Unlike most of the other folks in our Summer TV Binge, I have never seen the show I’m reviewing. As part of my rediscovered Star Wars fandom, I want to go back and check this show out. People I really trust, like Force Ghost Coast to Coast host Alice W. Castle, have been yelling at me for years for not being conversant in Clone Wars talk, so this is my way out of that!
Before we dive into the first season of the show next week, it felt appropriate, and necessary, to dive into the feature-length film that preceded the series. Here are my ten thoughts on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the film!
1. It feels like Star Wars
My biggest fear when approaching any ancillary material for a franchise I love is whether or not it will retain the tone/feel of the original property. Now, I’m not looking for exactly copies of A New Hope, but I want it to feel like it belongs in the same universe as the classic properties.
I can gladly report that this film feels like a Star Wars joint. In fact, I will argue that this feels more like Star Wars than Attack of the Clones does. There are a lot of elements that play into that, and I’ll get to some of them in a bit, but I’m really impressed by that tonal thread being present.
2. The day to day life of a Jedi
I was struck by how this is sort of the first time, on screen, I’ve seen the sort of mundane side of a Jedi’s life. Sure, Anakin isn’t stuck behind a desk or anything, but he’s in the middle of a conflict that he didn’t start and likely won’t end – he’s not quite a grunt, but this is certainly the least ‘important’ mission we’ve seen a Jedi take on.
And I like that; I wouldn’t like the extreme version of that, where a Jedi is doing his space taxes or buying a new tunic from a catalog. But I like that the show is attempting to fill in the blanks a little bit, in terms of what a Jedi does when he’s not saving the universe, guarding a princess, or openly stating his disdain for sand.
3. Ahsoka
This is, obviously, the big character that people talk about on the show, though I have to say, initially, I wasn’t all that impressed. Now, this isn’t me writing off the character or anything, but she seems pretty run of the mill apprentice character, without a ton of depth or nuance yet. I fully expect that to change as the series progresses, but for right now, I’m more interested in how she interacts with Anakin (which I’ll get to shortly) than I am interested in her as a character at the moment.
But again, I like what she represents. I like that we’re getting a female Jedi, I like that we’re focusing on a not-quite human character, and I like that we are actually seeing someone being trained. Each Star Wars film has more or less skipped over the intensive training pieces. The closest we get is Luke on Degobah, and that is far from standard Jedi training, and we still get a very small bit of that.
4. Anakin
Anakin is really interesting here as well. Part of the calculus behind the series has to be “make Anakin less shitty,” and the show is digging into that right away. But they aren’t making him perfect either; he’s still reckless, he’s still cocky, he’s still unbelievably natural with his force powers. But he’s less whiny, and he has a purpose that feels more explicit than it does in Attack of the Clones.
I found myself, a few times, saying “Wow, I…I’m rooting for Anakin.” That’s a weird feeling for me; I’ve always said that the writing of Anakin Skywalker is the greatest sin of George Lucas’s career, and this helps that immensely. It won’t help me when I watch one of the films, but in my head, when I contemplate Star Wars, this show will help me not cringe when I think of a pre-Vader Anakin.
Continued below5. “Stinky”
I have no idea if this will be a running issue or not, but the show gets really juvenile at times, especially when dealing with the Hutt baby they insist on calling Stinky. There are a lot of other bits of humor in the show, some of which work better than others, but the Hutt stuff is really over the top. Uncle Zero sounds like The Interrupter, and just about everything involving the baby is played as broadly as possible.
What’s odd is that Jabba is played relatively close to his film portrayal, so the Hutts seem like a really weird species of stereotypes and warlords. The clones also get a bit of dumb humor attached to them, which is actually even odder. I’m sure that the show’s tone adapts as it goes along, and it’s not as if the tone is so unbearable that it takes you out of the story. It’s just more prequel-ish than than I’d typically care for. In fact, that brings me to my next point…
6. It somewhat softens the prequels insanity/sheen
One of the problems with the prequels, to me, is that it showed a totally different world than the original films. At times, it seemed like it couldn’t possibly be the same franchise, the gulf seemed so wide. But this is acting like a bridge between the prequels and the rest of Star Wars media, or at least that is how I’m perceiving it. Maybe future installments will mess that up, but this film very much feels like a nice midpoint.
7. The brother/sister relationship
Anakin and Ahsoka instantly develop a sibling-like relationship, and the more I think about it, the more that’s sort of unique in Star Wars films. Sure, Luke and Leia interact, but so few of their interactions are framed in a sibling context, and Han and Luke are sort of brothers-ish but, again, they’re not that way in A New Hope and essentially share one scene in Empire, so its only in Jedi that we begin to see that.
It’s also nice to not have Anakin being treated as a typical horny dude; he never once, at least not yet, sexualizes her whatsoever. Sure, he’s got his (Na)boo in Padme, but that hasn’t stopped writers in the past. There’s no temptation here; their relationship is purely master/padawan, as it should be.
That said, I hope the nicknames disappear into a Sarlac pit.
8. Good score
I was a little leery of a non-John Williams score, but Kevin Kiner does a nice job here bringing in traditional Star Wars tones and still building something that feels a little lighter and looser than what Williams usually does.
9. Great Obi-Wan
I don’t know if it just that the character is more malleable than others, but there’s never really been a bad Obi-Wan moment in a Star Wars property, and this continues that. The voice acting of James Arnold Taylor really sells both the somewhat carefree nature of the young Obi-Wan and the gravitas that Alec Guinness brought to the role in the original trilogy.
In other hands, the surrender scene would’ve been monotonous and off-putting. Here, it just works.
10. Less like one-time encounters, more like an actual war
The film does a nice job of establishing that this is a war, there are battles and multiple fronts, and it all feels very sprawling and complicated and, well, like a real war. You get the feeling that the Jedi are incredibly taxed through all of this, and that the entire galaxy is feeling the crunch of this war. That’s a really nice way to expand a world that, theoretically, should be limitless.
Join me next week when I dive into the series proper, and make sure to sound off in the comments!
Oh, and for those asking: I’ll be covering the hand-drawn series later this year in a separate series.
