How can you get mad about Star Wars in 2008? How is it possible to still have enough invested in this franchise to get upset when the latest iteration turns out to be... surprise! a total fucking turkey? I know that there are still people like that in the world, and they will be the only people who will walk out of Star Wars: The Clone Wars seeing red. Most of the rest of the population of filmgoers likely won't even bother seeing it in the first place.

That's a wise choice. Clone Wars is terrible. It's awful in a way that makes the Prequel Trilogy seem sort of good, that makes you almost yearn for the return of Jar Jar Binks (mysteriously absent here, replaced by other, equally annoying and offensive characters). Where each of the films of the PT had at least a scene or two that was cool, was well-thought out or that showed you something exciting, there is not a moment in The Clone Wars that's interesting. The only enjoyment I got from the film was laughing at how miserable it was and then zoning out during the boring fight scenes... which make up, no joke, about 90% of the film's running time.

The Clone Wars, either a pilot for or a compilation of episodes from a new Lucasfilm CGI cartoon show, attempts to literalize the term 'non-stop action.' The film careens from battle to battle, taking as little time as possible to set up characters, situations or the plot. These battles are huge, loud, and ultimately dull. There's no drama in watching hordes of boring clone troopers shooting at hordes of boring robots. What's worse, by the time the third massive battle sequence takes place, you realize that this shit is all wash, rinse, repeat - the beats from battle to battle feel pretty much the same. And the other action scenes are as generic Star Wars as you can get - if there's a light saber duel, you can bet it happens on some platforms.

What's funny is that while the film has all of these generic Star Wars elements - why do we need to keep returning to fucking Tatooine? - it never feels like a Star Wars movie. The opening crawl has been removed in favor of a Starship Troopers-esque voice over, and not one person says 'I have a bad feeling about this,' even though no one talks in anything more complicated than one liners (all bad). The Star Wars theme has been replaced by some kind of electric guitar crap that feels like it should be on a toy commercial in the late 90s. Am I getting across to you the level of badness here?

The CGI animation itself is often hideous. The characters look like shitty marionnettes, which apparently was actually the goal, amazingly enough. I guess sock puppets would have been too technologically challenging. These characters flounce around generic Star Wars landscapes, spouting one liners that sound like they were written by an autistic person who had learned to speak by watching the Star Wars films - it's Lucas' standard imbecilic dialogue even further imbecelized. I don't know if this is an actual exchange in the film, but it might as well be:

Anakin: I have to turn the ship left to evade the missile!

Ashoka: Watch it Skyguy, you'll wake up the baby!

Oh yes, Skyguy. Oh yes, the baby. The Clone Wars does do a valuable fan service: it sheds more light on Episode III. After meeting Ashoka, Anakin's young new Padawan learner, we really understand why he killed all the younglings. I'd have done it with my bare fucking hands. She calls him Skyguy, which is amazingly annoying, and he calls her Snips, apparently because she comes from a planet that practices female circumcision. Of course the Anakin/Ashoka relationship is made impossibly awkward by the fact that she's half naked and twelve, and that they're always in close quarters. I don't need the Force to see this fan fiction coming.

The baby is Stinky The Hutt, Jabba's child, kidnapped by the evil Count Dooku. Stinky plays out almost like a parody of George Lucas' inexorable attempts to add cute shit to his movies. In this case Stinky looks like an actual piece of shit, and apparently smells like one as well. I kind of liked this character because it completely broke the movie. Up until the point when the baby comes in, the film threatens to almost be a real movie, and then Stinky shows up and it's like everybody just gave up. The movie gets really funny once Stinky is introduced, but not in any way that could be construed as on purpose.

Other Star Wars characters show up to be further disgraced. Padme is shoehorned in at the end to deal with - I shit you not - Jabba the Hutt's gay uncle, and we get a steady parade of the small universe of characters that has made the Star Wars universe so ridiculous in the past decade. Samuel L Jackson and Christopher Lee and Anthony Daniels lend their voices (Jackson sounds even MORE like he's doing video game cut scenes here than he did in Episode I) while the rest of the characters are voiced by 'soundalikes' who presumably cost less or have less dignity than Frank Oz.

The bottom line is that I can't imagine watching 100 episodes of this banal, overbearing shit. How can something with so much action be so bone-numbingly dull? Even the kids in my theater didn't seem to give a shit about what was happening. It boils down to this: if you made this movie, you're probably an asshole and should be stopped from making anything else. If you like this movie, it's hopeless for you.

2 out of 10