Who’s Soaring Now?

In 1962, movie critic Manny Farber looked at the work of European art-house directors like Francois Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni and Tony Richardson, and pronounced it sluggish and bloated with pointless, pretentious technique. Yes, their films were made with painterly precision and brimmed with elegant eye-candy. But the characters? They were flat, emotionally over-controlled and locked into the frame like figures on a Grecian temple.

“Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones” is no “Jules and Jim,” yet in an odd way Farber’s description perfectly fits the new George Lucas blockbuster, especially when you compare it with its biggest summer rival, Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man.” Lucas has said that digital production and new special-effects technology have freed his imagination to make the “Star Wars” movies he always wanted to make. Maybe so.

But the result, in the series’ two most recent pictures, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones,” has been monumentally static. “Attack of the Clones” has the same costly special effects, kinetic action sequences and swooping, vertical-angled shots that “Spider-Man” does. But while “Spider-Man” is visually alluring, witty and exhilarating, “Attack of the Clones” is mostly just plain exhausting.

What brings Spidey to life while “Clones” dozes? Maybe it’s that while “Spider-Man’s” look never loses touch with the movie’s comic-book roots, “Attack of the Clones” goes for an overblown, operatic grandeur that reduces character and plot to an afterthought. Without condescending to its pulpy source material, “Spider-Man” elevates the action-adventure genre, while “Attack of the Clones” merely overwhelms it with big, portentous digital set pieces. “Clones” is a bore. “Spider-Man” keeps its feet on the ground, conceptually, and it soars.

Like its youthful hero, Peter Parker (played with understated acuteness by Tobey Maguire), “Spider-Man’s” design is deceptively simple. The movie’s opening credits unspool over a montage of comic-book panels, invoking the eye-tickling graphic environment created by series co-creator Stan Lee (one of the movie’s executive producers). But like the seemingly bland and innocuous Peter Parker, “Spider-Man” has a few surprises up its spandex sleeve.

Director Raimi, who earned his spurs with the low-budget yet cunningly stylized “Evil Dead” series, and his production designer, Neil Spisak, have synthesized two very different design sensibilities here: a loud, humorous Pop art syntax, which animates “Spider-Man’s” superhero antics; and an affectionate, sepia-toned vision of New York City, with all its gritty charms and architectural marvels viewed from our hero’s unique high-flying perspective.

Andy Warhol would have loved “Spider-Man’s” combination of radiance and self-aware humor, which stops short of camp. Both Spidey and his adversary, the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), are as brightly attired as Brillo boxes. From the moment early in the film when Peter Parker is bitten by a genetically altered arachnid, “Spider-Man” crackles with brash visual wit, like a New York tabloid front page.

In one dazzling sight gag, we see a high school corridor through Parker’s DNA-altered vision: a paper airplane hanging in suspension, a buzzing fly slowed to a snail’s pace, a bully’s fist inching toward Parker’s face. In another, the webs on Spider-Man’s tunic morph into Manhattan’s tangled street grid, filled with yellow cabs scampering like berserk insects. And in an image that neatly fuses comedy and pathos, Spider-Man receives a grateful kiss from his unsuspecting love interest, M.J., as he dangles upside-down in the rain.

“Spider-Man” drops sly pop references to other movies, a postmodern practice that “Star Wars” helped invent. Peter Parker’s bid to raise cash by going mano a mano with a goonish pro wrestler in a cage recalls a similar Mel Gibson showdown in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (1985). And when the Green Goblin launches his lethal assault on Times Square, he blazes over the Manhattan skyline on a kind of jet-propelled surfboard, bringing to mind the Wicked Witch of the West skywriting “Surrender Dorothy” above Oz.

Unlike the Gotham of the first “Batman” movie, brilliantly realized by the late Anton Furst, or the Metropolis of the “Superman” films, much of “Spider-Man” takes place in a recognizable New York of elevated trains and grimy streets, of larger-than-life edifices like the Chrysler Building (where Spider-Man goes to brood on an ornamental eagle) and drab, look-alike outer borough residential rows.

This isn’t the sanitized, haute bourgeois fairy-tale New York of Woody Allen films. In spirit, it may be closer to the explosive, color-coded Brooklyn of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (though without Lee’s hip-hop hyperbole). This New York is a dangerous city where buildings topple and people die: The Times Square attack conveys genuine horror and panic, as a high-rise crumbles and terrified pedestrians dodge falling debris.

