor has got to be over 100, ravaged by the dark side yes but also sustained by its sheer hatred inside that shell of a body. It explains why Luke’s generation can’t remember the Jedi or the Republic. And the thing is, I might have been onboard with throwing all this out of the window and accepting a different vision of the Clone Wars… if the one the prequels gave us wasn’t so awful.

When it comes to reviewing the novelisation of a Star Wars movie, it is a bit different from reviewing any other Star Wars book. Here I am much less critiquing the author, R. A. Salvatore, than I am the story itself. That said, let’s talk about what Salvatore uniquely brings to the table. His prose is pretty pedestrian, to be perfectly honest, and there was no point where I took note of a well-turned phrase, or a particularly lively description, or an inventive and charming bit of dialogue. I think I would call the style of writing serviceable at best. To Salvatore’s credit, however, I do feel he does his best to mitigate some of the worst aspects of the film. For example, adding in early scenes of Shmi’s life with her new family gave some much-needed empathy for her story and those characters, whereas in the film what happens to her feels rushed and poorly explained, and Anakin pretty much brushes everyone off without even bothering to get to know them. When Anakin is being a whiny jerk, Salvatore gives him an inner voice where he mentally kicks himself for sticking his foot in his mouth, which makes him slightly more sympathetic. But other authorial choices are, I think, highly questionable. During the speeder chase sequence on Coruscant, Salvatore has Obi-Wan state some variation on “I hate it when you do that” far more times than he ever utters the line in the film, and it really heightens the sense of the character’s powerlessness, lack of control over Anakin, and makes him seem incompetent. Salvatore lingers on Zam’s attractive female form, noting on how it has helped her succeed in assassinations in the past, but then notes that it wouldn’t help her here since Padme is female. Like, why draw attention to that only to note how it is not helpful here? It makes me as a reader question why Zam would choose an unhelpful disguise now. Entering the seedy cantina, Salvatore chooses to put the name “Elan Sleazebaggano” in writing. Yes, I know that’s the name assigned to the character by the movie – but the movie never actually uses it, so if I were writing the novelisation, I would dodge actually using it too when the name was this lazy and cringe-worthy. Why? Why would you do this, Salvatore? Why? There are missed opportunities, too. In the film, Anakin mentions to Obi-Wan that it was Padme’s idea to use her as bait to flush out the assassin, but despite including an extra scene of dialogue between Anakin and Padme, Salvatore mysteriously never uses the opportunity to have the pair discuss and come up with this stratagem.

There are so many problems with the romance. To begin with, I have a hard time buying that Anakin is only hung up on Padme. Sure, she’s beautiful… but he’s 19 years old; his head is turning at any attractive woman that happens to walk by. Do not tell me he “fell in love with her” when he was 10 years old during The Phantom Menace and that’s why he only has eyes for her. A pre-adolescent ten-year-old does not have a good sense of what romantic love is. When they meet again in Attack of the Clones, they’re basically having to get to know each other almost as if it were for the first time. I question whether they even hit it off during the time they do spend getting to know each other. Padme has devoted her life to politics; Anakin has no patience for it whatsoever. Padme is all about the democratic process; Anakin thinks an autocratic dictator would take action and get things done. Padme tells him to stop creeping on her; Anakin smirks and continues to leer at her. What is Padme getting out of all this? Anakin is surely not the most appealing potential partner in the galaxy, his pent-up aggression and obvious immaturity being definite turn offs for a grown adult. The book tells us that the real reason Padme softens towards Anakin is because, at 24 years old, all she really wants to do is settle down and have babies. Honestly, I was surprised that Padme didn’t call her elder sister out on that nonsense and ask her why pursuing her lifelong passion as a career somehow didn’t count as “doing something for her”? And even then, that’s not a great argument for specifically choosing Anakin. Nor is there any pressing need to marry so quickly – at least, no reason that is ever given to the audience. So essentially, these two people are thrust together because they’re young and attractive… despite the fact that they have no chemistry whatsoever. It’s been said before, but this is a Romeo and Juliet understanding of romance. As in, some people are under the misapprehension that Romeo and Juliet is an ideal of romance, when in fact the story is supposed to be a tragedy about teenagers killing themselves because they can’t conceive of a bright, promising future without the person they literally met a few days ago – it’s a tale about getting swept up in those initial intense emotions whereas real love is so much more. Okay, so you’re saying that Anakin and Padme are supposed to be a tragic love story, right? But there’s more proof that whoever was responsible for this disaster simply didn’t have a good grasp on romance, because it’s not specific to Anakin and Padme. I direct you to consider Owen and Beru, supposedly of an age with Anakin, and planning on getting married soon. So that’s two couples getting married at a very young age. Because hey, if we’re going to have a cameo from Luke’s future adoptive family, we have to have everyone in there, right? Audiences won’t understand if Owen’s girlfriend is someone he dated before Beru. Likewise, Luke and Leia have to be born, so we’d better get those crazy kids hitched, regardless of whether it actually makes sense for Padme to find a teenaged boy five years younger than her suitable marriage material after just a couple of months together, or whether Anakin’s of an age where the last thing on his mind is making a lifelong commitment even if he weren’t a Jedi… yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Now make the dolls kiss.

