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Emery G LeeIII Case Western Reserve University [lang ]eg14[commat]po.cwru.edu[rang ]
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (Lucas 2002) is the second installment of George Lucas's new Star Wars trilogy, which depicts the decline and fall of the Republic and the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. In Clones, the adolescent Anakin starts down the dark path, and the Republic teeters on the brink of collapse. But even fans of the original trilogy will find little of interest in these developments.
Although Joseph Campbell has pointed to the ''timeless'' aspect of Star Wars, that film is better understood as a product of its times. Conceived in the 1970s, the original Star Wars trilogy chronicled the Rebellion against the evil Galactic Empire. The Empire, as portrayed in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi, is the apotheosis of the military-industrial complex, representing in stark form the ascension of technology over the natural. The destruction of Alderaan by a single blast from the Death Star demonstrates, in horrifying fashion, the negation of the natural by technology. This negation is also embodied in both Darth Vader, who is described as being more machine than man, and the Empire's faceless Stormtroopers.
The Empire is ultimately thwarted, however, by the Rebel Alliance, a hodgepodge of resistance fighters. In contrast to the Empire, the Rebels employ what appears to be out-of-date technology and ''the Force,'' a mystical energy field created by all living things. Using the Force, Luke Skywalker destroys the original Death Star, a climax that holds out the hope that human beings may yet prevail over the technological marvels that they have created in order to dominate nature but which, in the end, dominate them....