Film Studies: Eight legs good - digital clones bad

There are bottle-necks in the American movie theatre business, and I found one of them in the men's room at a major San Francisco cinema. This was after a showing of Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones. I was the only adult in there, forced to wait (that's when bottle-neck becomes an unfortunate phrase you can't get out of your head) as a gang of 12-year-olds got rid of their loads of cola and soda. "Well," said one kid, with a profound, evacuating sigh, "I'm glad I saw it anyway. Because I might have been the only kid who hadn't seen it." Didn't he notice the empty seats at our mid-afternoon screening? Didn't he know how to read the half-hearted applause that died away before it could begin? Didn't he grasp the quiet insurrection that has occurred in our theatres over the last few weeks? The Force is waning. Spidey rules.

You and George Lucas might argue that this is over-statement. After all, in its opening weekend in the US, Attack of the Clones sold $116.3m of tickets (and maybe as much in popcorn and soda). That's remarkable for a saga that has now been stretched out over 25 years, but it was the number from a four-day weekend. When Spider-Man opened two weeks ago, it enjoyed only a three-day weekend – and it earned $115m. In other words, Spider-Man opened to a per-screen average of $31,769, while Star Wars 2 had to settle for $27,254.

This is not the end of the world; it is not even the salvation of the movie business. But it is the realisation that those first three films (Stars Wars, itself, from 1977; The Empire Strikes Back, 1980; and Return of the Jedi, 1983) belong to one era, while Attack of the Clones and the lamentable Phantom Menace (1999), are of another age.

The two later films will do very well by all but the highest monetary standards. But the really hard-core Star Wars fan base, the age group that had three films in six years, has not carried over with absolute loyalty. So the new films rely on a fresh generation of kids and they are harder to impress. Already, I suspect, they regard Spider-Man as the sensation of their childhood, and nothing spurs the sensational success of movies more than that notion of childish discovery. I'd like to think that kids now find more humour and feeling in the exchanges between Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst than they do in the "love story" in Clones.

So George Lucas, now 58, finds himself richer than ever but lacking the lustre of being the only pied piper our children hear. It may be grimmer for him in that he has personally directed the two latest episodes and must stand up under the widespread critical orthodoxy that the story, the dialogue, the acting, the pacing are all horribly lame. And Lucas, of course, still has the last episode to deliver. He has warned that it is, by rights, the darkest of the six, the one most given over to inter-galactic war and gloom.

There's another consequence to these latest numbers. Attack of the Clones is being released in two versions – a regular print and a digitally projected version. This is enormously important to Lucas – no matter that fewer than 20 US theatres are equipped for digital projection – because he has attached himself to the new technology and is urging cinemas to go over to digital, despite the potentially ruinous investment that would require.

I've seen both versions, and it's my opinion that few people could tell one from the other. Equally, neither version manages to bring much life to all the computer-generated imagery in the picture. These scenes do not have the brightness of real photography, the depth of real shadow and perspective. They do not feel like "movie". I grant that this is a matter of taste, and it may be something over which the crucial young audience refuses to be bothered.

But I continue to cry out for the retention of photography – inasmuch as it's so much better suited to natural light (hence nature), to skin and faces, to atmosphere (and thus to narrative) than systems of film-making that are spiritually mechanical. Lucas and many others argue that this is a lost cause already, that the computer has replaced photography. I prefer to say that the change has occurred only with tragic loss, and that it might yet be reappraised and reversed. If photography and cinema give up light, they risk abandoning the most precious things that those media can aspire to. That struggle is far more important than all George Lucas's fabricated wars in space.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk