I have to admit, I purposely avoided "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" when it was released.
As it turns out, it was for the best.
In essence, George Lucas has been both the creator and the destroyer of the Star Wars franchise. He created Star Wars. He made it famous back in the late '70s. He abused the crap out of it in "Episode One." He redeemed himself a little with "Episode Two" - the little green blur known as Yoda helped with that - but with the infamous "Nooo!" scene at the end of "Episode Three," he broke both its legs so it couldn't run away.
He finally finished the job with "Clone Wars." The animated series that is set to follow is little more than a bit of postmortem desecration of the corpse.
Star Wars has never done well in animated form - with the ironic exception of Genndy Tartakovsky's 2003 series of animated shorts, also known as "Clone Wars."
Take, for example, the "Droids" and "Ewoks" series that plagued cable television in the mid-1980s. Both were absolute garbage, and when combined with the infamous "Ewok" live action films, they served only to come damn close to killing off the entire Star Wars franchise long before the prequel trilogy was any more than a twinkle in Lucas' eye.
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That's why it's a good thing the main story has been told in Star Wars, because it looks like "Clone Wars" might manage to do what "Droids" failed to do - what even Jar Jar Binks failed to do. It might actually make everyone start to hate Star Wars.
One might ask, "How can it possibly be so bad? There are lightsaber duels and space fights, right?"
The answer: Baby Hutt. The entire focus of the film is that Count Dooku and his evil little apprentice have kidnapped Jabba the Hutt's son and are planning to use him to turn Jabba against the Republic. Worse yet, out of Lucas' bag of bad ideas comes the worst one yet: Anakin gets an apprentice - a smart-ass 12-year-old Twi'lek (the people with the tubes coming out of their heads) girl.
The plot - or at least the long chain of bad puns and convenient occurrences that masquerades as a plot - is laughable. The story doesn't drive forward to anything even remotely satisfying, and the only good thing that can really be said about the film is that at least the animated nature gives the characters an excuse to be flat and unemotional.
It's not all bad. The action sequences aren't terrible, especially the lightsaber duels - this is Star Wars, after all. They do look a bit mechanical, but that's to be expected.
Even the dreadful little apprentice looks pretty cool when she's flipping around and slicing up battle droids. She's only annoying when she actually speaks. The only positive thing that can be said about that character is that she probably doesn't survive the Jedi Purge, and may, in fact, have been cut down by her own former master. Harsh as that sounds, she really is that annoying of a character.
Someone needs to redirect Lucas. Maybe Hollywood can get him to make a sequel to "THX 1138." Since that movie sucked so bad, no one will have to feel like their childhood just got trampled on when he screws up another sequel to the movies that made him famous. The only consolation a Star Wars fan has these days is that at least the dark hand of Lucas hasn't butchered the video games set in that universe. Yet.
"Clone Wars"
Grade: F
Now Playing
