Star Wars: The Clone Wars is less talk and a little more rock
The world may not need another Anakin Skywalker movie, especially one that looks as if it’s not quite a cartoon, not quite a Christmas special and not quite something panoramically painted on the side of a van. But there's always room for another stoner movie, and Lucasfilm and Warner Bros. might want to market Star Wars: The Clone Wars as such, in a summer of stoner movies.
People attuned to the Clone Wars need to be high on something—high on being a lifelong devotee of Star Wars, or at least high on the hope that it is salvageable. Sadly, this one shucks off all remaining pretense of universal appeal, and instead unfolds with all the majesty and emptiness of watching someone play a video game.
It’s unsettling to begin with the Warner Bros. logo instead of Twentieth Century Fox’s fanfare logo, but hey, it’s a bottom-line galaxy, after all, in which George Lucas has directed his minions (among them director Dave Filoni) to march forth and make money however possible. Although Filoni’s animators pull off lovely but fleeting moments of inventive style and rich colours, we are right back in the fog of war from the first frame. It’s like having to retake a multiple-choice test in a history class you flunked: the Sith, the Jedi council, the chancellor, the separatists, the Old Republic, the senate, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Trade Federation. The what? The hunh?
