In March 1977, I turned eight years old. One night that May I went to see Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope with my dad and little brother. My life hasn't been the same since. That summer, I spent all of my time pretending to be Luke Skywalker, wearing a brown belt over a long t-shirt in an attempt to replicate his Tatooine tunic and chasing my friends around the neighborhood with a stick (these were the days before Force FX lightsabers and the like) . My first SW action figure was R2-D2--a simple doo dad by today's standards--but I was transported by that piece of plastic and the meanings it represented into a world of imagination that previously did not exist for me. My enthusiasm did not die down when I turned nine, or ten, or eleven, or twenty-five, or thirty. Though I now consider The Empire Strikes Back to be a superior film to ANH in nearly every respect, nothing has ever replaced the sense of absolute wonder and enchantment I experienced in the summer of '77.
It is now the summer of '08. George Lucas has presented the latest addition to his universe with The Clone Wars, an animated adventure set between the events of SW episodes II and III, focusing on the battles of Jedi Knights Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker against the evil Count Dooku and his Separatist armies. Obi Wan and Anakin, with the help of Anakin's young padawan Ahsoka Tano, attempt to rescue the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt in an effort to secure Jabba's cooperation with the Republic in the Outer Rim territories. One of the first things I noticed about this film was its obvious insistence on unreality--the animation, rather than following the (sometimes) unfortunate pattern of verisimilitude attempted in animated features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to Wall-E, celebrates its difference. The artists and animators have created heavily stylized versions of well-known SW heroes and have refused to be faithful to accepted norms of representation, from the long hatchet-face of Dooku to Obi Wan's unmovingly perfect coif to Padme's impossibly slender figure. These unorthodox representations may act as outward manifestations of each character's personality, but they also look $%^&* good--I hesitate to use the word "art," but if the shoe fits...
Even for a SW movie, all laws of physics and mechanics fail to apply--Republic tanks scale a sheer mountain cliff and Anakin leaps hundreds of feet through the air to shred Separatist battle droids into junk. This is a film that knows it is telling an unlikely and fantastic story, and tells it with gusto and nearly relentless momentum. It doesn't matter that scientific laws are broken in a universe of infinite possibilities. Naturally, there are numerous battle scenes in the film, and they don't disappoint. The battles scene on Christophsis recalls similar scenes in WWII movies such as The Longest Day, and the partnership between Anakin and Ahsoka parallels that of Han and Luke nicely. Obi Wan's light saber battle with the foul Asajj Ventress is also particularly well-done.
Some critics have complained that there is too little character development to make the film completely successful. Bongo and I agreed that war movies, and TCW is a war movie, are not vehicles for character analysis; they are not elaborate costume dramas that allow for long interludes of soul searching and emotional exploration. Here, the old characters are re-introduced, the new characters meet up with them, and together they undergo a series of adventures. If this sounds familiar, it should--the same thing happened in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. TCW is simply following in a long Lucas tradition of continuing adventures in which the characters are swept up in an epic story of triumph, failure, and redemption.
There must be a few kids who will turn eight this summer-- The Clone Wars was made for them. Forget about all the aging fans who insist that the original trilogy should have been left alone, the haters who say that Jar-Jar Binks should be killed off, and the legions of rapacious collectors who are only interested in the market value of their collections. This is not their movie. It belongs to the eight year old kid who genuinely believes, as I did in '77, that SW can change the world. If the film generates for them a fraction of the excitement that the original Star Wars did for me, then it will have been successful.
It is now the summer of '08. George Lucas has presented the latest addition to his universe with The Clone Wars, an animated adventure set between the events of SW episodes II and III, focusing on the battles of Jedi Knights Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker against the evil Count Dooku and his Separatist armies. Obi Wan and Anakin, with the help of Anakin's young padawan Ahsoka Tano, attempt to rescue the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt in an effort to secure Jabba's cooperation with the Republic in the Outer Rim territories. One of the first things I noticed about this film was its obvious insistence on unreality--the animation, rather than following the (sometimes) unfortunate pattern of verisimilitude attempted in animated features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to Wall-E, celebrates its difference. The artists and animators have created heavily stylized versions of well-known SW heroes and have refused to be faithful to accepted norms of representation, from the long hatchet-face of Dooku to Obi Wan's unmovingly perfect coif to Padme's impossibly slender figure. These unorthodox representations may act as outward manifestations of each character's personality, but they also look $%^&* good--I hesitate to use the word "art," but if the shoe fits...
Even for a SW movie, all laws of physics and mechanics fail to apply--Republic tanks scale a sheer mountain cliff and Anakin leaps hundreds of feet through the air to shred Separatist battle droids into junk. This is a film that knows it is telling an unlikely and fantastic story, and tells it with gusto and nearly relentless momentum. It doesn't matter that scientific laws are broken in a universe of infinite possibilities. Naturally, there are numerous battle scenes in the film, and they don't disappoint. The battles scene on Christophsis recalls similar scenes in WWII movies such as The Longest Day, and the partnership between Anakin and Ahsoka parallels that of Han and Luke nicely. Obi Wan's light saber battle with the foul Asajj Ventress is also particularly well-done.
Some critics have complained that there is too little character development to make the film completely successful. Bongo and I agreed that war movies, and TCW is a war movie, are not vehicles for character analysis; they are not elaborate costume dramas that allow for long interludes of soul searching and emotional exploration. Here, the old characters are re-introduced, the new characters meet up with them, and together they undergo a series of adventures. If this sounds familiar, it should--the same thing happened in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. TCW is simply following in a long Lucas tradition of continuing adventures in which the characters are swept up in an epic story of triumph, failure, and redemption.
There must be a few kids who will turn eight this summer-- The Clone Wars was made for them. Forget about all the aging fans who insist that the original trilogy should have been left alone, the haters who say that Jar-Jar Binks should be killed off, and the legions of rapacious collectors who are only interested in the market value of their collections. This is not their movie. It belongs to the eight year old kid who genuinely believes, as I did in '77, that SW can change the world. If the film generates for them a fraction of the excitement that the original Star Wars did for me, then it will have been successful.
2 comments:
Your review gives me great hope, Bingo. I've been making the mistake of reading reviews off Rotten Tomatoes, and they do NOT look good. Even Roger Ebert, who in his old age seems to give everything at least a lukewarm review, trashed CW. Sigh.
Bango, if there is one thing I have learned in my 30 years of SW viewing, it's that everyone always thinks he or she knows Star Wars better than GL. I forgive them, for my part--it is very difficult sometimes, but II realize there are just some people who never get chills when the opening fanfare begins...
Post a Comment