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| Friday, October 17, 2008 08:01 PM |
| On the Viewer - Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Episodes 2 & 3) |
 by Fëanor |
There have now been two animated series and one animated movie with the title Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The first series was split into two seasons, and it's truly brilliant; I own it on DVD. The movie is really an introduction to the new animated series, which is set between the two seasons of the original cartoon. You can read my review of the film on Phillyist here. Despite the fact that I really didn't like the movie very much, I felt bound by my sad and obsessive Star Wars fandom to watch the television show. But I'm really bad at sitting down at a particular time to watch a particular television show, so I've completely missed it so far. Luckily, like all shows these days it seems, The Clone Wars is available to watch online. Unfortunately, by the time I got around to searching for and finding this site, it seems they already took down the first episode (and it looks like it featured lots of Yoda lightsaber action, too. Damn it). Still, I was able to check out the next two.
First up is "Rising Malevolence," which opens up with the annoying narrator guy from the movie telling us that the Seperatists have a deadly secret weapon that's destroying Republic ships and leaving no survivors. It turns out the weapon is a gigantic warship called the Malevolence, piloted by General Grievous. It uses huge ion cannons to disable ships, robbing them of all power, and then picks them off easily with its many laser cannons. Anakin and Ahsoka disobey orders to search for survivors at the scene of the secret weapon's latest attack, and manage to save some folks and get away with precious information about the ship. In the next episode, "Shadow of Malevolence," Anakin and his squad have been tasked with hunting down and destroying the warship, and Anakin conceives of a dangerous and desperate plan to do just that, and to assassinate Grievous in the process. Things don't go exactly as he plans (obviously, Grievous gets away), and a number of his men are killed, but ultimately the Malevolence's ion cannons are destroyed and many innocent lives are saved.
Like the movie, the series is surprisingly brutal and violent, and many clones die horrible (though never gory) deaths. The series is also heavily padded. Even though the episodes are short (probably little more than 20 minutes), they still feel overlong, with many sequences that are repetitive and pointless, as if the creators were struggling to fill the time. As is now Star Wars tradition, a lot of the dialogue is recycled from the original movies; you will hear the "I've got a bad feeling about this" line, as well as many other familiar phrases. This is at the same time comforting, and a bit annoying. Write some new dialogue, already!
It also seems to me that they've introduced a rather large continuity error. I remember pretty clearly that General Grievous was introduced as a new character in the second "season" of the original Clone Wars animated series. This season was meant to lead directly into the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. This new series clearly must take place before those events, and yet Grievous is already well known. Also, it seemed pretty clear to me that it was the injury that Grievous sustained at the end of the second season of Clone Wars that caused him to cough and hack in Revenge of the Sith. But in this series, Grievous is already coughing, even though he cannot have received that injury yet.
I'm also still annoyed by the lame nicknames Ahsoka and Anakin have for each other. "Snips?" "Skyguy?" This is seriously the best the writers could come up with? Ahsoka's nickname for R2-D2 is possibly even worse. Artoo is already a nickname; why did they have to make her change it into the far more irritating Artooie?? And speaking of Ahsoka, the character in general just irritates me.
Still, pushing all that aside (and, admittedly, it's a lot to push aside), this is a Star Wars show, which means it has lots of action, excitement, space battles, laser fire, lightsaber fighting, and a very cool overarching story and universe. So overall, it's really not that bad. Not nearly the equal of the original Clone Wars series, but certainly watchable. I expect I'll try to keep up with future episodes online... if I can remember to do so. |
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