REVIEW - Star Wars: The Clone Wars

I'm going to come right out and say it up front - I really didn't think this thing was all that bad.

Now, I know some people's brains just exploded, but seriously, I will explain! Don't take away my geek card yet! I have reasons.

Mistakes were made here, there is absolutely no question. The first mistake was to take the first three episodes of what was supposed to be a TELEVISION SERIES and slap them together and throw it in a MOVIE THEATER. On a television series, you have less time per episode to get inside the characters, but it's okay because you're spending X amount of episodes with them so you can do your character development over that time. By slapping three episodes together haphazardly, it shortchanges the new characters' development and just seems like you're watching a video game you can't play.

Which leads me to my next point, which is that the character design is terrible. Everyone looks like puppets carved out of wood or something. George Lucas had the bright idea to make an homage to Thunderbirds but in this day and age you CANNOT MAKE SOMETHING CRAPPY ON PURPOSE AND EXPECT PEOPLE NOT TO COMPLAIN (see also: The Happening). The characters look dumb, but at least the style works well for the clone troopers, droids, spaceships, etc.The first thing you notice is there's no 20th Century Fox fanfare. It feels weird to have Star Wars without it. The next thing you notice is that the music cheaps out almost immediately. The music's okay once it gets going, but replacing the bombastic opening theme and text crawl was a bad choice, especially when you replace it with a narrator voice who sounds pretty much exactly like the news guy from Buckaroo Banzai. The loss of the traditional opening makes the show kind of loses its momentum from the start and makes it feel like it's not actually Star Wars. I expect this is where many people in the theater got irretrieveably lost.

Plot and storywise, I thought the film actually did a decent job, with the exception of the Hutt angle. I don't even so much mind the Hutts being used in general as I do the way we're forced into the fact that Jabba has a cute baby Huttlet. Using Jabba for this also works at cross-purposes with the goal of the series - it serves to CONTRACT the universe rather than expand it. It's a big galaxy, and at this point it seems like the only two characters who have never met are Chief Chirpa and Lobot.

And Ziro the Hutt is just plain offensive. First of all, he speaks Basic, then they make him sound like Truman Capote, which is a pretty weird choice. The character is very underwritten, so the voice characterization and black-light tattoos are all there is to tell you everything you need to know about the character, and apparently we are meant to understand that Ziro is a vaguely homosexual scumbag, despite the fact that Hutts reproduce asexually. How an asexual species with vaguely defined gender roles can be considered homosexual is...beyond the purview of this blog. Suffice it to say that Ziro the Hutt is, shall we say, ill-conceived and unnecessarily distracting.

The only other complaint I have about this is the same complaint I had with Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars animated series (which is suddenly and mysteriously out of print!): the dude who voices Obi-Wan Kenobi sounds pretty close, but his line readings are terrible. He stresses words oddly; nobody talks like that.Overall, though, the show (I won't refer to it as a film because it most certainly IS NOT) wasn't all that bad. I figured it would be a complete train wreck, but it wasn't far off from the sort of thing Tartakovsky had been doing on the earlier series. A lot of people were complaining about Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker's new Padawan, but aside from her insistence on calling him "Sky-guy" (which was very, very annoying) I thought she was pretty okay. She and Anakin bicker like George Costanza's parents almost immediately, and I think it works, especially since the film series' plot contrivances keep Padme away from much of the action. Ahsoka's not a useless tag-along character like Jar Jar Binks or anything. And between what we know from Episode III and Yoda's rather vague explanation of why Anakin is assigned a Padawan, we can infer her fate and its importance to Anakin's development. There are a lot of character moments throughout the show that will clearly pay off later, and I thought they did a really good job of keeping the characters consistent to their film counterparts.

Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee returned to voice Mace Windu and Count Dooku respectively (they both seem to take any job they're offered), as does Anthony Daniels for C-3P0. The rest of the voices aren't so far from their film counterparts to be distracting, though Lee's voice is just too awesome for the CG Dooku marionette puppet he's saddled with. The dude looks like an Easter Island statue.I've heard complaints about the battle droids. As featured in the films, I found them to be really, really annoying with their asides and non sequitirs, especially the poor timing of the joke where Qui Gon tells that one droid he's taking the Queen to Coruscant and it's like "Uh, Coruscant? That doesn't compute...you're under arrest." That was really, really lame. That said, I think they've finally perfected the comic timing on these guys. It makes absolutely no logical sense that these droids have such defined personalities as to value promotions, have philosophical leanings, or believe in God (yes, God); and I guess that's why I couldn't help finding it funnier than I thought possible when the droids made parting comments like "But I just got promoted!", "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?" and my personal favorite, hitting the ground after falling from an impossible height: "Oh my God!" I don't know why I found this to be both funny and acceptable within the Star Wars universe, but I DID. Maybe I'm just getting old, I don't know.

I've heard good things about the rest of the series that's been broadcast so far. Apparently Paul Dini (Batman: The Animated Series) wrote a three episode arc, and I'm willing to bet that it's awesome. From the clips I've seen of some of the episodes, they look to deal with some mature themes and issues. But there's also a Jar Jar episode in there too, you know, for the kids. There was a particularly interesting episode featuring Kit Fisto and his recently graduated Mon Calamari former Padawan that looked to deal with some really complex sociological issues regarding war and ethics, and another one with Plo Koon and some clones stuck drifting in a lifepod that looked really good as well. Not typical kid's show type stuff.

If I had seen this show in the theater, I would have been very, very upset. As a Star Wars FILM, it is lacking in the scope and characterization of even Attack of the Clones. But when seen in perspective on the small screen, I thought it was actually pretty good and I look forward to the rest of the series.