Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)--3/5

"The Clone Wars" is a beneficiary of the rapidly eroding expectations engendered by the "Star Wars" prequels. Unsurprisingly, it's a better film than all of those prequels. The complete digital conversion finally gives life to characters previously played by real actors. Well, some life. The character animation on display is barely better than the fourteen-year-old "ReBoot" and the director has said he was inspired by "Thunderbirds." Still, better than Hayden Christensen.

The animation of everything else--those (relatively) easy-to-render ships, droids, and flat surfaces--is excellent, indistinguishable from the animation in the live-action chapters. ("Live-action" is an anachronistic term here. The prequels are mirror-image "Roger Rabbit" films, with human characters interacting with swaths of animation.)

Scenes of characters standing around and talking are kept to a minimum. As a result, the pace of "The Clone Wars" rarely flags. It consists of mostly of action scenes. This is probably the best thing about the film. Although it's more space junk, at least it's not more incredibly boring space junk.

The whole movie has a trivial sheen to it. Since it takes place between Episodes II and III, we already know the outcome of the battles. Newly introduced characters are little-better than redshirts on "Star Trek." At least, they will be once the New Show! Coming Soon! starts its run on Cartoon Network.

2 comments:

whybrary said...

god. i loved roger rabbit. remember when they melted that dude with acid?

Cat Herself said...

I went to this movie yesterday with my 13-yr-old son and my hubby. I have to admit that I fell asleep during it. Sorry! The action scenes are so plentiful I have to say I don't even think I missed much. Short on plot, heavy on explosions (which my 2 dates loved).