Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Movie Review
"Star Wars: The Clone Wars"
Review by Eric D. Snider
Grade: D-
Rating: PG
Released: Friday, August 15, 2008
Directed by:
Cast:
The only thing slightly mollifying my hatred for "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" is that it's meant for kids, not adults. It's shallow, cheap, and silly, just like a Saturday-morning cartoon -- which is what it's supposed to be. "The Clone Wars" will launch as an animated series on Cartoon Network and TNT in October, and this movie serves as a sort of pilot episode.
Which means dumping it in theaters is outrageously greedy and cynical, a move designed solely to make money off die-hard "Star Wars" fans who will see anything bearing the "Star Wars" logo, whether they enjoy it or not. (Don't forget how the geeks punished George Lucas for his "terrible" prequels: Instead of paying to see them in the theater 10 times, they only paid to see them five times.) If this were airing on TV, for free, I'd have no beef with it. The fact that it's in theaters makes it worse.
But then again, it's not really fair to judge a movie by how it's distributed. It's not the movie's fault that George Lucas has a bottomless appetite for cannibalizing his own products and tricking nerds into paying for the same material over and over again. Let us therefore judge "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" on its own merits.
On its own merits, "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" is dull, puerile, idiotic, and buffoonish. It represents Lucas' worst tendencies, taking all the things that people complained about in the prequels (which I thought were OK) and multiplying them by a thousand. Remember how people talked about those prequels like they were the worst movies ever made, when really, come on, they weren't THAT bad? "The Clone Wars" actually IS that bad.
The story is set between prequels 2 and 3, with the clone wars raging and Count Dooku's separatists fighting the Republic. In this episode, Jabba the Hutt's infant son has been kidnapped, and the Jedi Council tasks Obi-Wan Kenobi (voice of James Arnold Taylor) and Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) with rescuing him. Why? Because Jabba controls space routes that the Republic needs to pass through safely in order to fight the war. This fact is mentioned at least a dozen times, in case the viewer forgets why the Republic wants to curry Jabba's favor.
While Obi-Wan participates in a less-important subplot that I have already forgotten about, Anakin goes on the rescue mission with his new trainee, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein). Yes, surly Anakin has a padawan! And she's a teenage girl, and she's really spunky, and they get on each other's nerves! And they have to rescue a baby Hutt and take it to Tattooine! It's "Star Wars: The Sitcom"!
It's every bit as awful as it sounds, and maybe worse. The dialogue, credited to three TV-cartoon veterans, has Anakin and Ahsoka bantering and teasing each other relentlessly, though never in a way that's funny or interesting. It's always drivel like this:
ANAKIN: (as Ahsoka catches up to him in the heat of battle) I knew you'd get here eventually!
AHSOKA: Always in time to save your life!
Repeat that formula a hundred times and you get the idea.
Then there's the fact that Jabba refers to his son as his "little punky-muffin," and the battle droids' moronic personalities that turn them all into stooges, and Ahsoka's cutesy nicknames for everything (the junior Hutt is "Stinky," while R2D2 is "Artooie"). There's the ongoing battle scenes, which are completely devoid of suspense or excitement -- partly because we know who's going to survive them (we've seen the stories that come after this one), and partly because they're animated in generic, assembly-line fashion.
And then there's Ziro the Hutt, who is bound to become the most infamous "Star Wars" character since Jar Jar Binks. Ziro is Jabba's uncle, a jazz-club denizen who seems to be a gay pimp, or possibly a drag queen, and whose voice (provided by Corey Burton) sounds like a combination of Truman Capote and Droopy the dog. He is painfully unfunny comic relief in a movie that's already lousy with shtick, shenanigans, and cartoon lameness.
Say what you will about the "Star Wars" films, at least they never looked cheap. "The Clone Wars" looks cheap. The computer-animated faces are expressionless, and the general quality of the art is light years behind Lucasfilms' usual standards. They went with mostly no-name voice actors to save money, hired somebody cheap to bastardize John Williams' musical themes, and slapped together a movie that insults everyone's intelligence. Anakin's conclusion while investigating the kidnapping sums up the entire movie: "This smells like Count Dooku to me." Yes, Ani, it smells like Dooku to me, too.
Grade: D-
Rated PG, a 'hell' or 'damn' or something, and endless sci-fi cartoon violence
1 hr., 38 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 16 comments
August 15, 2008 at 2:40 am
Crap....I knew I should have checked here before promising to take my weepy nephew to it this weekend. Stupid WB for pushing back Harry Potter!!!
