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Last Night Remixed |
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Nov 20 2008
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Dom Robinson reviewsStar Wars: The Clone WarsDistributed by Warner Home Video
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Slotting in between Episodes 2 and 3, Star Wars: The Clone Wars
takes the characters of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi on a simple mission.
Well, it's simple in terms of plot structure even if the task from start to finish is fairly difficult for them. And if you let it, it can be difficult for the viewer if you want to hang on every last word of the plot. That's because, like a lot of the Star Wars films, the only plot exposition they have is about warring factions and brokering treaties and other things that sound like you've put on an episode of Question Time instead. However, as long as you recognise who's the good guys and who's the bad guys and that good has to triumph over evil by the time the end credits roll, while ignoring all the waffle, then you'll stand yourself in good stead.
The basic plot is that, after dealing with the first big fight where the bad guys try to invade the town of the good guys by going in with a huge shield that covers every surface within a big enough radius - a shield that is quite easily deal with by the good guys, the news comes through that Jabba the Hut's son has been kidnapped and both Anakin (Matt Lanter) and new female Padawan learner, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein), have to go and find him and bring him back to daddy. There's some good banter between these two as he refers to her as 'Snips', her to him and 'Sky Boy' and both of them to the smelly green blob they've had to locate as 'Stinky'.
So, why would the good guys help Jabba? Because this means it will keep profitable trade routes open... and, yes, we're back
to tedious plot info again. Still, on the plus side, while this doesn't have Han Solo, Boba Fett and other classic characters
in it, it does have a new good one in the form of Ahsoka, and a new baddie in Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman) who works
under Count Dooku (Christopher Lee).
Star Wars: The Clone Wars has a thread-bare plot (there's a slight bit more to the rescuing of Jabba's son, but not a lot so I'll leave you to find that out), some of the slow bits do drag at times, but then 70% of it is pure crash/bang/wallop.
As such, this film felt like a series of CGI cut scenes from a computer game stitched together and put up on a big screen, and it looked fantastic for that. Camera angles go as wild as you'd expect and characters grimace into the camera like Dirk the Daring from Dragon's Lair as the baddies square up against them. I went to see this film expecting a great piece of entertainment for 90 minutes and that's what I got. It didn't matter that the two main characters weren't voiced by the real actors from the films - although it would've been nice, and it was a bonus that we had the original voices of C3PO, Mace Windu and Count Dooku thrown into the mix.
It also made me realise that, as many films are made out of computer game series - and that almost all of them are total crap, they'd improve a lot more if they went the route of Clone Wars and made a CGI movie. That way, you could get all of the action up on the big screen and if you can find hold it together with a decent plot then that'd be welcome, even if it's not entirely necessary.
There's a good deal of brief comedic moments as well, all of which are entirely daft but which made me laugh a lot, mostly
coming with one-liners between the enemy droids as they exhibit human traits, such as when one notices the forthcoming onslaught
by Anakin and co. as they climb a mountain towards them, and tells his underling to "Fire at grid location 1114467" (or
something similar), to which he replies, "Er... 11..4... what was that again?", and the first one sighs, then points and
shouts, "Down there!"
What was surprising was that for a Star Wars film, from the first week out it was only showing in one screen in this multiplex and in its second week there wasn't a massive audience for it, which was rather a shame as it certainly deserved more of a big-screen turnout than the average dumb Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell flick.
Put simply, if you like the Star Wars films and you want to see something very undemanding, and a bit different as it's a CGI-only sci-fi movie, then this is a great way of spending an hour and a half.
Note that this is also the first entry prior to a new animated TV series, coming later this year.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
DVD: 
