Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

The label “The Clone Wars” has always confused me. Victors get to name wars so “The Clone Wars” makes it sound like the Republic is fighting clones. Instead, they are fighting with cloned soldiers, which makes the name of the war non-standard and in my opinion, really dumb. That’s just one of the reasons why I can’t keep this early Star Wars universe history straight.

The movie turned out to be better than I expected though. There are no major gaffs, but there are many things they could have done better.

Job one would have been to speed up the pacing. The story needed editing, and as a general rule, once you hit the climax, the rush to the end of the movie should be headlong and breakneck. The talk-fight-talk pattern may work for video games, but in this movie, it just made everything drag.

That would be my basic critique of this movie—It felt like a story that was written for a video game. The mission is strong. The political and military strategies are surprisingly sophisticated and coherent. But after every fight sequence, there’s a lot of talking that sets up what we’ve just learned and what still needs to happen.

Look-wise, the main detractions are the characters. A lot of the fighting machines looked really cool and were well designed. The landscapes and cityscapes are passable. But the characters, especially the human ones, looked wooden and strangely carved.

Still, there is a fair bit of humor in it. And it is Star Wars. So I did not mind buying my ticket. I’ll probably go see the next one too.

Tags: Movies //