A few years ago now, George Lucas had a good breakfast, got really drunk, was hypnotized, and then was possibly blackmailed into allowing Genndy Tartakovsky, the creator of Dexter's Laboratory and samurai Jack (BEST. Cartoon. EVER) to do two one hour Clone Wars projects that were then split into smaller episodes for airing on cartoon network. They were, as I've mentioned before in my posts, Brilliant. I include the list of events that compromised Georges decision making abilities because he obviously made a good call.Sometime early this year I recieved the shock of a lifetime when I found out just four months before the planned release date that Lucasfilm was releasing another star wars movie to theaters. I was shocked that it somehow got by me. Really? and it's animated? and it's a clone wars movie? didn't they already do that? Everything about this new movie was down played, with even the marketing only showing up a week or so before the movie.
Turns out that George has been developing TWO star wars TV series, one of which would be a computer animated Clone Wars show. With further research, I discovered that the "Movie" was actually the intended pilot for the show, and Lucas decided to put it in theaters to heighten awareness of the upcoming show. I had my concerns, among them being the complete lack of reference to the previous Clone Wars, a very odd animation style, and the very odd build up to the film. But, it was star wars, so I went.
I got to the theater early and excited, sat down, and waited for the movie to start. Thirty seconds into it, I knew I was in trouble. The logo showed up, the music began... and it was wrong.... it was as though someone wanted the star wars theme, but couldn't get the rights, so they made something that sounded as close as they could. Grimacing, I prepared to read the crawl.... but there wasn't one...... Huh? The next thing I know, I'm watching the opening to starship troopers, or very nearly. A wartime news report intro? really? The confusion went from there.
I was dumbfounded. When I was preparing to go to the movie, I had complained that it was only an hour an a half. That was the longest hour and a half of my entire life.
The movie was, well, pretty bad. The writing was awful, the plot was bad, the music was weird, and the animation was a little off. The Action was pretty decent, and you could tell the movie makers knew this, as the action made up about 95 percent of the movie.
While watching a tv shoe, you might notice that after a commercial the characters will say what they said just before the break, or will quickly summarize what just happened. Well, while the move had managed to edit out the commercial breaks, they didn't remove the dialog that re-establishes the plot, which means every fifteen minutes or so you get to hear Anakin's padawan (let me just say again... Wha?) recite what they're doing and why.
If you are intrigued with exploring the clone wars, rent the animated season... they make a two hour movie that leads directly into the third movie, and they're REALLY good. If you want to see something that exeplifies beating a dead horse, watch this.
The sad thing is, it's actually not as bad as I make it sound, and if they had aired it on TV, I probably would have thought it was ok. But instead...... ugh.
Watch it on video. score- 2/10
1 comment:
I think this sort of thing is what happens when people become famous and can then force their (studio, publisher) to produce not-so-great-material from their before-I-was-famous pasts. Shoot, if I ever became famous, I would! All those stories rejected by magazines . . . sure, I'd force some poor publisher to force feed them to the unsuspecting public. Even though, probably, they were rejected for a reason! (Arguably, one reason Rowlings' books got longer and longer is that the more famous she got, the more her publishers shrugged their shoulders and said over the latest, "Why edit it? People will buy it anyway.")
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