Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
Although they’re separated by more than two decades, the two Ewoks films and 2008’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars share a lot in common. Both were blatant attempts by Lucasfilm to spin out the Star Wars trilogies after their respective stories had finished. They were both aimed at children and both gave birth to popular television shows, essentially acting as feature-length pilots for the animated series to come. Luckily, Star Wars: The Clone Wars never had to go through the fail-to-succeed method that the Ewoks films did, with the moderate success of The Battle for Endor being borne on the back of Caravan of Courage’s failure. As well, despite its poor reviews, The Clone Wars gave birth to the popular animated series that would become beloved to many Star Wars fans, some of whom (bizarrely) prefer it to the Prequel Trilogy. That pronouncement would be going too far, but like The Battle for Endor before it, The Clone Wars sees the Star Wars template refashioned into a successful children’s entertainment, one that has more than a touch of the spirit of the original Hollywood serials that inspired George Lucas in creating his saga in the first place.
Set between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, The Clone Wars begins to fill in the gaps of the Republic’s war with the Separatists that rages for three years between films. Even more significant than the seismic events of the war during this period of time is Anakin Skywalker’s transformation from a brash padawan to a celebrated war hero. By the very nature of their limited runtime and abbreviated focus on the Clone Wars, Lucas’s films could never show the full extent to Anakin’s growth as a Jedi. By the time Revenge of the Sith begins, Anakin has already taken astronomical leaps from where we left him in Attack of the Clones: as he tells Count Dooku on the bridge of General Grievous's ship: “My powers have doubled from the last time we met, Count.” The Clone Wars attempts to draw out that transformation and emphasize Anakin’s impulsive, but heroic, nature before his descent to the Dark Side. It is a children’s film after, so the emphasis on the good aspects of the Prequel Trilogy’s central hero is paramount.
The film doesn’t attempt to work for the uninitiated, as it begins in the midst of Anakin (Matt Lanter) and Obi-Wan’s (James Arnold Taylor) campaign on the planet Christophsis. During the campaign, Anakin is assigned a young padawan, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein), as is customary for Jedi Knights (Anakin became a Jedi Knight shortly after the end of Attack of the Clones), and they’re tasked with rescuing the son of Jabba the Hutt, who has been kidnapped as part of a Separatist plot organized by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee). This assignment takes them to several planets across the galaxy, including Anakin’s homeworld of Tatooine, and includes run-ins with Dooku and his Force-sensitive apprentice Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman).
Like so many Star Wars spin-offs and expanded universe creations, The Clone Wars relies heavily on pre-established characters and elements. For instance, instead of a new gangster being introduced, we have Jabba the Hutt again, inexplicably interacting with Anakin and drawing him back home. There’s a bit of a shrinking world syndrome throughout all of the works surrounding the Prequel Trilogy, but it’s most pronounced in The Clone Wars, where the familiarity allows the filmmakers to work in shorthand, relying on established relationships between the characters themselves, and the characters and the audience.
The film is also obviously a series of episodes spun together into one feature film. The plan was originally to air this on television as a kind of mini-event to launch The Clone Wars show, but Lucas was so impressed with the early footage that he thought they should refashion it for the big screen. Director Dave Filoni and his crew of animators work hard to expand the scale of the film, but the structure is unmistakably episodic, and even though there are a wide variety of scenarios and action scenes, including spaceship dogfights, lightsaber duels, and war scenes, they occur at an overly-calculated clip. Character introductions don’t work within a three-act feature structure—for instance, Padmé only appears near the tail-end of the film, during what would be the final two episodes. However, there are still elements of interest here, even taking into account the limitations imposed by its structure.
Most notably is the startling relationship between Anakin and Ahsoka Tano, his padawan. Frankly, it’s a bizarre choice for the key relationship in this film, and the subsequent series, to be one between Anakin and a character we never see in the live-action films. In contrast to so many of the other elements of the film and series, whether the familiar characters or planets or links to the Original Trilogy, Ahsoka benefits from none of the film’s nostalgic appeal. However, considering the deliberate gap left between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and the significant development of Anakin between those two films, there’s natural interest in Anakin’s growth during the Clone Wars. Thus, however strange Ahsoka’s presence is at first (and however doubly odd it is that she’s never mentioned in Revenge of the Sith), it does reveal more about the character of Anakin Skywalker and hint at what he could’ve been like as a Jedi Master had he never succumb to the Dark Side.
