Saga Attack of the Clones or Empire Strikes Back

Attack Of The Clones

TESB is a typical 50/50 film. 50% is great (Luke/Yoda, Bespin), 50% is annoying (Han/Leia, Hoth). I love Luke as a character, Vaderis impressive and I find the sequence on Bespin highly entertaining, but I just can't stand Han and Leia. They are totally unrelatable to me, seemingly invulnerable and the way their love is portrayed just annoys. They are also peripheral to the plot and relagated to being bait throughout the whole film.
I never found Hoth interesting, too. The battle seems meaningless, it is never mentioned again and I find it illogical in parts.

AOTC, on the other side, appeals to me on most levels. The focus is clearly on Anakin and his ordeal, but the other characters are not forgotten. Padmé is nicely intergrated in his sotry, giving her the task to determine or decide whether they should give themselves a chance -regardless of adversities - or not, and Obi-Wan got the whole subplot about the Clones.
Contrary to most people, I can actually feel for Anakin and Padmé. You're in love although you're not really allowed. It always reminds me of what biracial or gay couples might still fell in today's world sometimes. I find that much more engaging and though-provoking and even touching than two adults who're unable to talk about their real feelings honestly.

Even some of the silly dialogue has some unappreciated depth to it. "I hate sand" also holds a lot of meaning and reminds us of Anakin's painful childhood in slavery. This was basically a scene when their contrary childhoods were dealt with and highlighted a lot of their differences. "You could use a good kiss" might be more entertaining, but I also find it a lot more hollow.

Last but not least, I can't stop but appreciate AOTC's visual and color palette. From Coruscant to Kamino to Tatooine and Geonosis, it all feels fresh and unique and appropriate to the state of the story. The orange shades create a wonderful atmosphere of melancholy. This is our last glimpse at relative happiness before the dark times. TESB is visually probably the most impressive OT film, but it also feels "narrow" in parts. At least to me. I miss images like these and the emotions they convey:



It might just be an error on my part, though.

Anyway, my vote goes to Attack Of The Clones.

 

No-one needs to write a book or do anything here for that matter, but it's fun to ramble on a bit. This is a discussion board, after all.

I see your point, though. One could make the same claim for all the Star Wars movies. Words don't remotely do them justice. I've become a great fan of returning to the source for direct communion with the core of the art: the films themselves.

Or...

Anakinism (nice word) is the purest form of teenage thrill-seeking, mixed in with a frustrated capacity to love.

Anakinism has many shades.

As for conning? No. Anakin commits one atrocity in AOTC, and at that point, there's nothing for Padme to take back, since she hasn't yet pledged herself to Anakin for a first time. And in ROTS, you may have missed it, but when Padme realizes Anakin has committed more atrocities and shows no remorse, unlike before, she backs away and refuses to go down the same path as him.

BTW, how can an "-ism" hate or con anyone or anything?

 

And then loses the will to live, while her 2 children are just born....

Lucas needs to change the ROTJ scene for the 2021 SE:

Luke: Leia, do you remember you mother? Your real mother?

Leia: Just images...feelings....of her bailing on us when we were born! I was adopted and became a queen, where were you sent?

 

Attack of the Clones, for me, is a clearly better film.

Empire Strikes Back, unfortunately, suffers from terminal Hanism, wherein it portrays aggressive, rude, and dismissive behavior as being appealing to women.

Right…

You know, maybe this is why nerds and geeks are stereotyped as being virgins and terrible with women. If they follow their hero Han's example, they're more likely to get kicked to the curb than anything else.

 

In a perfect movie more than 50% would be more relevant to the story.

I watch it. I get bored with half of the movie. Granted, there're a few scenes in AOTC I want to skip through but overall it gives me more food for thought.

 

ESB is easily the most iconic SW movie, though.

 

I would say all three original movies are iconic, I don't think ESB is more iconic than the other two.

 

Both AOTC and ESB have their flaws. But I still favor them over the other four films.

 

I must have missed the memo where it said this was a bashing thread.

 

Attack Of The Clones suffers only from the few cringy scenes between Anakin and Padme. otherwise I just love it and the airpseeder chase through Coruscant is incredible and my favorite scene in the film.

