Warning: long rant ahead. Summary: Terrible movie.
This movie was a huge disappointment, from the very beginning. I had been wondering, before seeing the film, how Lucasfilm would handle the opening, since the Star Wars movies usually start with the now emblematic text crawl, (which sets the stage for the action in the movie) at the top of which is the episode number and name. Since this movie is not technically an episode of the Star Wars saga, I had assumed that instead of saying Episode 2.5 – The Clone Wars, they would put simply The Clone Wars.
Turns out, I was wrong. Instead of the opening crawl of text, there is a montage of action sequences and a (somewhat cheesy, in my opinion) narration of the events. This scene could easily have been a text crawl, but in an effort to make the movie more kid-friendly the director instead opted to blatantly show the action instead of leaving it to the viewers’ imaginations. As a result, before I was 5 minutes into the movie, before any main characters had even been shown on-screen, I was already horrified at the thought that I had actually paid money to see this blasphemous excuse for a Star Wars movie.
And that was just the opening titles.
For the entire duration of the movie, I could not get used to the bizarre art style. I understand that it’s trying to look somewhat like the Clone Wars animated clips (see below, as compared to the movie above). The series of 5-minute animated shorts depicting the story of the Clone Wars was aired on Cartoon Network in 2003, and was awesome. The new movie of the same title attempted the same style, but in 3D. It certainly has the same look, but none of the same feel. The animated Clone Wars was like Samurai Jack, but in the Star Wars universe. No surprise, as they were both the work of Genndy Tartakovsky. The animation was fluid, the art style, while certainly very stylized, worked extremely well.
This was not true at all for the movie. Everything in the movie looked rigid and hard. You can see what I mean in the above screencaps, just look at Obi Wan’s hair. It doesn’t move at all, in fact it looks like it’s made out of wood. What you can’t see in that screencap is how the faces look like that too, with extremely limited movements, resulting in very un-expressive faces. All of the movement was stiff and ugly, and actually hard to watch. There is also very bizarre selective detail, for example most of the textures are flat colors, but for some reason Yoda has extensive bump-mapping on his skin. It looks extremely strange, because it no longer like he is a stylized character, but a realistic character with a very angular body, due to the detail on his skin. The Hutts aren’t slimy, just large and somehow both fluid and blocky.
The story revolves around the Hutts, specifically Jabba, his uncle Zero, and his son (who doesn’t seem to have a real name, but is nicknamed “Stinky” by the Jedi that were assigned to rescuing him). The basic plot is that Jabba’s son has been kidnapped, and he has asked the Jedi for assistance in retrieving the infant. The Jedi are reluctant, but at the persuasion of Chancellor Palpatine (another disappointing character, the voice actor doesn’t even sound like Ian McDiarmid), Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi are sent to help. Things get difficult when it is revealed that Count Dooku and the Separatists (who had been helping Jabba while the Jedi deliberated with Palpatine) are behind the kidnap, and are attempting to turn the Hutt Clan against the Jedi.
In the midst of all of this, Yoda assigns a padawan apprentice to Anakin, a youngling Togruta named Ahsoka Tano (see above). Let me just start by saying that I hate her more than I hated Jar Jar. She is obnoxiously immature, but Yoda OK’d her for Padawan training despite the fact that she is still a youngling at only 14 years old. She insists on being trained by Anakin, but she doesn’t really seem to learn anything from him, only really offering him criticism and competition. There are a few scenes when one of them points out something that she learned, but I got the feeling that Lucasfilm also noticed that she was a terrible student and tried to add in those scenes to fix the problem.
I was glad that there was very little of R2D2 (or “Artooey,” as Ahsoka nicknamed him) and C3-PO, because as awesome as they were in the original saga, in the prequels the only purpose they served was comic relief, and believe me, there was plenty of that without them. It seemed like the only purpose the battle droids served (other than fodder for the battle scenes) was comic relief. Misunderstanding each other, telling each other to shut up, the droids in this movie were more human than the human characters were.
The soundtrack was not composed by John Williams, and didn’t sound anything like that of the Star Wars saga. It was certainly groovy, but it didn’t have a Star Wars feel to it. Most of it wasn’t orchestral music at all, but much more generic action movie beats. In any other movie, it would have fit the action, but it just felt weird and out of place coupled with Star Wars.
The only thing I actually enjoyed about the movie were the battle scenes, which were impressive. There’s one part where an pair of AT-TEs scale a totally vertical wall, which was completely awesome. The lightsabers glowed, the energy bolts flew (though not quite as fast as they did in the other movies), and the droids glowed red-hot as they were carved by the lightsabers. It was adrenaline-packed, but there was too much of that and not enough of the other things that make a movie into a Star Wars movie.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars was definitely a movie intended for children, not hardcore fans of The Saga. Every aspect of the movie that I didn’t like probably makes it more and more attractive to kids. Gone are the beautiful cinematic panning shots, the glorious Williams soundtrack, the politics, the subtleties of the battle between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. Instead it’s quick action, cutesy nicknames (“snips” and “sky guy”, as well as artooey and stinky), and too many whiny teenagers. Anakin’s struggle with the Dark Side is barely touched upon, just a few comments about him not wanting to talk about his past, and some scowls when Ahsoka asked too much.
Save yourself some money, don’t bother with this movie. Pirate it, or just skip it entirely. It really was that terrible.