From her first introduction, it’s clear that Ahsoka shares a lot of similarities with Anakin, which is why Yoda assigned her to him in the first place. She’s impulsive, but also innocent, much as Anakin was as a child on Tatooine. Like Anakin in Attack of the Clones, she is quick to argue with her master and is overly confident in her abilities. For instance, after she helps destroy the shield generator on Christophsis, she is caught bragging to the clone troopers about her exploits, relishing her powers. Anakin’s relationship with Ahsoka allows him to see himself as a younger Jedi and reflect on his own growth as an individual. Not that the film belabours this—it’s a children’s action film, after all—but there are moments of reflection, especially once Anakin and Ahsoka head to Tatooine and he is reminded of the loss of his mother and his massacre of the Tusken Raiders (these elements are never explicitly discussed, but hinted at throughout).
Also, whenever Anakin has to play the role of master and order Ahsoka to calm down or be patient or follow orders, he runs up against his own impulsive behaviours; it’s impossible for him to give Ahsoka orders without there being some dramatic irony about his own difficulty in following Obi-Wan’s orders. Nothing here is as revealing as it could have been, but sandwiched between light action scenes, it gives the film enough character interest to justify the introduction of Ahsoka in the first place, and justify The Clone Wars series as a whole.
It’s important to clarify that despite the film’s ability to add moderately to the character of Anakin Skywalker, its primary purpose is to play as a science-fiction adventure serial. In fact, the film even does without the opening crawl in favour of narration that catches us up on the action like in an old 1950s western serial. The approach towards the war scenes is light and airy, an opportunity for adventure for the heroes instead of the moral conundrum that they’re depicted as in the Prequel Trilogy. Characters banter throughout the battles, bad guys are fools who are easily tricked, and despite the prevalence of violence, the heroes don’t get too hung up on the cost of the war. In some ways, the approach to the Clone Wars here predicts Lucas’s approach to World War II in the underappreciated Red Tails that would come out a few years later. In fact, the painting of a Twi’lek dancer on the side of a clone gunship is a direct reference to the pin-up models painted on the sides of bombers in World War II.
Other sequences in the film play with other genres popular in the mid-century. A detour into the underworld of Coruscant finds Padmé engaging with Zero the Hutt, Jabba’s flamboyant uncle, who seems to be a southern dandy gangster straight out of a B-movie from the thirties or forties. His inexplicable southern accent is jarring in the context of the Star Wars universe, but it fits within the serial storyworld the film is playing with. You’d almost expect Peter Lorre or some other sexually-ambiguous actor to have voiced him had the film been made 70 years ago.
These little elements add interest for viewers who are familiar and fond of Old Hollywood conventions, but it’s still important to emphasize that children are the target audience here. The whole concept of the Clone Wars is a mere smokescreen and political machination for Palpatine in the Prequel Trilogy, but The Clone Wars treats the war as the main plot and concern. Despite some exposition about trade routes and political gambles, the film views the war as a straightforward battle between good and evil, which makes sense considering it’s made for children.
Furthermore, the focus is on the action and humour throughout. The battle of Christophsis is an extended sequence, and if taken alongside the other feature films, is the second-longest battle of the Clone Wars depicted on screen, after Geonosis. Nothing gets too scary or dangerous for the heroes, but there’s plenty of variation to keep viewers engaged. The scene where Anakin, Ahsoka, and a clone trooper battalion climb vertical cliffs to assault the B’omarr Monk monastery where Jabba’s son is being held adds some novelty to the depiction as well; we haven’t seen anything quite like this before.
Of course, along with the quick pace and abundance of action, The Clone Wars suffers from some of the duller hallmarks of children’s entertainment: notably, poorly-written banter and lame humour. Ahsoka’s tendency to call Anakin “Sky Guy,” and Anakin’s nickname for her, “Snips,” don’t fit within the humour of the Star Wars saga. The battle droids are too dumb, often failing the most basic of tasks. And Kevin Kiner’s music throughout doesn’t fit the serial tone, too often shifting from world music to edgy guitar riffs to dated holdovers from 2008 pop music. Many of these problems would be corrected in the series to follow, but from the get-go, The Clone Wars was trying to find the right tone and balance between twenty-first century children’s entertainment and classic serial storytelling.
That’s alright. It’s clear to everyone who has watched the series that it improves on its feature pilot, but even taken alone, this film has enough to justify viewing for Star Wars completionists and children alike. Like Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, it does enough within its limited scale to be moderately engaging, while hinting at more fruitful expansions of the Star Wars storyworld. It’s undoubtedly one of the worst of the feature films, but it’s never boring and perfectly appropriate viewing for its intended audience.
6 out of 10
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008, USA)
Directed by Dave Filoni; written by Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching, and Scott Murphy, based on Star Wars by George Lucas; starring Matt Lanter, Ashley Eckstein, James Arnold Taylor, Tom Kane, Dee Bradley Baker, Christoper Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Daniels, Nika Futterman.