Review: The Clone Wars

Plot: In this CGI prequel to REVENGE OF THE SITH, Anakin Skywalker must rescue Jabba the Hut’s infant son from the clutches of the dark side in order to secure Jabba’s political influence for the alliance.

Review: OH, THE HUMANITY!!! How I hated this poor excuse for a film! After seeing STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH, I figured that at long last the STAR WARS saga had come to an end. While I did not particularly enjoy the prequels- even at their worst the films still had their moments. As soon as this film was announced I expected the worst. It reeked of a greedy cash grab from George Lucas, and when I was assigned to review the film, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic. So I went into the film with a bit of baggage but in my wildest dreams I never figured the film could be this bad.

How bad is it?

Let me put it this way: the film could not possibly be worse. If the filmmakers had just filmed Lucas flipping off the camera for two hours it would not be as bad as this film. Remember how much everyone hated Jar Jar Binks in THE PHANTOM MENACE? Jar Jar is like Han friggin’ Solo compared to the new characters introduced in this film!

 

First, let’s start with Anakin’s new pre-teen sidekick – Ashoka Tano – who’s like the Jedi equivalent of HANNAH MONTANA. Throughout the film, not only does she keep getting into trouble constantly while cracking bad jokes, but she repeatedly calls Skywalker, “Sky-guy”. WTF? Is that was passes for comic relief in the STAR WARS universe. Sky-guy? What the hell is this, DEGRASSI HIGH? After she’d been onscreen for about three minutes I was already looking for the exit- but I decided to stick it out. Surely it can’t get any worse, I foolishly thought to myself.

It did…

Meet Jabba’s offspring, STINKY. Yep, Stinky. That’s what they call him in the film. He’s a baby version of Jabba, and spends the movie making funny faces and farting. That’s right folks, STAR WARS now has fart jokes. Sounds pretty bad so far, right?

But wait…There’s more. Turns out Jabba’s got an evil, cross dressing, English speaking cousin who sounds suspiciously like Truman Capote. Once this character hit the screen, I honestly could not believe what I was seeing. For a second, I thought someone might have spiked my coffee with LSD, but alas, I was not high.

 

Another bad thing about this film is that, while Lucas & co. were able to get Christopher Lee & Samuel L. Jackson to lend their voices to the film, they were not able to get Frank Oz so the whole film we have to listen to a wrong sounding Yoda. I couldn’t care less that Ewan McGregor & Hayden Christensen didn’t voice their characters but Yoda?! C’mon George, cut him a check!

Obviously, John Williams is also absent in this outing, and in his pace they hired a hack named Kevin Kilner to re-orchestrate his themes. By re-orchestrate I mean that Kilner adds wanking heavy metal guitar solo’s during the action scenes. Which is great because I don’t know about you, but I always thought the original trilogy would have been better if it had been scored by Whitesnake.