Scavenging off the Vulture

This post entitled "Chewbacca was not the Original Wingman" is beyond marvelous. Speaking of Spike's re-airing of the entire Star Wars series, I DVRed it and have been watching it off and on for the last week or two and it has inspired a bit of an admission in my own head that I may have been wrong about something.

Attack of the Clones is not as bad as I remember it. Don't get me wrong, George Lucas can't write dialogue to save his life and Hayden Christiansen is a horrible actor and Amidala's declaration of love ("truly, madly, deeply": did he pay Savage Garden listening fees for that?) is indescribably cheesy, especially when it is clearly meant to echo the Leia declaration (one of the best scenes ever).

However, there is a possibility that I over-reacted to the whole improbability of the romance. If you listened to Lucas' idea of their age differences you had this supposedly much older woman, who we assume has some sort of brain since she has been practically leading her world from the time she was 14, deciding that the thing to do is go prance around in fields and lakes half-dressed all alone with this boy who has a crush in her. No woman with any clue about life or men would behave in that way; it is some sort of weird school-boy fantasy that had haunted Lucas since he was a teenager. Yet, seeing the movies a second time, the age difference really comes across as closer to five than ten years and it is pretty clear that when Amidala drags Skywalker out to the Lake Country on Naboo she is already infatuated, even if she isn't admitting it. There are still problems, but I am now willing to say that the movie does not constitute an affront to all feminists anywhere.


Still, though, if you wanted Amidala to fall deeply in love with the young one why do you cast Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan. What women in her right mind would choose, or even consider, Mr. Whiny Tortured Soul when Ewan McGregor was around?