George Lucas reaches his logical endpoint: “Star Wars: The Clone Wars”

I had a sudden realization when I was watching Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. It occurred during the steeple-chase scene toward the end when Anakin and Padme are racing through the Separatist battle droid factory and riding conveyers and dodging pieces of machinery. I wondered why Lucas was wasting our time with an assaultive, not-very-exciting action sequence that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. And then the proverbial lightbulb flickered to life: what I was seeing was the pretext to the inevitable videogame tie-in to the movie. The movie series that had spawned merchandising had finally become a slave to its creation. With Star Wars: The Clone Wars, we don’t even get the pretext to the game, we get the cut-screens.

In a way TCW is a logical end-point for Lucas. He has seemingly no interest in actual, you know, actors—preferring instead to pore fetishistically over every detail of his CGI robots and assorted beasities. Now we have a movie that exclusively features 3D computer models. People, Lucas seems to have finally realized, just aren’t necessary. And so we have this, um, movie (for lack of a better word).
This latest installment of the Star Wars saga takes place between AotC and Revenge of the Sith, in the heated days of the clone wars—something all of us fanboys wondered about since the first Star Wars and never realized would be quite so lame. The movie opens niftily enough with the green Lucasfilm logo and combat radio traffic on the soundtrack before cutting to black-and-white 1940’s style newsreels (including ultra-avuncular announcer) which provide the exposition necessary to understand what’s going on. Basically, there is a war. In involves Clones and droids. Clones are the good guys, and droids are the bad guys. Okay, let’s make with the zap-zap, ker-blam!

And there is a lot of it here. As a matter of fact, the movie is really little more than a series of increasingly-similar huge battles between the clones and the droids. Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi go someplace and get into a huge battle. They win (or escape), go someplace else, and get into another huge battle. And that’s pretty much the movie. The wire coat-hanger of a plot that the battles are draped on concerns Anakin’s attempts to recover Jabba the Hutt’s son from Separatist kidnappers. This is of the utmost importance to the good guys, since getting in Jabba’s good graces will allow them use of the Hutt’s region of space for their supply lines.

Really? Jabba the Hutt is the fucking McGuffin in this movie? Really. Jabba the Hutt. Personally, I think this seems likely as Eisenhower making a deal with Meyer Lansky in order to facilitate D-Day. Seems to me the Republic, which is waging a galaxy-wide war doesn’t need to screw around with gangsters and smugglers. Why not just take their supply lanes and blast anyone who looks at the crosswise? Last time I checked, gangsters didn’t have massive battle fleets. But hey, what do I know? There’s no Lucas in my name.

The other, er, plot point is the introduction of Anakin’s padewan, a young female of some species named Ashoka Tano. She brings some welcome brattiness to the usual overly-stilted and mannered dialogue of the prequel characters. Unfortunately, the creative force behind the movie decided to animate her in the most jail-bait fashion possible, which gives everything a creepy bend.

Late in the game, the movie throws in some undercooked intrigue regarding Coriscant, Padme and Jabba’s weird, tattooed, cross-dressing uncle (seriously…I am so not making this up, he’s like a weird Hutt version of Truman Capote). Mostly, though, the movie is an excuse to have droid battles and lightsaber duels. Of course, by this stage of the game the Star Wars canon is as dense as that of the Star Trek universe, so none of these characters can get killed, and the Republic’s victory over the droids is a foregone conclusion, so the movie really doesn’t have any narrative tension to it.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is allegedly a lead-in to the series which airs sometime this fall. Based on this movie I’m not in a rush to set my TiVo. Not unless there’s way more of the Truman Capote Hutt.

UPDATE: Apparently, George Lucas specifically requested the weird Hutt to sound like Truman Capote. Am I the only one that thinks that George is fast careening toward Howard Hughes territory?