Star Wars: The Clone Wars Review

THE LINK

View some of it here. This bit is pretty good.

IMMEDIATE REACTION

"Why?"

PRE-VIEWING TURNOUT

On opening night the entire audience consisted of my father, brother and I, a guy resolutely dressed as some kind of Sith sitting alone up the back, and a couple who kept nervously glancing back up at the Sith Lord with that 'I-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this' expression.

By the way, this guy ticked all the boxes;

• Fluorescent-red, limited edition, Stainless-steel lightsaber
• Long flowing robes, with some kind of carefully recreated decals
• Pre-Ordered ticket to a movie that didn't even sell a row
  
• Went to see a critically panned movie on opening night, in fancy dress alone
  

Hoyts obviously knew they were sitting on a gold-mine with this particular film, and the four or five ads before the show were exclusively aimed at the female teenager market - showcasing the very worst in coming of age comedy/dramas.

All this promised something big.

THE INTRODUCTION

Ever since Young Anakin yelled 'yippee' and pod-raced straight into our hearts, I've been saying to myself "King Kohl," I've been saying, "I really hope the next Star Wars film I see has a precocious teen with wooden acting to match Jake Lloyd's stellar performance." Well, was I in for a treat! I mean ANY Star Wars film that can have the line "Stop driving so wildly, you'll wake the baby" deserves full support and respect from Music Pie.

THE SUMMARY

"It was a strange and constant mix of good writing with poor execution, and good execution with poor writing - making the whole thing poor. If just ONE scene could have got it's whole act together I might've liked this film."

THE PLOT

Main characters from the prequels bumble around being weak and failing, while the villains bumble around and are weak and fail even more. The only useful character is a new teenager, without backstory or personality, and alternates between feeble and niave, and unreasonably powerful for no reason. Probably producer's daughter. The Hutts are occasionally involved somehow.

THE SETTING

After one movie, an excellent cartoon series, and countless expanded universe comics and books... haven't we really seen enough of the Clone Wars? The chance that the few unique things inherent in a Clone Wars scenario will be explored are ruined by the fact that they've decided to drag out Anakin and Obi-Wan again - who thought Obi-Wan could be boring? The thing that makes it so tiresome is that the Star Wars universe is so large and expansive - they could have done anything! I don't mean making entirely new characters, but there are hundreds of great ancillary characters that could be explored. I mean... Clone Wars? It's BORING.

THE GOOD STUFF

First off - I personally thought it was visually impressive. The scenery was great (if not a teensy bit too 'colourful preschool pop-up book') and the way everyone looked like they were cut out of foam actually looked real classy.

True, everyone moved as if they had some rigid orthopaedic frame forcefully Arc welded onto their body, but it still looked pretty classy when they were standing still. (Joe suggested that they were just trying to stay authentic to Hayden Christensen - heh heh)

And to it's credit the action was pretty good! There were some really cool sequences, like the battle on the side of the cliff. The lightsaber battles were mediocre but it definitely had some cool bits that made me think 'maybe, just MAYBE I might watch this again... either with fast-forward or on YouTube'.

THE BAD STUFF

One of the most frustrating things would have to be the voice acting. It's obvious the writers were like 'Let's have some witty banter in here', and then they write dialogue which is... well, passable. But the actors read every line like it's the most important one liner in the whole movie. Imagine if the voice actors were only recording one piece of dialogue a year, and hence really played it up - that's what even the most trivial lines like "I agree" or "Come on, let's go" are like. "Can you check the ship... before TAKE-off"

Also this wasn't a movie; it was a computer game. It was like watching cutscenes, and right when you're about to grab your controller, the game starts playing itself. (EDIT: I know this is a weird critique, but I actually read a similar one in the newspaper!)

You know: 'this is the bit where you fight 3 droids - now you have to fight a boss - now a vehicle level'. Most of the smaller battles had the air of a random encounter from like Final Fantasy or something - "Oh no, ANOTHER spaceship." You get to the point where you actually expect a health bar and a mini map to appear around the screen or after a fight to have experience awarded. This isn't helped by the game-style graphics or the bit where a gun actually appears at the bottom of the screen FPS style.

There were some... odd choices in there. I mean, riding a large dragonfly that looks like a reject Pokemon was kind of weird. And yeah, a cross-dressing Hutt with the voice of Whinny the Pooh can be a little unsettling, I won't argue that point. But C-3PO being competent? That's shark jumping material right there.

Speaking of shark jumping material, nothing says non-canon more than an entirely new character, heavily influencing main characters, and then never being mentioned in the movie immediately afterwards. The plot reads just like a fan-fiction. I'm talking about the bad kind that tries to force in all the movie favorites unsuccessfully, as well as slipping in the Author as a respected main character.

GRAPH

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:
The only character arc, though small and unjustified, between the girl and Anakin happens within the first several minutes of the film. From then on everyone kinda glides on. No one learns anything. No one grows or changes. No one even discovers some small truth about themselves that happens to come in handy at the climax.

That small little peak is when Anakin refuses to talk about his past. He doesn't get close to resolving any of his issues. He doesn't even end up talking about his past.

EXPOSITION:
I'm just talking about noticed exposition. Very heavy and doesn't really slow down. Becomes quite frequent near the end to explain why nothing's really happening.

Takes a great deal of narrating and character dialogue to carefully explain common Star Wars things like the Republic and Jedis - then doesn't give any introduction or information AT ALL on Ventress or whatever that villain's name was. I think she was in some comics or something.

BAD NICKNAMES:
Skywalker = Sky Guy? Terrible.
Ahsoka Tano = Snips? Where'd that come from?
R2 = Rtoohey!? Really? REALLY?


REALLY!?

DROIDS BEING FUNNY:
Needlessly and unthematically incompetent is first class humour apparently. The graph is lying. They were never funny. The one good thing I can say about the humor in this movie is that every now and again you can tell what the joke was supposed to be, and that has to count for something, right?

WRAP UP

Yeah, most people (actually, just Josh and that Sith guy) will say "look, it's just four crappy Saturday morning kids cartoons stuck together that you'd never normally watch." Well, that's all true except for the bit about kids cartoons being an excuse to be crap. I still paid money to go and see it. Well... my Dad did.

Now look, the movie wasn't that bad, but I have a critique that is, in my opinion, the worst critique I can make of any film: Everything redeeming about it has been done much, much better in other films.

There is nothing, no action scene, no special effect, not even one line of dialogue, or one small idea, or even a tiny background detail that made me think 'that is special'.

Now that rare, and very disappointing.