Reviews of Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Not Star Wars...this is kids sci-fi central!

Posted : 1 year, 1 month ago on 10 November 2008 03:28 (A review of Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

"The desert is merciless. It takes everything from you."

George Lucas is turning into an enemy of film. After the atrocious Star Wars prequels, I honestly thought the Star Wars legacy couldn't possibly be additionally defiled. Alas, it is this review's despondent duty to report that this animated addition to the Star Wars canon has managed to be worse than all three Star Wars prequels and the earlier Cartoon Network TV series. Star Wars: The Clone Wars even makes the 1980's Ewok adventures look like The Empire Strikes Back in comparison! As soon as it was announced that Lucas was releasing this animated feature, it smelt like a cash grab - and in final analysis this is nothing but a shameless cash grab. Thankfully, it performed disappointingly at the box office. Maybe Lucas will finally realise it's time to stop exploiting the Star Wars franchise.

Sometimes one milks a cow so extensively that the milk turns sour and undrinkable. Lucas has milked this franchise like this for years. The prequels were crossing over into sour milk territory...The Clone Wars enters the undrinkable milk territory. After 10 minutes I was already bored. Unfortunately, things only continued to deteriorate. George Lucas' involvement was minimal. He didn't direct nor write. Never thought I'd ever actually say this, but bring back George! The script for this film is worse than those written by Lucas, the characters are stale, it's juvenile, the animation is putrid and it's dull!

The first 30 seconds of the movie are a warning of things to come: the traditional 20th Century Fox fanfare is replaced with the subdued Warner Bros. logo. The Star Wars theme has also been butchered. After the words "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" appear, you expect to hear the immortal music followed by the customary opening scrawl to detail the story so far. Instead there's some peculiar, sub-par pseudo-variation of it. The remixed music sounds like contemporary pop music! Following this, the iconic scrawl is replaced by the voice of a narrator. It sounds like a cheesy version of Starship Troopers! As a whole, the music and narration is like nails on a chalkboard. This alone was sufficient forewarning before plunging into the abysmal central narrative... The son of Jabba the Hutt is kidnapped and the Jedi are assigned to get him back. How utterly lame and un-Star Wars!

Remember the unbearable character known as Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace? After suffering every miserable second of character interaction in The Clone Wars, I felt more tolerant towards Jar Jar! Yes, it's that bad! Anakin's new pre-teen apprentice - Ashoka Tano - is the equivalent of Hannah Montana! Not only does this character spend the entire film getting into trouble constantly and cracking bad jokes, but she repeatedly refers to Anakin as "Sky-Guy". And Anakin calls her "Snips". WTF?! After the introduction of this character I foolishly thought things could not get any worse...but they did.

Meet Jabba's son Stinky. Yep, the characters call him Stinky. He's the baby version of Jabba the Hutt who spends the entire film making funny faces and farting. That's right folks...Star Wars now has fart jokes. And Jabba now uses language like "punky muffin".

The credibility of the plot is very quickly damaged. Jabba has a son with no wife or partner in sight? How do the fat slugs even copulate? At least we can be thankful there's no Jabba the Hutt sex scene. Oh, and it also turns out Jabba has an evil, cross-dressing, English-speaking pimp for a cousin who sounds like a cross between Truman Capote and a member of the gay community with throat cancer. Once this character hit the screen, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. For a moment I thought perhaps my coffee was spiked with LSD. But alas, I was not high.

The battle scenes are frequent and on a large scale, yet they're undermined by a number of things. First of all, there's never an ounce of intensity. The battle droids are even played out for laughs. For example, they tell each other to shut up. The clone troopers are also capable of karate. There are several instances when a random clone trooper would transform into Jason Bourne and begin fighting the battle droids in close combat (at one stage a clone trooper punches a droid...then shakes his hand as if to suggest it rather hurt). During the action there are laser bolts and rockets buzzing around like flies, however we know all this artillery won't ever hit anyone important. The intensity is further ruined when Obi-Wan takes a break during a battle to stall the commander by explaining he wants to discuss the terms of a surrender. They're even served soup!
This is unmistakably a movie for the kids and for the kids only. The Force is never mentioned, Anakin's crossover to the dark side is never even hinted at, and the music will make you detest the very concept of music. The grand touch of John Williams is sorely missed. In its place is an incompetent composer who inserts guitar solos during the action sequences! Maybe George Lucas should hire Whitesnake to record new music for the original six Star Wars movies as well...


