By Guest Reviewer Alan Trehern
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES! Oh sorry, just still excited from a pretty good movie I thought would blow. If you don’t know me, my name is Alan Trehern, and I sometimes write ridiculous reviews for Ben’s Movie Reviews. I’m sure if you type my name in the search box, you’ll find most of them. My proudest moment here has to be my omnibus of posts on Star Wars. I must now complete that series with the latest installment in the saga: Star Wars: The Clone Wars…Now if you read my First Impressions of this movie over at The Solar Sentinel, then you probably have a good idea of what I wanted from this movie. However, I went in expecting the worst: a movie for children with infantile jokes and a horrible car wreck of Star Wars mythos. Thankfully, I was met with only a tolerable amount of this, and the rest of the movie was actually to my liking.
First off, the animation was probably one of the best things in the film, considering the new trilogy was mostly CG anyway, you got used to the characters and environments, even though they weren’t real. The space battles were presented fluid and easy to watch, for me anyway. Nothing was loose or slow, but nothing was too fast or jarring to make you sick. On top of that, each character had his or her own visual look, and no two players looked the same (expect for the Republic’s clone soldiers), allowing the audience to recognize the actors and stay in tune with the storyline. My visual favorites were Anakin, Dooku and Zero the Hutt.
The storyline was another strong point of the movie. You were caught up and informed of any events you missed in the first ten seconds, so you can’t say you don’t know what’s going on in the film, cause they told you. And the following scenes were continuous, unlike Episodes I-III, which switched locales and events every two minutes. The audience appreciates this and it is another factor in the movie’s overall fluidity. They also placed characters like Jabba the Hutt and Yoda in the story to appease classic Star Wars fans, which I thought adamant. There were also very few NEW characters, which subtracts some confusion if you’re unfamiliar with the Star Wars galaxy.
As far as characters go, I’d like to point out my own personal feelings. I have NO emotional attachment to the actors or portrayal of the characters in Episode I-III, so the voice changes and actor changes to Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Padmé actually IMPROVED the film, shedding the familiar “zombie” acting of Christianson, Portman and MacGregor. The main character of Anakin Skywalker was also put into better light as an arrogant, joke cracking but disturbed Jedi Knight. This was very close to my interpretation of Anakin, had I been allowed to make one. Had this been the personality of Anakin through the movies, you would have had more of an emotional tinge when he turned to the darkside, instead of that “Thank God this movie is finally over, when do we get to see Darth Vader, oh wait that scene was gay when he yelled ‘Nooooo!’” feeling.
So there you have it, one of the few positive reviews of this movie. Sure it had its goofy parts, but that’s what the original movies had too. Do I think this re-fuels the franchise? If they can improve the storylines and possibly some darker animation for the TV show, yeah, we could have a new entertaining saga on our hands. Has this corrected flaws in the new trilogy? Absolutely not! That would take years and three more movies, I think, to improve. But then that might not be so bad, right?
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