Possibly an even bigger problem than this awkward romance is the character stupidity shown. It’s okay to have one character who is supposed to be not too bright do idiotic things. It is not okay to have every character behave in this way simply because the plot hinges on it. It doesn’t exactly engender audience empathy for your protagonists if they keep missing the bleeding obvious. Someone is trying to kill Padme but it doesn’t make sense that it’d be the Separatists because her opposition to the Military Creation Act helps their cause. Gosh darnit, if only the Jedi Council could unravel this mystery for the ages! You don’t think it could be… someone who wants the Military Creation Act to go through, do you? Nah! So then the Council decides it’s a good idea to send Padme off alone with the highly erratic, disobedient, hormone-fuelled Jedi Padawan who keeps staring at her, getting tongue-tied around her, and admits that he hasn’t stopped thinking about her for ten years. That couldn’t possibly go wrong! And because it’s for her protection, they’re going to take refugee transport, where Obi-Wan, Typho, Dorme, and other prominent members of the senator’s entourage bid her farewell in broad daylight. The Temple archives can’t identify the poison dart, so instead of running an isotope analysis which would at least narrow it down, Obi-Wan decides to ask an old buddy… who we’ve never seen before… who runs a 1950s diner. Wait, what? Do you hear that? That is the sound of my immersion shattering.

Perhaps the most egregious example of character stupidity and strange choices in writing comes when Obi-Wan discovers that the order for the clone army was placed by someone called “Sifo-Dyas”. I still remember watching this in the cinema and thinking with a knowing nod; “Sidious, of course.” I mean, it’s a pretty shitty alias if you’re trying to hide who you really are, but at least it makes perfectly good sense that Sidious would want to create the army. But no… there really was a now-dead Jedi named Sifo-Dyas who placed the order… for reasons that are never explained. Okay, first, if you are going to have it be a completely different character, you need to name them something vastly different from any other well-known character in order to avoid the audience leaping to the wrong conclusion. Second, neither the film nor the book explains why Sifo-Dyas placed the order, and that’s kind of important because it’s the mystery underpinning the whole plot. And third, the Jedi Order sees no problem whatsoever in taking delivery and deploying this clone army immediately… despite the fact that someone clearly wants a war to happen, someone who wants it bad enough to try and kill the lead opponent to that happening. They apparently don’t bother to investigate this – why did Sifo-Dyas place the order? Who paid for it? Who is Tyrannus? Once it’s been discovered that Tyrannus is Dooku, then the next question becomes how did Dooku know about the order being placed, why would he help fulfil it by finding the perfect donor, and what was his connection to the individual that originally placed the order? You see, you would think that getting answers to these questions would be pretty damn critical. Yoda, Mace Windu, and Obi-Wan all talk about the problems the Jedi Order is currently facing, the knowledge that the Sith are still out there working against them, and their diminished capacity to accurately read the Force. Nope! And it’s Nute Gunray that wants Amidala killed because he’s bitter. That works, and Sidious and Tyrannus would probably give this the go ahead because she’s standing in the way of their war plans… but shouldn’t the other Separatist bigwigs be protesting, since launching a surprise attack on an undefended Republic is just what they want? Oh, and while I’m here talking about massive plotholes you could fly a Star Destroyer through; it annoys me that we end The Approaching Storm with the Jedi having successfully blocked Ansion’s secession, and as yet no planets have seceded. We start Attack of the Clones with hundreds if not thousands of planets having seceded, but we’re also told that Obi-Wan and Anakin have just got back from Ansion. How long did it take them to get back?! It can’t have been much more than a week, and I’m being generous with that estimation. Why does none of this make any flipping sense?!