Star Wars: The Clone Wars features zero characterisation (save the juvenile interaction we're constantly given) and practically no story. The boring voice cast is accompanied by only three recognisable names. Anthony Daniels, Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee are the only members of the original cast to lend their voices. But they're only allotted a few minutes each. Everyone else is pretty much interchangeable. Frank Oz doesn't even voice Yoda. The replacement can only be described as awful. All these actors make you miss the wooden human acting on offer in the prequel trilogy. The dialogue is also dismal...let's not even go there.

This brings me onto the issue of the poor animation. The filmmakers endeavour to make the CG animation appear as unique as possible. The appearance of the characters, for instance, is blocky and chiselled instead of particularised. There aren't any individual strands of hair on heads or any form of facial hair. Instead there's a solid mass that a sculptor might have carved from stone or clay. The animation comes off looking strangely square and very cheap. Maybe that's the point as this movie introduces us to the television series for which, understandably, the filmmakers must cut costs. Nevertheless, The Clone Wars is a major motion picture, and audiences paying big bucks for tickets deserve far better.

Suffice to say, I did not even remotely like this travesty of a film. The Clone Wars is not Star Wars and it isn't worthy to be counted as part of the saga. This is cartoonish to extremes in everything from the script to the appalling animation. If George Lucas disowned Howard the Duck, I'm surprised he didn't do anything similar here. All this film offers is action and non-stop fighting. As I said, this action isn't even exciting. It's dull and subdued, and the animation is too trite for anything to look spectacular. This is merely a monotonous story with repetitive combat sequences that only add to the turgid video-game anonymity of it all.

Okay, so this is a film made for children and perhaps I'm being overly harsh. But the original Star Wars movies were gritty and competently executed. They appealed to a wide audience. Why couldn't this film be created to appeal to all ages? The Clone Wars even fails as a children's film. I've heard reports of children growing restless and sleepy by the time a cinema screening concluded. There is no fun to be had with this film.

2.0/10 (not even sure why I'm being so generous...)

0 comments, Reply to this entry

The Prequel of the Prequel

Posted : 1 year, 4 months ago on 20 August 2008 05:08 (A review of Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

''This is where the fun begins!''

As the Clone Wars sweep through the galaxy, the heroic Jedi Knights struggle to maintain order and restore peace...

Matt Lanter: Anakin Skywalker (voice)

Clone Wars interested me mainly due to the fact it's animated and its another story derived from the saga. As soon as it begins we the audience are thrown straight away into the story, leaving us little time to soak it in but we manage.

Clone Wars, obviously is set between the events of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. If you have ever played the Star Wars: Battlefront series of games then you will be right at home with Clone Wars. We have such things as ship dogfights, infantry skirmishes and frantic chases all displayed with gloriously captured animation.

The main story that Clone Wars executes, is one of Jabba the Hutt's son who has been mysteriously kidnapped. Predictably Anakin and Obi-Wan are chosen to sort this matter out while Count Dooku, Ventruss and Sidious do there best to deter them for their own means. General Grievous isn't in this story at all.

The voices are all recognizable to their respective characters although alot of the original actors who took part on the prequels understandably haven't returned. Two I know of that did decide to return were Anthony Daniels and Samuel L Jackson, who as C-3PO and Mace Windu, give their character's life. Although they are mainly sub characters here.
The new voices such as Tom Kane voicing Yoda, or Ian Abercrombie as Palpatine are pretty spot on with their accurate tones and accents.
James Arnold Taylor voicing Obi-Wan Kenobi does a bit too much of a good job elaborating on the English accent a little too much.
Asajj Ventress, the Sith Assassin wasn't in it as much as I thought she would be. She does however make an evil impression and have a memorable light sabre frenzied battle with Obi-Wan which made for some sparkling show of light and colour.

Another nice thing about Clone Wars is the fact that it's got a perfect blend of humour and seriousness. We are treated to the cute little son of Jabba, the Huttlet, Droids saying dumb comical little remarks, and a new apprentice Padawan in the guise of Ahsoka Tano. She injects the story with some much needed freshness.

So on the whole Clone Wars was alot better than I thought it may be. Some fun and brilliantly captured moments, all animated accurately. Only things I was disappointed with, was that posters misled me with, was the fact Yoda has his light Sabre out. In the film he doesn't even use his Sabre, talk about false advertising. Little things like this or the whole sub-plot and diminishing qualities of narration did spoil some of Clone Wars.

On the whole Clone Wars is a brilliant choice for the family, children or anyone who is a fan of animation or Star Wars. Still love the Clone Wars cartoon series they used to have on TV, which even was 2D had alot of depth to it and artistic vision.
The Clone Wars film does the whole thing in 3D and results in a glorious explosion of light, colour, and fun.

1 comments, Reply to this entry