the clone wars

short answer - totally great. clever action and dialogue, gorgeous visuals, a solid enough plot, and enough of an edge to counter the fact that it’s basically a kids show.

long answer - i don’t actually understand why so many people don’t like this. is it too colorful? is it too wierd, too kid friendly? it’s not worse in any single area than any of the prequels, and it’s largely more entertaining than any of those three movies.

[here be spoilers...]

ahsoka, anakin’s padawan, yes, she is kind of annoying, although she grew on me quickly, and at her worst i still didn’t find her nearly so obnoxious as others did. most of that is that she’s still a jedi and you can only make a jedi so lame before you remember that they’re cutting droids in half and carrying a sword into the middle of a gun battle.

people are declaring that she’s worse than jar jar, fuck that. jar jar and little orphan ani were simultaneously annoying and incompetent. they were useless. they won their respective battles by accident, by sheer dumb chance. anakin in episode two, yeah, obnoxious and arrogant and annoying, but he was also pretty badass, and it carried him through. same deal here. ahsoka is not worthless, so i stopped having a problem with her almost immediately.

though, can we give her a shirt? seriously, she’s like fourteen, the tube top is a little wierd. why is it only the hot girl jedi can get away with wearing less than five layers of brown fabric? she gets a line where a droid doesn’t realize she’s a jedi, it’s because she’s not dressed as one.

also, the jedi keep putting on their cloaks which look terrible, only to discard them at a moments notice. why bother? and what’s with wearing like 1/8 of a suit of clone armour? either wear a full suit of brown clone amour, or biker scout gear with a brown field jacket, or just regular jedi gear and no clone armour at all.

there’s a really strange subplot in the latter half where padme is interacting with jabba’s flamingly gay uncle on coruscant, but i can’t explain why it didn’t bother me, it just didn’t. padme got be badass again without a lightsaber or force powers, and it’s nice to see the side characters get to do something worthwhile. also, jabba’s gay uncle and his coruscant nightclub? that’s so wierd an idea i have to like it.

but whatever. the entire universe has a chunky, chiselled aesthetic, and the color palette is ridiculous. bright vibrant sunsets and landscapes, intricately detailed buildings and spacecraft, lots of variation and little details. it’s absolutely gorgeous almost 100% of the time.

the clones are great, with a fair bit of good dialogue and they’re just satisfying to watch in action. i’m very excited about the promise of more from them. there was a great scene where anakin and ahsoka are talking to anakin’s squad, and there are a dozen clones with a dozen different haircuts. a few of them were gray, a few shaved, a few still dark haired, one had shaved his hair into red bands. and they’d painted a ww2 style pinup girl on the nose of their dropship. i love that kind of thing.

and the droids are hilarious. almost every droid in the movie gets to be funny, and they get most of the best dialogue. r2 holds his own in a warzone filled with clones and jedi, and even 3po manages to be cool.

the plot isn’t so great, but again, neither were the prequels. it gets by on charm and snark. there’s some spectacular visuals, some ridiculously good animation for a tv series, the whole thing holds up a lot better on the big screen than it has any right to.

it’s really nice to see obi-wan in his e2 starfighter again, and it was similarly nice to see the trade federation landing ships from e1.

lightsabers are hard to screw up, and there’s lots of them here, and for a change they actually exist in the characters’ hands, it’s not a glow effect added in post. this manages to make them look more compelling than they have in the past. maybe it’s just that they’re finally putting out ambient colored light? they have a little more pop than ever before.

yeah, i don’t really get it. decent plot, strong characters and action, gorgeous visuals, kid friendly without being dumb… there’s limited use of the force but it’s used to good effect. there’s a certain inevitability to the good guys winning, but there always is in this kind of thing, and it’s hardly a cakewalk. and while the lightsaber duels are ultimately futile because we know all the combatants live to fight again later, they’re still nice to watch.

in that sense, the movie is an absolute success. it’s the pilot to a full series, and i’m eagerly awaiting the next episode and i’m buying all the toys. i could complain about being shilled to, but i haven’t walked out of a star wars movie without serious grievances in a long long time.