Or maybe it's stupid me for being a sucker for those blue weepy eyes!!!
August 15, 2008 at 3:01 am
What scares me is that as far as animated movies go, this one scored even lower than "Happily N'Ever After."
August 15, 2008 at 5:18 am
Actually, this movie is doing quite a bit better in the review, but only by the standard that stubbing your toe is "quite a bit better than" having your head bashed in with a rock.
August 15, 2008 at 8:25 am
Too bad. I actually liked the original Clone Wars cartoons that were shown on the Cartoon Network.
August 15, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Lucas says he got the idea for the animation from the stiffness of anime and Miya-hacky films.
August 15, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Pshaw - Lucas apes influences the way a little kid copies the "knock-knock" jokes of adults.
August 15, 2008 at 8:46 pm
#5 - Thats so sad.
The stiffness of anime is not a style. Its because most of the animation crews are woefully understaffed and try to get away with as little animation as possible. Count all the "looks like its animated when there isn't a single frame of animation happening"-tricks they use to fool children and clueless adults into thinking they're watching animation; pans, zooms, stills of dialog where the mouth isn't showing, usually when the speaker has their back to the camera. Even when you DO see a character talking, the only animation happening is the mouth shape that gets replaced. (We can thank Hanna-Barbera for making bit-animation popular..) My favorite is when the character's motionless cutout is moving against the background in some way.
Its funny how so many people think american cartoons are getting to be more and more like the "anime-style". Of coarse studios are going to use as many tricks as they can to produce however many minutes worth of faux-animation. It has nothing to do with art whatsoever and everything to do with money.
Sad to think that most of the early Disney films ran anywhere from 24 to 30 animated frames per second, when the general audience today has proven to be as enthusiastic about watching 1 frame per 15 seconds. Anyone who thinks its a style choice is sadly mistaken.
Of coarse I'm not trying to bash anime at all. I'd take an interesting story with engaging characters in an anime-style movie over the slightly better animated cartoons of the '80s like, say, Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos for example, which usually ran at around 10-15 fps.
I hope you enjoyed my rant. The end.
:-P
August 16, 2008 at 4:54 am
What I'm saying is, unless you are a movie reviewer, it's your own dang fault if you went to see it. Going to a Star Wars movie and complaining that it sucks is like going to see Cannibal Holocaust and complaining that it was surprisingly violent. It's not that you're wrong; it's just that you should have seen it coming, especially if you've seen the last six movies that this franchise pumped out.
August 16, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I think that the very thought of Jabba the Hutt engaging in acts of procreation is enough to keep me from seeing this movie.
August 16, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Re #5: Miyazaki a hack? Surely you jest!
August 18, 2008 at 1:00 am
"Remember how people talked about those prequels like they were the worst movies ever made, when really, come on, they weren't THAT bad?"
So they've gone form being A-grade movies to being "not that bad?"
August 18, 2008 at 6:40 pm
They're going to make another series? My husband has the original Cartoon Network ones on DVD and they're pretty decent. This movie looks like it just strings them together to tell the whole story at once in computer animation. How much more story can there be?
August 18, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Wow, I guess I should've finished the review before posting. That sounds nothing like what the posters and such represented: the female sith and her ambitions and duel with Anakin. I thought that would be more drawn out than in the cartoons, but man, all that stuff with the Hutts...what?
August 18, 2008 at 7:56 pm
#11,
"In both cases, on subsequent viewings, I realized I'd been wrong. An A or A- review, in my philosophy, should be for films that will stand up to repeat viewings. Those first two "Star Wars" prequels were full of dull scenes when I watched them again, and the hackneyed dialogue, overlookable the first time because I was so excited to get the story that I didn't notice how badly it was being phrased, became painfully, embarrassingly obvious. Had I been more circumspect when I first saw them, I'd have given them B's."
From the Revenge of the Sith review.
The entire premise of this movie sounds like some ridiculous subplot someone tried to get into the prequels.
September 2, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Oh my gosh! Dave the Slave just made me swoon. That was some of the hottest animation nerd talk I've ever "heard".
-Totally not being facetious-
September 9, 2008 at 1:22 am
About half a million Slashdot dweebs are now cursing the factthat Dave the Slave beat them to the anime rant and impressed the geek girl.