Stardate 20020517.1212

(Captain's log): I still haven't seen the latest Star Wars film, but from things I've read and ads I've seen, I have at least some idea of the general flow of the film. A great opportunity has been lost. (Probably more than one, but bear with me.)

One of the problems Lucas has in this prequel trilogy is that he has to maneuver the plotline to satisfy continuity with the original trilogy which was produced before, but in story terms is dated after the current film sequence. In the original series, Lucas tossed in some throwaway phrases which have come back to haunt him.

In "A New Hope", sitting in the Millennium Falcon, Ben Kenobi starts to brag to Luke, and Luke reacts at one point with, "You fought in the Clone Wars?" That is the only mention of it in the entire original trilogy. But now Lucas has to include something which can be designated "The Clone Wars" in the current trilogy to satisfy that reference.

From what I understand, what happens is that the bad guys use cloning technology to breed infantry. There's no more to it than that. Such a waste. (About the only point to that, seems to me, would be to simplify the supply problem a bit; you only have to stock one size of uniform.)

What I had envisioned for the "Clone Wars" was a war of shadows, with the bad guys cloning people and replacing them with look-alike ringers who were actually on the side of the bad guys, and infiltrating the existing power structure with sleepers. The Jedi would then be critical in the struggle because they would be the only ones who could identify clones, which in turn would cause the bad guys to start hunting the Jedi down. That, then, would explain the decline of the Jedi.

Even going into this film, that is still what I expected to have happen. I expected Darth Maul to reappear as a clone; I expected a who's-real-who's-a-clone struggle, where no-one except the Jedi knew who was a friend and who was a foe.

Instead, from the TV ads, what we get is a massive battle on a featureless plain, fought with space age weapons and Babylonian tactics. Napoleon could beat these idiots; they're not even smart enough to go prone to fire their weapons. I don't care how good you are with a light saber; you're not going to stop canister fire, or deflect a 12-pound cannon ball.

How good would the Jedi be at defending themselves against cluster bombs? If you forget the gee-whiz CGI and analyze the abilities of the weapons themselves, the infantry turn out to be using weapons with approximately the same capabilities as the American M1 Garand, the standard infantry rifle used by the US Army in World War II. Their aircraft are approximately equivalent to Korean war fighters armed with medium caliber cannon.

Nobody in that galaxy a long time ago and far away seems to have invented bombs or missiles! (We've seen them used once; to attack the first Death Star.) Their aircraft strafe; the weapons on their walkers are little better. Their infantry use human-wave tactics. The US military of 2002 would make short work of them. If one of their aircraft tried to take on ours, it'd take an AMRAAM up the snoot long before reaching gunnery range. Apache gunships would destroy their walkers. Then heavy bombers would slaughter their men on the ground with area-effect weapons. How good would the Jedi be at defending themselves against an FAE with light saber?

And the clones, the clones; why did the bad guys even bother with them? It's not like there's ever been any difficulty coming up with cannon fodder.

This isn't a Clone War, it's a Clown War.