Universal Themes

Love, hate and the clash of great powers play out in George Lucas' dazzling `Attack of the Clones.'

Are you hurt?" e-mailed a friend in mockery of the Saturday-serial dialogue style in Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones. "Are you blind?" I e-mailed back. For the latest entry in George Lucas' transgalactic saga of the moral rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker and the deterioration of democracy into despotism has an electric visual majesty and boasts Lucas' best direction since American Graffiti.

All the talk about Lucas as an empire-builder clouds perceptions of him as an artist. But as that Jedi guru Yoda would say, an artist is he. Lucas tests the boundaries of the picture frame, fills it to breaking point with bulging action and scintillating detail-work and then moves from one frame to another with a steady, plangent pull.

This movie isn't mechanical; it's voluptuous. In a single chase through the city planet of Coruscant, Lucas encapsulates all of Blade Runner; in a single pitched battle on the arid planet of Geonosis, he sums up the delirious appeal of stop-motion creature master Ray Harryhausen. And with the help of cowriter Jonathan Hales and composer John Williams, he taps an emotionalism that fuses the eclectic ingredients of the Star Wars saga, from the pioneer-clan feelings of John Ford Westerns to the dystopian dread of Lucas' debut feature, THX 1138 (1971).

Lucas' Star Wars sequels are the biggest independent movies of all time. Seen that way, the first Star Wars trilogy not only revived special-effects action yarns but also established dysfunctional families as the theme of off-Hollywood moviemaking. What puny indy has a primal scene to compare with heroic Luke Skywalker finding out that his dad is Darth Vader?

Star Wars: Episode One The Phantom Menace showed how Luke's father and Vader-to-be, Anakin Skywalker, was plucked from slavery on the sand planet of Tatooine when a maverick Jedi (Liam Neeson) realized that the Force was strong within him. At the end of that first prequel, the Jedi's apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobe (Ewan McGregor), became a full-fledged Jedi himself and took on the role of Anakin's mentor.

In this second prequel, teaching Anakin requires Obi-Wan to handle teen-age moodiness of cosmos-quaking proportions. Attack of the Clones is one escapist fantasy that stays true to adolescents' tortured ideals and desires. It evokes pangs in open-minded adults as well as shocks of recognition in 13-year-olds.