The Empire Strikes back is quite simply one of the best films ever made, let alone best Star Wars film. I flip flop with ROTJ as far as best SW film. This is the best moment in TESB:



There is nothing more iconic in the entire Saga than this moment. And it's not just a Star Wars thing. The most entertaining villains all have an "Ultimate face of evil" moment. This is Vader's. This is Vader about to attempt consumation. And despite all villains having such a moment none of them equal this one.

 

I have to add however, it is nice to see that people genuinely like the prequels.

 

Those that can resist near-constant drive-by bashes, at least.

 

Its funny cause i said the same thing about the OT bashing in a few threads in the past few weeks that you posted in (you didn't personally bash as youre one of the respectful people here), but you didn't seem to mind other people taking jabs at the OT. It goes both ways around here.

 

Constant jabs about any of the films annoy me. But if there are going to be jabs, I generally would ask for two things:

i) Try to add more than a jab.
ii) Try to ensure jabs are directed at the films which are actually under discussion.

This is meant to be a thread for comparing / contrasting AOTC and TESB.

"Which do you like more or prefer?", as a question, implies weighting, and the chanting of the good.

Some of what I've seen in here, in my opinion, simply isn't cricket.

 

Indeed. And what's more, it's a board specifically designed for in-depth discussion.

 

Just be consistent, because we both posted in the TPM vs ANH thread, and you didn't seem to call out Darkslayer who trolled through that thread. First he called out any person who called it Star Wars, saying THERE IS NO MOVIE CALLED STAR WARS! Then saying, "Just to let you know I see the OT as an expansion as the PT!

The last time I checked, it had nothing to do with ANH vs TPM, but I guess you'll let that slip by because its a shot at OT fans. That is why this whole fallacy that you guys call yourself Saga fans is laughable because you turn the other cheek at OT bashing the same way the OT fans turn the other cheek at PT bashes. The difference is those people claim to ONLY be OT fans, where you guys continue to say your Saga fans, yet you have no problem bashing 1/2 of the Saga. So lets call a spade and spade and start calling you guys: OT bashers. Because if you love the OT movies as much as you say, you would be calling people like Darkslayer out in the ANH vs TPM thread, but all the 'Saga' fans stood silent.

 

I don't post in the film forums enough. I forgot so much drama can be at work here.

 

more like melodrama

 

Er... that's because I was busy writing several of those "books" you apparently don't read.

If that's how you wanna see it. If this is all about factions and recrimination to you.

See above.

Sounds, to me, like you're just trying to justify fighting fire with fire.

How about adding positive comments rather than carving out a career as a basher?

What you derisively call "drama", I call a gentle reminder -- at least, on my part -- that this is meant to be a fan site, and an admonition that people should be adult enough to stick to the topic rather than dishing out cheap snipes and insults against movies they have a personal distaste for.

 

I don't even think these films are comparable. While it really depends on the day as to which film in the series I like the best (ESB, ANH or ROTJ) the weakest is always AOTC.

So I'd say The Empire Strikes Back is my preference.

 

And now to go about answering the original question...

AOTC and TESB are the middle chapters of their trilogies and overtly about transition and a million and one items in mid-flow. What I like about both films is that many things are left hanging in the balance at the end. True resolution is not to be found in either film. On the other hand, AOTC powerfully establishes the Clone Wars -- the disintegration of diplomacy and peaceful negotiation -- and the forbidden union of Anakin and Padme, while TESB gives Luke an entirely new perception of his father and his place in the cosmic hierarchy. They are films alluding to and advancing toward a supreme climax, but they deliberately never get there for themselves, granting them more of an introspective, bittersweet feel. They also represent the tonal landscape of their respective trilogies at its most estranged: a tangled morass of mood, plot, character, imagery, and theme. AOTC even manages to take a more abstract approach to sound and music. Both offer gorgeous colour palettes and lighting choices, too.

The dream-like nature of AOTC feeds into a weird ambiance which the film is steeped in. It is sometimes said that cinema, as an art-form, is very dream-like, and there have been numerous meditations on this idea in the medium itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneiric_(film_theory) In this regard, I have to think that AOTC is George Lucas' most beautiful film. It is visually sumptuous in a way none of his others are and he barrels into digital cinematography with stunning assuredness. Here is a movie with a jumbled topography and an authentic, proto-digital sleek effervescence. There is a lot of surreal art-scaping in this one. And a mature, tentative sensuality in the plotting and imagery, too. All these aspects meld together to suggest something a little removed from the other five: a fractal violation in a linear pre-history.

