Cinema review
Directed by Dave Filoni
Starring the voices of Matt Lanter, Ashley Eckstein, James Arnold Taylo, Dee Bradley Baker, Tom Kane, Nika Futterman, Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Daniels, Christopher Lee
Release date 15 August 2008 (UK)

The son of Jabba the Hutt has been kidnapped, so Yoda sends Anakin Skywalker and his shiny new Padawan, Ahsoka Tano, in hot pursuit, in this big-screen opener to the new Clone Wars TV series…

Like many SF fans, I’ve had a difficult relationship with Star Wars over the last 10 years: watching, rather than engaging with, the prequels, and generally losing touch with the galaxy far, far away.

However, the trailers and pre-release buzz for The Clone Wars all seemed promising – with the reins (and scriptwriting chores) moved far enough away from George Lucas’s lately inept hands and onto a crack cadre of animators and storytellers who seemed to know what they were doing.

As a welcome change, the pre-release buzz was right.

In an era of the Star Wars milieu that can be charitably called ‘a bit depressing’, The Clone Wars harkens back to the franchise we all fell in love with: sparky (if never stunningly brilliant) dialogue, engaging characters, clear dramatic stakes, inventive uses of fascinating vehicles, and the feeling that events are reflections of an enormous, thrilling backdrop just waiting to be explored.

The story, such as it is, features a Macguffin sure to delight the six people who remember the Boglins toys – Jabba the Hutt’s infant son, Rotta, has been kidnapped by forces unknown, and it’s up to the Republic to get him back, or Jabba is liable to give a free pass to the Outer Rim to Dooku’s Separatists and cut off the Republic’s vital chains of resupply. It’s not quite ‘rescue the Princess, blow up the Death Star’, but it’s a morally conflicted little tale that substitutes visceral action for stodgy Senatorial antics.

The new animated look gives the whole prequel universe a spit and polish revamp. Main characters previously dismissed as wooden in their live action incarnations are ironically rendered compelling in animated form: Anakin transforms from a petulant teen soap reject into a dangerous, charming, multifaceted rogue. Obi-Wan’s chides and jibes seem less like RADA warm-up exercises and more like the exasperated teacher handing control over to his graduating pupil he was always supposed to be.

Furthermore, the new Padawan, Ahsoka Tano, gets plenty of chances to shine. Though clearly a Mary Sue character for the production team, her doubts and inexperience shine through just as clearly as her martial expertise, dry wit and know-it-all demeanour. A thoroughly likeable addition to the franchise, she adds a welcome note of potential peril to the untouchable-at-this-point Obi-Wan and Anakin. It will be very interesting to see whether Lucas’s depressing worldview extends to killing off this orange ball of fun at the end of the television series (emotionally crippling youngsters everywhere), or whether she graduates to Knighthood and drops off the radar before Order 66 is enacted – perhaps popping up in live action TV form a few years down the line? Her character arc promises to be fun to watch.

And what of the clones? The new keyword is ‘individuality’. Those who felt the battlefield sequences in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith were curiously weightless – and not just because of the CGI, but because the battles pitted faceless drones against faceless drones – will be cheered by the clones’ newfound identities, amusing haircuts, armour modifications and developing personalities. The movie doesn’t shy away from the horrors of warfare, whether it’s the near-destruction of a clone battalion, patching up the wounded, or pulling clone corpses out of a punctured AT-TE – the body count is high for a family movie. The workaday geniality of the clones is enough to make you care about their fates as their ranks are whittled down – a major achievement in itself.

The Clone Wars succeeds at its most difficult task - making Star Wars cool again. Where the prequels (and, in fact, every appearance of the Jedi from Luke's bowl-cut on) offered us staid reserve, The Clone Wars cuts loose with the thrill (and cost) of war. Part of this refreshing flavour is down to the new blood on the scoring side. While remixed versions of John Williams' greatest hits firmly anchor the film, Kevin Kiner’s addition of Battlestar-like tribal orchestrals and even rock up the excitement and interest, defamiliarising everything that seemed set in stone.

Comment may be passed on the new opening sequence, which eschews the traditional crawl for an homage to the WWII newsreels, part of the Holonet News coverage that will come to the fore in the series. While for British audiences the enunciation will bring Harry Enfield to mind, the conceit works, dumping a lot of information in a jaunty, painless style and allowing us to jump into the action all the more quickly.

Lucas has made no secret of the fact that the Thunderbirds puppets were a major inspiration for the Empire’s new clothes – but Gerry Anderson would have killed for actors like these. While never challenging the heights of Pixar, the animation is richly coloured, expressive and filled with nuance. While occasionally revealing its TV-budget origins with sets that seem a little too small, the lack of an infinite canvas gives each battle and set-piece an intimacy recent Star Wars conflicts have lacked. The addition of hand-painted textures over the roughly-hewn character models gives these brave new worlds individuality and bounce, and, although the curiously flat-bottomed sets bring to mind the worst Star Trek studio-bound ‘caves’, all is forgiven by the vitality of the characters. Finally, Lucas has achieved his dream, and completely removed live actors from the filmmaking equation…

There’s the occasional speed bump: the lisping Coruscanti Hutt Ziro seems a little too close to South Park’s Cartman, perhaps stopping off at the ‘cheap stereotype’ wagon that gave us the ‘Taiwanese’ Neimodians, but this is bold action storytelling, leaping from one set-piece to the next, with just enough assured character moments to string it all together. Compared to the oblique political manoeuvring of the prequels, this breath of fresh air bodes well for the upcoming 77 hours of Clone Wars programming. Christopher Andrews

VERDICT: 7/10
Whether you’re a moviegoer who swore off the franchise after Revenge of the Sith, or a hardcore fan that fills their pants at the thought of new canonical material, The Clone Wars is a Star Wars film for the lapsed and prolapsed alike.

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