Yet “Spider-Man” also takes a loving, even rapturous view of New York. When Spider-Man alights on a wall or rooftop, we glimpse Manhattan’s Beaux Arts facades and upper-story exterior sculpture, the architectural treasures that so often elude pedestrians. This homey point of view flows naturally from the movie’s conception of its main character, a guy who leaps tall buildings but remains firmly tethered to his human relationships. “Spider-Man’s” contrasting but complementary sensibilities, the Pop and the poetic, unite in the sequence in which Parker first tests his webs. He tries several times, a puzzled look on his face, before succeeding in firing a gooey projectile at a rooftop target across the street.

At the screening I attended, the audience broke into cheering and applause, much as those lucky first-wave viewers did in 1977 when the Millennium Falcon makes the jump to cyberspace in the original “Star Wars.”

Compare this sequence to the airborne, emotionally stillborn chase scene near the start of “Attack of the Clones.” Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), in pursuit of an anonymous assassin, take off on a wild ride through the urban canyons of Coruscant. The surrounding high-rise nightscape goes by in an impressionistic blur, as Lucas’ jumpy camera seldom stays with anything long enough to bring it into focus or let us savor the details. You might as well be watching a high-speed video game--with your kid brother’s hand gripping the joystick.

Even when the chase finally crash-lands at a nightclub, there’s none of the throwaway levity or charm that Lucas put into the famous cantina scene in the original “Star Wars.” (You’d find freakier, funnier patrons on Saturday night at Universal CityWalk.) Humorlessly single-minded, the scene lumbers forward, seldom pausing to take in the expensive props and scenery that Lucas and his top-rank design team have assembled.

What Raimi grasps, and Lucas appears to have forgotten, is that gee-whiz visuals work best when they advance the story and occasionally intersect with the characters’ personality traits. It was Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling bravado as Han Solo that set up the thrilling payoff to the Millennium Falcon jump-start scene. Similarly, it’s Maguire’s subtle facial expressions, his bafflement morphing into delight, that make his web-spewing trick more than just an impressive stunt.

The “Star Wars” aesthetic, of course, has always been a hodgepodge of influences, just as its mythic themes are new riffs on age-old stories like the Oedipus legend.

Darth Vader’s costume, for instance, is equal parts German storm trooper and Japanese samurai, and the visual appeal of the first three “Star Wars” films lay in their dexterous mixing and matching of high-culture tropes and B-movie cheesiness. They took their cues from comics like “Flash Gordon,” perhaps the first “space opera” to combine sci-fi technology with period costumes and archaic architectural settings.

But in “Phantom Menace” and “Clones,” the series’ stylish retro-futurism has given way to arbitrary pastiche. In these movies, the background echoes of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (Coruscant), William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” (the pod race in “Phantom”) and John Ford’s Monument Valley westerns (Anakin’s home planet of Tatooine) lack interesting twists that would make them seem fresh. Although impressive in sheer scale, they appear less like newly minted fantasy worlds than like impersonations of old movie sets--just as the robotic actors appear to be body doubles of themselves rather than flesh-and-blood beings.

A rare moment of Chaplinesque visual wit occurs in “Attack of the Clones” when Anakin and friends are trapped on a massive machine-assembly line and C-3PO’s head is knocked off and stapled onto a robot body. And there’s a compelling cruelty to the three genuinely scary monsters unleashed against Anakin, Obi-Wan and Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) when they’ve been taken prisoner, a touch of the darker sensibility that is central to the “Star Wars” myth but curiously underplayed in the last two films. Yet there’s no single image in “Attack of the Clones” as remotely lyrical or memorable as the twin sunset in “Star Wars,” or Han Solo frozen in carbonite in “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Even in Hollywood, fantasy realms often work best when they bear some connection to the universe the rest of us inhabit, so as to keep from flying off into deep space. In “Attack of the Clones,” the beautiful queen-turned-senator Padme says as much when she tells her bodyguard, Anakin Skywalker, to get a reality check. “We live in a real world!” she rails at him. “Come back to it!” If only “Star Wars” could heed that advice.

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Reed Johnson is a Times staff writer.