Nowhere are AOTC's peculiar, woozy charms more brilliantly intertwined for me than in the speeder chase: the film's first action sequence that acts like a tuning fork for the rest and remains a unique piece of cinema on its own terms. Here we have a very three-dimensional action sequence where Lucas takes advantage of both speed (left-to-right motion) and height (vertical drops) and the sensual night-time neon glow of Coruscant itself. With the added spice of the mildly-playful antagonism and one-up-man-ship between Anakin and Obi-Wan -- a glorious bond of many shards in this picture --we have ourselves (or I have myself) a very sophisticated and involving work of almost "pure" cinema where everything feels alive and exciting and enticing and different. I might not be explaining myself very well, but stack this sequence next to anything in TESB or the rest of the saga, for that matter, and all the rest seems lacking. I adore the dialogue, the performances, the visual effects, the visual choreography and the neat little action beats -- everything. And when Anakin jumps out of the speeder and floats down the y-axis, it's as if he and we are cresting on a wave. Then he lands and is dragged away by Zam's speeder into the amber night: a dazzling expression of a human soul lost somewhere between the present moment and infinity. It's so riveting, so lilting, so pretty. The chase sequence honestly blows me away every time.

But maybe AOTC is tweaking some inner fantasy. Maybe I just want to get lost in a big city -- even (or especially) one that doesn't exist. I'm kind of taken back to Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation" and how unreal and blissfully sensual and delightful Tokyo is presented in that film. Neither Lucas' Coruscant nor Coppola's Tokyo are real. They're both precisely as removed from reality and turned into some forbidding, endless enclave as the other. They might be long-lost twins.

It's such a strong, weird, desultory movie. Almost like the "Alpha Wave" Star Wars experience. The "reality" of the other SW movies, even when AOTC takes us to the homestead, seems some place and some time else. There's such a great remoteness and eccentric grandeur to it. All those pregnant glimpses of optic, blinding white: like the "reality" of the other five trying to intrude. And I'm right with you on stuff like "dreams pass in time". It's these incredible ripples of meaning that emanate from the smallest, most matter-of-fact gestures. All Obi-Wan is trying to do, there, is to comfort Anakin, but HOW he goes about it! Even the tiniest of details seem flooded with the most devastating and colossal of meanings. But you have to be open to the possibility of those meanings and to reading the film in that way.

As for where TESB stands in all of this...

I like it. A lot. While ANH was, and is, plenty good and stacked high with its own brand of sophistication, TESB is really the film that gave Star Wars a maturity, an elegance, and a sweep barely imaginable with the original film in isolation. Its poetic evocation of mud, slime, grime, blizzards, fog, dank caves and claustrophobia is second to none: a metaphorical "horror" landscape which contrasts powerfully with the brighter, beat-up world of the original movie. There's a much darker, broodier quality to TESB, and by the time we get to Cloud City, the film feels almost Orwellian in its cautionary atmosphere of false utopias and a sense of danger and deceit lurking around every corner. We might almost long for the simplicity of ANH, were TESB not such a dark, dreamy, beautifully plangent ride. And there really is an angelic quality to Cloud City, too. It feels like the rending of "Flash Gordon" into opulent, high art: an actual city so wonderfully austere as to inspire genuine awe. And then the carbon freezing chamber is powered up and TESB gets suitably grim and artfully lofty in its operatic aspirations. Han being frozen is a really touching moment and the staging of the big duel between Luke and Vader is blissful in its shadowy cat-and-mouse quality. And Luke's re-birth on the weather vane is the perfect capper to his mental, physical, and spiritual journey. It couldn't be starker or any more "right" in the telling.

I'm inclined to call this one, for me, a tie. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay TESB is that AOTC seems very carefully and yet lavishly patterned on it. It hits many of the same notes, but it manages to play an entirely different tune. There is a wonderful synergy between the two films. In many ways, they are the best of their genre, and two of the boldest, most imaginative pieces of high-concept cinema ever made.

 

Honestly, I might be one of the only people to say this but I liked the loved scenes. Anakin and Padme are cute together...

 

Carbon1985 and Cryogenic - practice what you preach and stop dredging up the whole 'bashing' issue and then fuelling it.