Although Star Wars: The Clone Wars was born to be a whipping boy, I'd like to suggest that it's not wholly without merit; it has a certain honesty about its intentions to be nothing of any particular importance, and damned if it doesn't meet that goal. Besides which, it provides a solid argument that a Star Wars prequel is better, the less pretense it has to being anything else than a video game.

That's exactly what the film looks like, as everyone who's seen the trailer has mostly figured out already. It looks like the cut scenes from a video game, and not even a particularly state-of-the-art video game. Like a game from 2003 or 2004. It's even structured like a video game: there's an action setpiece that hinges on defeating a whole big army of identical baddies, and then there's an extra-hard battle at the end. And once you've beaten the boss, you get a little movie explaining what the next mission is going to be.

There is purity in this. One of the chief problems with George Lucas's prequel trilogy of The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith sprang from the creator's attempt to use what amounted to a big-budget Flash Gordon remake to address questions of intergalactic politicking and trade theory; if it weren't bad enough that the setting was fundamentally at odds with these matters, Lucas quickly revealed that his dialogue writing and storytelling abilities weren't up to dealing with matters of much greater depth than "these dudes are evil, these dudes are not, there is a mystic Force".

Though it's almost certainly not right to consider The Clone Wars a seventh Star Wars film - it is the sequel to a 2-D animated Cartoon Network series from 2003 called The Clone Wars, and the pilot for a computer animated Cartoon Network series set to debut this fall called The Clone Wars, and all three take place in between AotC and RotS - the relative simplicity involved, which despite a somewhat confusing tale of frame-ups and double-crosses basically consists of "watch Jedi knights hack droids apart with lightsabers", means that The Clone Wars is easily the equal of, and quite probably better than Episode I and Episode II. True, many of the same flaws are present - awful dialogue, contrived narrative - but at least The Clone Wars is much shorter.

The somewhat confusing plot concerns Obi-Wan Kenobi (voiced by James Arnold Taylor) and Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) fighting a group of evil droids with the help of not-yet-evil clones. After a time, Yoda (Tom Kane) requests that Anakin train the new recruit Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein), a clear sop to the young audience that the new movie/series imagines for itself, and also that somebody goes and find Jabba the Hutt's (the sluggy fellow from Return of the Jedi, you remember) kidnapped son before the villainous Count Dooku (Christopher Lee, one of three actors reprising his character from the "real" movies) can trick the Hutts into making an extremely beneficial alliance that will spell doom for the Republic. Having not watched anything with Star Wars in the title since the summer of 2005, it took me some fumbling before I could quite remember what the hell was going on at the beginning (the opening crawl being replaced with opening narration that sounded a bit like the hectic voiceover used to entice you and your quarters to a particular machine at a mid-'90s arcade; in any case, it was no better at explaining things than the old-school crawls were). Fortunately, none of this mattered in the end, because the film quickly turned into Jedi knights hacking droids apart with lightsabers, for 98 restful minutes.

As this happens, screenwriters Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching and Scott Murphy continue George Lucas's fine tradition of writing lines of dialogue that no human being is actual capable of saying aloud. There aren't any instant-classic howlers such as "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo", but otherwise it's comfortable, familiar Star Wars territory: it seems that nearly every line either describes the action that has just taken place, the action that is about to take place, or the action that is currently taking place elsewhere. Often preceded or followed by a helpful cut to said action, just so we can see that the speaker isn't lying to us. I swear to God, I don't recall the original trilogy having such...let us be polite and call it "functional" dialogue, but maybe I was too young to fully appreciate it. Oh, also Ahkosa and Skywalker come up with cutesy little nicknames for each other: she calls him "Skyguy" and he calls her "Snips". If the latter of these is explained, I missed it.

The one thing that I can't honestly bitch about very much is the animation. Okay, the character design is contemptible, and the animation of those characters is a bit stiff, and their skin looks like it was carved from pine, but you'd be surprised how quickly you get used to all that. Leaving some unexpectedly successful lighting and composition, and space battles that look almost exactly like the ones in Revenge of the Sith - as well they might. This is where The Clone Wars really starts to feel unabashedly like a video game, one that you can't play and one that frankly you wouldn't really want to play, but at least it doesn't feel like a live-action film that wants to be a video game, and for this we must all be thankful.

Final thoughts: the film doesn't do nearly as much to continue humping the corpse of the Star Wars franchise as we all expected. In fact, it sort of elevates the franchise, a little bit, though that has much more to do with just how badly the first two prequels sucked. Put it another way: we all know that George is going to produce Star Wars projects until he dies, and if this is as bad as it gets, we should count ourselves lucky.

Oh, I forgot to mention, there's a drag queen Hutt who speaks with Truman Capote's voice. Good night, everybody!

Reviews in this series
Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
The Star Wars Holiday Special (Binder, 1978)
The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
The Ewok Adventure (Korty, 1984)
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (Wheat & Wheat, 1985)
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (Lucas, 1999)
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (Lucas, 2005)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Filoni, 2008)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Edwards, 2016)
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (Howard, 2018)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Abrams, 2019)