Film is Pwn

It is snowing in my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina.  An alien invasion does not debilitate New York City to the degree that an inch of snow shuts down Charlotte.  Charlotte’s citizenry forget how to behave when beset by fears of the white powder descending from the heavens like millions of malicious storm troopers.  

When the forecast calls for snow in these parts, people stock up on bread, water, and firewood as if the Apocalypse were nigh.  I was glad the theoretical blizzard was set to occur over the course of the weekend. You see, if I were to be at the office when the snow started, there’s no telling how long it would take for my panicked, Southern co-workers to resort to cannibalism despite the copious quantity of Dorito’s still in the snack machine.  (I can talk down to panicked Southerners because I very briefly lived in Chicago as a pre-teen.  So what if I’ve lived in the South the vast majority of my life? I’m a Chicagoan! Go Cubs!)

Friday evening I left work in hopes of picking up dinner and renting a movie for my night’s entertainment.  Getting there was a bit of a challenge as drivers dared not venture above 15 mph on Highway 485 as the first snowflakes fell, hours before they would stick on the surface or freeze on the road.  My local Blockbuster video, generally a ghost town, was inundated with families desperate to acquire a weekend’s worth of DVDs for fear they might have to converse with each other. 

Alas, I couldn’t justify standing in line for thirty minutes to rent the new release of the week, Bruce Willis’ bold remake of Will Smith’s bastardization of I, Robot, Surrogates, so I picked up something to eat and headed home.  I tell you that to tell you why I ended up watching the animated film, Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  My parents bought it and lent it to me, and it had been sitting in front of my DVD player for a couple of weeks.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is terrible, and it’s not just because its title implies two different kinds of “Wars.”  Is it a “star war” or a “clone war” – make up your mind, Lucas!

Chronologically, Star Wars: The Clone Wars fits in between Star Wars II: Send in the Clones & Star Wars III: Revenge of the Script.  Intellectually,The Clone Wars falls somewhere between Star Wars I: The Fandom Menace and The Star Wars Holiday Special.

The plot revolves around those titular Clone Wars, where the Jedi’s and their clone friends (alias the Storm Troopers) are battling the evil Count Dooku (that’s a real name, I promise) and his endless supply of thoroughly useless robots.  It’s astounding how the robots make the Storm Troopers look competent by comparison.

Count Dooku has a master plan to shift the balance of power in his favor, and it involves currying the favor of Jabba the Hutt.  If you recall, Jabba the Hutt is the giant slug/gangster featured in Star Wars VI: The Return of the Jedi, which chronologically is decades down the road.  Jabba essentially ran one wacky sand trap whose greatest weapon was a hole in the ground, and posed no real threat to our heroes outside of comic relief.  So imposing a foe is Jabba and his crew that he ultimately will be defeated in Star Wars VI by two ambiguously gay robots, a princess in a bikini, and Billy Dee Williams.  If not for giving the world the gift of said Princess in a bikini, Jabba the Hutt’s contribution to the Star Wars universe would largely be forgotten.

But let’s forget that we know from that (good) film made twenty-five years earlier that Jabba is a bad guy who is easy to defeat.  By golly, his cooperation is going to be key to the victory in the Clone Wars! . . . for some reason.

Count Dooku’s plan to curry the favor of Jabba the Hutt?  You’d better sit down for this one: Dooku plans to kidnap the slug child of Jabba, wait for the Jedi’s to try to rescue Jabba Junior, and record footage of the Jedi’s rescuing Jabba Junior, which he will pass off to Jabba as the Jedi’s kidnapping Jabba Junior.  At this point, Dooku’s nefarious scheme requires him to kidnap back Jabba Junior from the Jedi’s, or just kill Jabba Junior and then blame the Jedi’s for it.

It really seems like a lot of trouble when a good old-fashioned BRIBE would probably get the job done just as easily.

Our heroes are familiar favorites, Obi-Wan Kinobi, Anakin Skywalker, Yoda, R2D2, etc. Anakin gets a plucky, girl sidekick in Padawan learner Ahsoka, who adds nothing outside being a plucky, girl sidekick.  Sidekick Ahsoka’s addition is particularly cloying because Anakin is really nothing more than Obi-Wan’s sidekick, so what’s the fun in giving your wise-cracking side-kick a wise-cracking side-kick? I use the phrase “wise-cracking” loosely.  An example of Ahsoka’s lines are grating like this: “I’m the one with enthusiasm. You’re the one with experience, which I’m looking forward to learning from.”

The Clone Wars doesn’t really answer any questions the later trilogy and doesn’t really add to it at all.  Come to think of it, I had no questions left unanswered by the later trilogy other than “Why was this made?” The only good the Clone Wars has done is make that cinematic trainwreck look like a good idea in retrospect.

There’s no foreshadowing of Anakin’s dark side (which is the point of the trilogy, is it not?).  Padme — mother to Luke and Leia, the woman Anakin loves so much that he will betray the Jedi’s for her –- is an afterthought, and her key relationship with Anakin is barely alluded to.

Padme appears with 20 minutes left to go in a bizarre subplot involving Jabba’s Uncle Ziro the Hutt.  Ziro the Hutt cracked me up; he’s a southern, vaguely effeminate version of Jabba that sounds kinda like the old pervert from Family Guy.  Priceless.

The animation looks just dreadful.  Obi-Wan’s beard looks as if he’s taped brown blocks on his face.  As dreadfully unrealistic as the animation for the Clone Wars is, the presentation of Anakin Skywalker is a giant step up to the performance of Hayden Christensen.  Zing!

Speaking of Hayden Christensen, nearly none of the cast from the films provides the voices to their characters.  Christopher Lee as Dooku, Anthony Daniels as C3PO, and Samuel L. Jackson(!) as Mace Windu are the only returning favorites.  The rest are voice actors filling in for the regulars, so the dude doing Obi-Wan Kinobi’s voice (James Arnold Taylor) is doing an impression of Ewan McGregor’s impression of Alec Guinness. It’s hard to believe George Lucas couldn’t get any of the other actors. What’s the guy who played the Emperor doing that’s so important? A Star Wars convention in Cleveland?

If I had to say something nice about Star Wars: The Clone Wars is that it isn’t dull.  It’s dumb as all get out, looks dreadful, but there is always stuff happening on screen, so it should amuse the 6-8 year-old crowd. Parents, however, be warned!

Watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars is like watching someone else play a video game.  On second thought, that’s unfair to video games.  My brother showed me animation from a Star Wars video game released last year that looked light-years better than Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the video game trailer:

Here’s the movie trailer:

Maybe Lucas should let the guys who did the work on the video game do the next animated movie? Couldn’t hurt!