Kelly Wand“Star Clone Wars Wars” the “movie” “review”
August 28th 2008 05:50
As lifeless as if Lucas had directed it himself!
The action sequences in Clone Wars make the Bea Arthur cantina musical number from 1978’s “Star Wars Christmas Special” look like the lightsaber duel from The Empire Strikes Back. It makes you embarrassed for ever defending anything Star Wars-related. And it’s a perfect emblem of our drearily corporate times, of how terms like “child-friendliness” get thrown around as hair-trap excuses for a general collapse of standards. Because nothing, after all, is friendlier to a child than giving her/him bland clichés and sub-par animation.
George Lucas, the auteur who has repeatedly proclaimed that he doesn’t care what critics, the public, or anyone outside of his own immediate family over the age of three thinks (and who actually has the midichlorians to charge $35, I find out, for a set of action figures molded in the likenesses of his family members in the costumes they wore as extras in Episode II: Attack of the Clones), is now charging $12 movie-ticket admission rates to see a 90-minute commercial for an upcoming TV series on the Cartoon Network that’s totally unrelated to the vastly superior 2003 series on the same network created by the too-talented-for-Cartoon-Netw ork Genndy Tartakovsky – a movie and a series all based ENTIRELY on the time period no Star Wars fan or non-fan has the slightest interest in. That's right, Separatist droids vs. Imperialist clones for what Lucas promises will be over forty hours longer than both movie trilogies combined: whee!!!! Sure, we already know who wins, just as we already know all these cute little Jedi kids will soon be dead when Anakin goes bad and the maid finds Palpatine’s Sith robe in the laundry hamper, and obviously the "war" can’t actually end during the series’ run, but that just makes it even more exciting.
In his defense, Lucas apparently had nothing to do with the abysmal, insultingly dumb dialogue for once, although we do have him to thank for insisting on having the character of Ziro the Hutt (who in only three minutes total screen time effortlessly dethrones JarJar Binks as the most reviled Star Wars character of all time) talk in gay Southern English like Truman Capote, ostensibly because Lucas’ kids love Truman Capote. There’s so much else to hate going on, even its careless ruination of the beloved Yoda as a speech-impeded Dr. Theopolis third-stringer barely registers.
Save for the occasional pointless lightsaber duel, the movie seems only tenuously related to the Star Wars universe we knew (and once liked). There’s no John Williams score, no opening yellow text crawl, no space battles (i.e., no actual “star wars”), no reference to the Force, no indication of Anakin’s dark destiny, no sense of awe, and not even any of the trademark cornball Star Wars humor, unless you count the tiny bilious slug Stinky the Hutt’s whiny puking noises. Or the equally bilious observations voiced by the fatally spunky, personality-less new character whom we’ve never heard of, Ahsoka Tano, a pre-pubescent Twilek Jedi Padwan inexplicably assigned to first Obi-Wan then Anakin between firefights in the middle of a curiously inert street battle. Ahsoka Tano calls R2-D2 “Artooewie” and Anakin “Skyguy”; he reciprocates by calling her “Snips.” I guess because she’s hairless. Or blue. Or hasn’t filled out yet. Remember when the Jedi were genial, thoughtful, wise stoics? Dimly? Anakin doesn’t want Ahsoka around initially because….well, it’s not really explained why not, although she is certainly irritating. To help make kids like her, she’s always right about everything while her veteran battle commanders Anakin and Obi-Wan are always wrong; maybe that’s supposed to be humor too, even though billions of lives supposedly depend on their competence and discipline.
Like all three battles in the movie (i.e., one battle per TV “episode”), the first one is doused in purple and envisioned with the imagination of a small child devoid of peripheral vision. It takes place on a single straight avenue with no discernible architectural style or local populace or intersections. The droids (whose dialogue is presumably lifted verbatim from Lucas’ input during story meetings) seem to have the upper hand because of a heavily guarded shield generator, but Anakin trumps this technology by hiding himself and Ahsoka in a box and putting it in the middle of the street for the oncoming droids and tanks to march courteously around. Luckily they do just that, instead of trampling it or using sensors to see what’s in it or, uh, lifting it a couple inches to look underneath. If the droids are that dumb (and there is ample evidence as the movie progresses that they are, which doesn’t speak well of the Jedi being unable to finish them off in a single “war”), why not just hide the whole army in boxes? Or plant bombs in them? Or hell, anything remotely smacking of the sci-fi setting?
Later, Anakin and the clones attack another droid enclave by climbing up the side of a cliff ‘60’s Batman-style while the droids shoot down at them and say moronic jokes to their commanders and swoop around on flying bikes that the Jedi apparently forgot to bring their own versions of. I won’t give away who wins the battle but here’s a hint: Lucas. There’s also a Dark Jedi named Ventress, who must be really powerful because though uninjured, she runs away in the middle of a lightsaber duel with Obi-Wan and is never seen again. Anakin also duels Dooku inconclusively while Ahsoka kills some robots. Spoiler alert: nobody loses a hand. Most of the time, though, they’re fighting droids, which constitute so minor a threat, you kind of feel sorry for them. At one particularly nail-biting point, a bunch begin following Anakin and Ahsoka through some tunnels without attacking; understandably bored, Ahsoka seeks Anakin’s permission to slash them to pieces, does so, and they just keep going.
Towards the end, there’s a snoozy subplot involving the appearance of Natalie Portman’s Padme (minus the Natalie Portman part); since she’s a skilled diplomat, she sneaks into Jabba’s palace in disguise (original!), draws a gun on him, and gets captured and thrown in a cell. Meantime, Anakin and Ahsoka rescue baby Stinky and, noticing he looks sickly, call a drunk-sounding medical droid, who advises them to give it a lozenge and to call a real doctor. They don’t, although practically every scene involves one character calling another on futuristic cell-phones that get trampled and crushed and break instantly; the friend who dragged me to the movie observed it should have been called “Phone Wars.”
Clocking in at under ninety minutes, the movie somehow still manages to feel endless and stifling. The mostly bemused audience I saw it with didn’t boo it or cheer it either; they simply shuffled bovinely out, another disposable bauble ingested and instantly forgotten; on to the next. And why not. Clone Wars was purposely designed not to feel a single emotion about. Even for Star Wars fans. In fact, it made me realize that breaking up with Star Wars no longer actually means anything; it’s like announcing that Paris Hilton seems aloof. It’s impossible to imagine grown adults (or children for that matter) seriously discussing any events in this movie, let alone the impact of them on their previous conceptions of the Star Wars universe/canon/legacy. It’s a rubber eraser served as food, made by hacks exclusively for the pre-natal.
And after sitting, then slouching, then lying all the way through its interminable slush, the only thing that would entice me to watch the TV series is if it featured Bea Arthur with a lightsaber. Inside her.
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