Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) – on rental. There’s a lot of bad films based off great franchises, but few of them have been as painful watching as The Clone Wars has been. The original trilogy of Star Wars movies were great, the prequel ones uneven but mostly alright. The Clone Wars is just awful.
I remembered 4 years ago just after Revenge of the Sith Lucas’ announcement that there would be a spin-off in the form of an extended TV series, and that announcement was greeted with fans split on the side of the fence: a good number were happy to suck up anything that was coming off Lucas’ non-stop milking of a sci-fi world that was no longer as special as it once was. An even larger number just wanted the pain to stop – they have had enough.
I was leaning with the former camp: I’ve always been fond of the Star Wars ‘verse and was at least mildly interested to see if Lucasfilm was going to breathe new life into the franchise. Specifically – I thought the story of Anakin a.k.a. Darth Vader Skywalker had been completely told, but a new series on time periods outside this character could be worth exploring.
What we got instead was a film (and precursor to the TV series) that was set up to Fail. Firstly, it remains centered on Anakin, pegged at a time period between the second and third films, and told a story you already know the conclusion of. Ok, there are great films on historical events. James Cameron’s Titanic comes to mind for instance. You know the ship is going to hit the damn iceberg, but the film keeps you in suspense as you care about its fictional characters.
Not so for The Clone Wars. It’s second failing lies in its new but ultimately annoying characters, a fault I place squarely on the awful dialog and poor voice-acting. Foremost among the cast of additions is Ahsoka, the new Jedi Padawan learner, who in 10 minutes of the film starting you’d be concluding that Jar Jar Binks was less detestable. Ahsoka whines, pouts, calls key characters nicknames, and the voice-acting for her is dialed in.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, you also get a baby Jabba the Hutt who gurgles and acts cute like an infant. There’s even Jabba the Hutt’s uncle, Ziro Hutt who possesses Jabba’s mass but speaks either like a castrated Eunuch or a gay Hutt speaking in falsetto. No kidding… two Hutts for the price of one. The horror.
And thirdly, there’s the ‘stylistic’ visuals of the film. The film already sounds like Star Wars minus John Williams’ stirring music. You’d easily recognize all the old characters and hardware. But the CG work is unattractive with flat colors, and hard lines and edges in the models. The art looks akin to the stuff you see in cartoons 10 years ago. And the opening crawl at the start of a Star Wars film is now supplemented by a gyrating voice that sounds like he’s reading for a commercial for pop-corn.
It’s no wonder that The Clone Wars film received almost unanimously negative reviews accordingly to its Wikipedia entry, with one reviewer calling it one of the five worst films of 2008. Which is more the pity as the film was succeeded by an animated TV series produced in Singapore: because after this film, I have no desire to even try watching the TV series, patriotism to a local production or not.
In sum: the film appeals to a very specific demographic: under 12 year olds. For anyone older, it’s just painful to watch and if you’re in my age group, can destroy whatever vestiges of respect you have for the original Star Wars creation that was solidly present in our formative years.
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