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Star Wars: The Clone Wars
(2008)
The first film from Lucasfilm Animation has arrived, but it has the more dubious distinction of being the worst of the Star Wars features. Star Wars: The Clone Wars is redundant, boring, and not terribly attractive in telling a story more suited for the Junior Fiction shelves of your local library than the screens of your local multiplex. The film heralds a new animated Clone Wars TV series, which one hopes will fulfill Star Wars creator George Lucas' promise of telling interesting and varied war stories. For its part, this film doesn't fit the bill, but it does once more demonstrate, silly rabbit, that 21st Century Star Wars is for kids.
Lucas produced the film, which is set between his Episodes II and III, but the writing duties went to three TV writers mostly associated with half-hour animated series: Henry Gilroy (Transformers: Animated), Steven Melching (The Batman), and Scott Murphy (Angel). Here's what they came up with: epic battles on land and in space, R2-D2 opening doors, political treachery, and martial-arts inspired lightsaber duels. Haven't we sung this song before? As Separatist droids battle the Republic's Clones, Jedi knights Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor) and Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) must rescue Jabba the Hutt’s kidnapped baby in order to convince the Hutt to grant the Republic access to crucial supply routes. Most of the leg work will have to be done by Anakin and his new padawan (apprentice), Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein).
Ahsoka is a Togruta, which means she has stripes and "head-tails." More importantly, she's spunky! Terrific. If only she were also interesting or likeable. The banter between Anakin and Ahsoka comes—if not from a galaxy far, far away— certainly from a long time ago. Though it's chaste, their chafing immediately signals to the audience that they're made for each other. He calls her "youngling" and, eventually "Snips" (that had critics scratching their heads); she calls him "Sky Guy." Anakin at first resists taking a padawan, but wise old Yoda (Tom Kane) knows he's ready, and that disciplining Ahsoka will result in Anakin disciplining himself.
There's the kernel of what might have been a good contribution to the Star Wars saga there, but the writers fumble it. For starters, Ahsoka is usually right and Anakin usually wrong, a notion that's endemic to the plot but remains unexplored in dramatic terms. Director Dave Filoni was no doubt too busy crafting the video-game density of the image to attend to the characters. On one hand, the film has a simple story. On the other, it has a damn complicated plot, with its ping-ponging across the galaxy and political conspiracies (the Emperor and Padmé Amidala are both here). The screenwriters' strategy is to deal with a plot point in a quick and potentially confusing way, then return to the same plot point several times bluntly to restate it for confused kids.
The new look, old hat approach means that The Clone Wars is for children and super-fans only. If you must go (and you know who you are), you’ll find some settings and vehicles and action that are spectacular in a claustrophobic video game way. Completists can also thrill to the vocal returns of Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Christopher Lee as Count Dooku, and Samuel L. Jackson. The look of the film has been described by the filmmakers as something new that's inspired by anime and Gerry Anderson's supermarionation. Those infuences are clear: in particular, the blocky, angular character designs (with waxy faces and beards that resemble slats of wood) evoke Anderson's puppets. But why computer-animate marionettes instead of people? To quote Yoda, "Greater than we think this mystery might be."
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