I really want to add a C-Plot to Attack of the Clones in my wildest editor imagination.
Fans may know there were over 15 minutes of scenes that got cut from this already pretty long movie. Adding them back in pushes the film to over 2.5 hours, which back in 2002 was an egregious crime. These days, blockbusters routinely get near 3 hours, so it’s barely even a concern anymore.
(Why isn’t there a single Youtube video that compiles all of these?)
There’s even a few more cut scenes but unclear whether some of them were actually shot, since they have never been made public.
This video covers the unreleased deleted scenes starting at 7:52.
Not all of these scenes actually benefit Attack of the Clones. Obi-Wan and Mace’s content was reshot in a different scene that included Yoda, the Anakin and Ruwee scene is totally superfluous, and the wonky pacing of the first half of the movie gets even wonkier when you add all these scenes in. They were all cut for a reason, after all.
But I still really think most of them go a long way towards improving the experience of this odd movie. Well, as long as brisk pacing is not one of your musts in a blockbuster.
What I really want, though, is a full-on Special Edition recut. Add in all this extra shot content, improve the visual effects, and try desperately to smooth out the stupid mystery plot involving Separatists and Sifo-Diyas and Tyranus and Dooku and erased star maps and all that nonsense that never quite comes together. The problem with that last one can’t really be done with these deleted scenes. That Lost Twenty scene at least gives some more Dooku backstory, but it’s raw, dry exposition, not really the Star Wars forte.
That’s why in my dream scenario, I’d add a C-Plot to Attack of the Clones. The first half, anyway.
The A-Plot is Anakin and Padme fleeing Coruscant, falling in love, then running off to Tatooine.
The B-Plot is Obi-Wan investigating an assassination, finding a conspiracy, then running off to Kamino.
But, in both the theatrical cut and its extended edition, it’s paced in such a wonky way, not quite flowing back and forth between the two like you’d want. Plus, the A-Plot is pretty slow-moving and filled with cute but insubstantial scenes, while the B-Plot is a winding mystery that does not benefit from literally cutting from “huh this makes no sense” to “oh I figured it out” in the subsequent scene.
What we need is to add a C-Plot to Attack of the Clones, something that helps fill the gaps between the two main plots, while giving us a little bit of extra detail.
The second half of the movie actually has a brief C-Plot with the Jedi and Senate deciding to give Palpatine emergency powers and end democracy, and it helps the flow quite a lot. But in the extended cut, we are talking over an hour before that appears, and that’s what I’d like to address.
So when we think about adding a C-Plot to Attack of the Clones… What exactly do we add? I love how this movie fleshes out “normal life” in the Star Wars world, through the nightclub on Coruscant, through residential areas on Naboo, through a quieter life on Tatooine. I wrote about this ten years ago in a blog post, actually. If you could do more of that, and somehow also show off the Separatist Crisis in the background, I think that’d work the best.
I love the Separatist propaganda posters, and that’s something I’d double down on, myself.
One of my big qualms with the story in the film is that Dooku is mentioned offhandedly a few times as a noble former Jedi leading the Separatist movement, and he’s some influential famous guy, but none of the heroes know much about him or like him, and he comes across as evil on Geonosis, and then he’s revealed to be behind the Clones, and indeed evil. I would adore if an edit added just a couple touches into the movie to make him appear more sympathetic, for his noble cause. The Separatists, of course, are exactly right that the Republic is corrupt, broken, and controlled by corporations. Secretly, of course, the Confederacy of Independent Systems is also corrupt, broken, and controlled by corporations, and it’s all an elaborate scheme by two Sith Lords trying to take over the galaxy.
In today’s world, much more than in 2002, I feel strongly that just 2 or 3 extra scenes could boost all the political crisis stuff and make this tragically prophetic film even more potent.
So, if we want to add a C-Plot to Attack of the Clones, they’ll have to simultaneously complete all of these tasks:
- Break up the wonky pacing of the A-Plot and B-Plot.
- Show off more of “everyday life in Star Wars.”
- Paint Dooku as a more sympathetic figure and the Separatists as more justified.
- Funnel into the eventual C-Plot involving Palpatine’s emergency powers, without necessarily featuring Senators or Jedi in every scene.
- Some sort of payoff where the subplot doesn’t just come and go, but instead contributes to the rip-roaring climax of the film.
And my problem is that I can’t figure out what storyline would work.
I’m trying to think of this not as a rewrite problem, but as a reshoot problem–whatever we add, should be something we can shoot right now in 2025 with some bluescreen sets, some miniatures for exteriors and backgrounds (I wonder how much Fonco costs to hire), and archive footage. Not like someone would actually do something so ridiculous, but the Empire Strikes Back Revisited fan edit sure did straight up shoot entire new practical effects shots, so it’s not unprecedented.
So when you think of it from that angle, your options get extremely limited. You can’t really feature any of the exisiting cast members, because you are probably not going to get Silas Carson and Sam Jackson to come in for an afternoon for your fan edit. If you’re really good at effects, you can use archive footage, compositing, and CGI to get away with a little. And if you’re featuring brand-new characters with speaking roles, you’ll either need to find a story way to write them out of the rest of the film, or end up compositing THEM into later movie scenes as well.
I don’t want to have any “galaxy spanning” scenes, because Episodes III, VI, and IX are the only ones to do that, and VI and IX only at the very end. I’d also be very leery of making scenes that feel so clunky they actually make the film worse! It’s a huge challenge!
So, this whole blog post ends up with a mystery. What in the world can we do to turn this 2.5 hour extended cut film into a near-3 hour “ultimate cut” and fix the original movie’s issues? I’m open to any and all concepts, because this is just a silly thought experiment anyway.