Let’s talk about fan service. I know a decent number of you out there like Jango Fett and would probably call him one of the highlights of Episode II, even those who generally otherwise have a negative opinion of Episode II. He’s cool, and he’s pretty badass, and yes, he is those things. Some of you even say he’s cooler than Boba Fett, to which I say: sacrilege. But I don’t think the existence of Jango Fett is necessarily a good thing. I imagine Jango was created in a conversation that went something like this: “What can we do to make Attack of the Clones better than The Phantom Menace?” “Boba Fett was an unexpected hit in the original trilogy, a real fan favourite!” “Yeah, but… this is like 25+ years earlier, he can’t be that old and still working the bounty hunter gig, can he?” “Huh, you’re right. Make it young Boba and his dad.” “Uh, what?” “Make a character who’s basically a clone of the Boba Fett character – all of the fan service, none of the continuity problems. And hey, that’s an idea, why not make Boba the clone, and his dad the actual sources of all the clones?! I’m a genius!” So… we can’t have a cool original character then? We have to milk people’s nostalgia and play it safe to be sure we have a hit and make money. Brand recognition, baby. I mean, the degree to which the Disney films have tried to milk nostalgia and play it safe is practically factory farming at this point – but let’s not forget that the prequels did it first. Did we really have to see young Boba, young Chewie, and young Uncle Owen? And everybody has to be somebody too. It’s not good enough that Chewie was Han’s long-term smuggling partner and back-watcher – he has to save Yoda too. It’s not good enough that Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru were some kindly childless couple Obi-Wan found to hide Luke with – they have to be Anakin’s step-sibling and sister-in-law, literally the first place he would look if he ever suspected his children had lived. Boba can’t just be a young man from an obscure backwater planet who got caught up in a terrible murder and then went on a journey of desperate struggle to become the best bounty hunter in the galaxy – he’s just a copy of his dad who did the same thing he does. Yeah, that really fills me with excitement. Instead of being in a big, wondrous galaxy where extraordinary things can happen to ordinary people, we’re in a galaxy where the story is dominated by a select few families who repeatedly make history and nothing ever really changes. This is boring and predictable.

Overall, this story – whether I’m talking about the book or the film – was just such a miss. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the worst thing ever. Some of the characters are well done, some of the action is decent. But I think the story’s blunders drag it down too much, to the point where the bad points do outweigh the good and so I can’t in good conscience rate this story above average. The plotholes are huge, and the reliance on character stupidity kills a lot of it, and the romance is so cringeworthy and poorly executed. Is it any wonder, really, that I prefer the old Expanded Universe ideas about the Clone Wars as more of a lawless frontier era set further back in time and continuing for decades? I struggle to say this, since I realise that Episode II is such a critical story point… but I don’t think I want to keep it in my personal canon line up.

3 out of 10