THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLONES
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Read an interview with writer/director/actor Darren Scales

review written 9/10/2006

A few years ago, I began a blurb on The Empire Strikes Backyard thusly: "Parodies don't get much more ambitious than this. Sets. Costumes. CGI. I've seen "serious" fan films do worse jobs on their production values than this. But the Backyard Productions team knows how to do things the right way."

In TENCLO, they outdo themselves to rather ridiculous extent. The opening space battle is simply superb, with jaw-dropping effects work and a real sense of strong cinematic motion. Sets keep coming one after the other, and while it all looks a little low-budget, they're obviously full sets with great care taken to mimic the 1970s Star Wars look.

Oh yes. And it's feature-length.

What is more interesting than the production values, though, is the structure. The biggest joke in this comedy, in retrospect, is calling itself "Episode III", because the film takes great joy in skipping around Episodes II through IV in a great mishmash across time and, well, space, intentionally complicating itself as much as possible just to see how it can (for example) incorporate the Millennium Falcon, Jedi Knights and ANH's opening Tantive IV attack in the same scene and have it make sense on some level. It's sort of like watching a trained circus acrobat doing a bunch of back flips; part of you applauds his skill at doing move after move after move, but mostly you're clapping for the sheer audacity of pulling a stunt like that for no other reason than to prove that you can.

You get this fairly early on, in a scene of domestic life on Naboo that sets up a decidedly non-canon look at what Padmé, Anakin and the twins are like. Something quite inspired is done with Luke and Leia. (Incidentally, it pays off brilliantly at the very end when Obi-Wan realizes how to set things on the canon path once more. Suffice to say it involves a bonk.) Watching life on Naboo play out, you realize, subconsciously, that effort is being made to get off the beaten path and keep you guessing on not only what joke will come next, but what damn movie. This makes for a more rewarding and textually rich experience than a straight scene-by-scene ROTS spoof.

To an extent, it all plays out rather like a big goodbye to SW in general rather than a spoof of a specific film; one gets the sense the Backyard team wanted to wrap up the saga they grew up with with something really, really big, and wanted to incorporate the films from their childhood as well as their adulthood. It's sweet, in a way.

Much like its predecessor, though, TENCLO stumbles on the level perhaps most important to a comedy: comedy. It's long and sometimes not particularly funny. There's a peculiar recurring gag where Character A will make a statement and Character B will respond with a recognizable line from the saga. Cute, yes, but not necessarily funny; humor would only come from a true recontextualization of the line. To give Obi-Wan an opportunity to rehash Qui-Gon's "bigger fish" line is not in itself comedy. By contrast, the spoof of Anakin's "I hate them!" speech from AOTC works because it gives a genuinely new spin on a familiar line.

More successful are the jokes that pay attention to very specific details in the saga, parodying individual shots or tiny moments that no one's thought to go near. One example is a shot recalling the ROTS moment where Anakin and Obi-Wan push at each other with Force waves, the close-up on the hands. Even better is a delicious mockery of the ridiculous moment in ANH where Threepio and Artoo skitter across the hallway in mid-battle and don't get hit, which I can't remember anyone making fun of before, but it deserved it.

The film's funniest moments, in this reviewer's opinion, are the Jedi purge, and a seemingly throwaway gag from Palpatine: "He said it first!" Writer-director-actor Darren Scales reprises his Palpatine, and while his scratchy Emperor voice seems off (I became genuinely concerned that doing it had damaged his voice somehow), he provides a surprisingly on-target impression of the nuances McDiarmid brought to the character's Chancellor persona; his replication of the rhythms and emphases in the seduction-of-Anakin scene is a treat.

Credit must also be given to actor Shaun Walker, who is very careful to make his Mace Windu a match for the specific mannerisms Samuel L. Jackson brought to Windu, rather than a general SLJ sendup; it's actually disappointing when, toward the end, jokes referring to Shaft and Pulp Fiction come in.

I'll spoil the surprise for you. Yes, this film ends with a musical sequence, just like TESBY. But it's not nearly the charmer of the first. Instead of the simple, cheerful singalong of the prequel, TENCLO makes the fatal mistake of setting its musical to various John Williams cues that were not intended to be sung to, as well as a (very, very long) little dance number.

Ultimately this film is worth watching primarily for its near-experimental structure first, its high production values and equally high ambition a close second; there's something almost offputting about having silly gags taking place on an all-too-realistic Death Star with a big space battle going on outside, and there's much to watch for and appreciate. The laughs are a bit hit-and-miss, but this is a comedy that goes where most fan films simply can't. I'm unsure how to grade it, because how many feature-length Star Wars fan films actually get finished? I'm glad it exists, I'm just not certain how long I'll keep it on my hard drive.