You might have noticed Harry's review was taken off the site yesterday for apparently breaching some embargo. Word is LFL has a critical embargo on this shitfest before the 15th. Anyway, another reviewer put his thoughts up a few hours ago and I thought it was a fun read.
Presented here before it disappears from AICN.
Does THE CLONE WARS suck as bad as the Prequels? Massawyrm says 'ROGER ROGER!'
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, life was good and a movie named Star Wars rocked our god damned faces off. But those days are gone, in their place an endless stream of merchandising not meant for the average consumer, but the hyper specialized fan who still to this day must own everything and anything properly branded with the Star Wars logo. The inmates run the asylum now as Lucas long ago stopped listening to his soul as an artist - his heart as a storyteller - and has since begun listening to the slavering fanboys who cry themselves to sleep at night with their Darth Vader backpacks clutched close to their chests lest they separate it from their beating hearts. He's long since stopped working with the geniuses of old, replacing them with young, idealistic artists who revere him as some sort of living Man-God and long to carry on his legacy rather than forging their own. He's forgotten that the most important duty you have to your fanbase is not to give them what they want - but instead to give them what they REALLY want.
Do the fanboys REALLY want a bunch of scenes of characters whose destinies we already know fly through a series of dogfights so their pretty ships can go PEWPEWPEW against lifeless moronic droids so incompetent you question the tenacity of anyone that would put them into service let alone fight a war with an army of them? Do the fanboys REALLY want to spend the next 20 years of their lives arguing that the movies they love don't, in fact, suck the hair off of a nutless monkey? Do the fanboys REALLY want an animated television series not written for 30-year-old men, but easily amused 8 year olds on Saturday morning between bites of soggy Corn Puffs? Because that's what they're fucking getting with The Clone Wars.
This. Is. Shit-ty.
Everything that was wrong with the prequels is wrong again here. There's not much reason to dredge out all those complaints again. The Prequels aren't actually Star Wars movies. They're Fanfic. Bad fanfic that tries to include every element you love about Star Wars without actually using those elements the way they were intended. And while some might argue that it can't be fanfic if the original creator is involved, I would counter that the creator in question died a long time ago. In a galaxy far, far away. As an artist Lucas is entirely bankrupt, no longer able to conjure a single, tangible, original idea. And unlike other artists in his situation, he isn't able to properly recycle the ones he had to begin with either.
No, Star Wars is an ailing, dying beached whale of a property, too large to ignore but left too long in the sun to save. And the stench is unimaginable. So leave it to television writers to sit down and come up with a classic solution to lagging ratings. Their genius booster shot in the arm of suckdom? A plucky tween girl sidekick who keeps getting herself into trouble while being delightfully precocious and calling Anakin-Darth fucking Vader himself-Skyguy. Again. And again. And again. Every time this 14-year-old little monster opens her mouth to say something "witty" my jaw went slack and my eyes rolled into the back of my skull. She's unbearable, absolutely excruciating to watch, and yet she finds herself in almost every scene of the film. She's around so much I half expected her to pop up in scenes with the emperor or the Hutts, just stumbling into frame while saying something "cute" like "Oops, wrong door" or "This isn't the shuttle bay."
Seriously, the only way she could be any more annoying is if she added the word MEESA to the beginning of every sentence and BOMBAD to the end of it. You beginning to feel me? I get that they might be working towards a Luke Skywalker type transformation, but that doesn't replace the fact that A) her very presence makes me want to punch the person nearest me in the face repeatedly and B) she will not, ever, play a part in the mythology of the original films - or the fanfic prequel films - at all, unless Lucas goes back in to tinker with them AGAIN. So odds are she will meet a bitter untimely end sometime later in the series, like randomly slamming into an asteroid like the Han Solo clone from Shadows of the Empire. If and when that happens, I MIGHT tune in. If I don't just youtube the scene. Again. And again. And again.
Then there's the unending problem of putting characters in peril that we already know the fates of. Look, George. Having Anakin and Count Dooku have a dual ISN'T EXCITING. We already know what happens to Dooku. He died on screen YEARS AGO. We know he doesn't die at the hands of Skywalker. Nor does Skywalker get so much as a scratch from him. We know this already. So why devote so much time to it, unless you're completely out of ideas.
The party's over guys. The only ones left here are the folks who haven't realized it yet. I'm sure the Star wars fan forums are going to be aflutter with the revelations that Dooku once fought Anakin or that Anakin actually once went back to Tatooine, or that Jabba has an Uncle that - unlike other Hutts - sounds like a bad New Orleans piano player. But for the rest of us? This is just another episode in a long line of attempts to charge you for something you loved as a kid. I mean honestly, how much shit would we be giving Coppola if he had greenlit The Further Adventures of the Corleone's? Because that's what this is.
Will I be watching the series? After an hour and a half of being bored to tears? Not on your life. That path leads only to fear and anger, and we all know that once you start down that path, there is no turning back. If you WANT this to be good rather than KNOWING it will be good, odds are you're gonna be in the same boat as myself. This is no better than the Prequels. Scrub that hope out of your heart now.
I guess he didn't like it?
Presented here before it disappears from AICN.
Does THE CLONE WARS suck as bad as the Prequels? Massawyrm says 'ROGER ROGER!'
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, life was good and a movie named Star Wars rocked our god damned faces off. But those days are gone, in their place an endless stream of merchandising not meant for the average consumer, but the hyper specialized fan who still to this day must own everything and anything properly branded with the Star Wars logo. The inmates run the asylum now as Lucas long ago stopped listening to his soul as an artist - his heart as a storyteller - and has since begun listening to the slavering fanboys who cry themselves to sleep at night with their Darth Vader backpacks clutched close to their chests lest they separate it from their beating hearts. He's long since stopped working with the geniuses of old, replacing them with young, idealistic artists who revere him as some sort of living Man-God and long to carry on his legacy rather than forging their own. He's forgotten that the most important duty you have to your fanbase is not to give them what they want - but instead to give them what they REALLY want.
Do the fanboys REALLY want a bunch of scenes of characters whose destinies we already know fly through a series of dogfights so their pretty ships can go PEWPEWPEW against lifeless moronic droids so incompetent you question the tenacity of anyone that would put them into service let alone fight a war with an army of them? Do the fanboys REALLY want to spend the next 20 years of their lives arguing that the movies they love don't, in fact, suck the hair off of a nutless monkey? Do the fanboys REALLY want an animated television series not written for 30-year-old men, but easily amused 8 year olds on Saturday morning between bites of soggy Corn Puffs? Because that's what they're fucking getting with The Clone Wars.
This. Is. Shit-ty.
Everything that was wrong with the prequels is wrong again here. There's not much reason to dredge out all those complaints again. The Prequels aren't actually Star Wars movies. They're Fanfic. Bad fanfic that tries to include every element you love about Star Wars without actually using those elements the way they were intended. And while some might argue that it can't be fanfic if the original creator is involved, I would counter that the creator in question died a long time ago. In a galaxy far, far away. As an artist Lucas is entirely bankrupt, no longer able to conjure a single, tangible, original idea. And unlike other artists in his situation, he isn't able to properly recycle the ones he had to begin with either.
No, Star Wars is an ailing, dying beached whale of a property, too large to ignore but left too long in the sun to save. And the stench is unimaginable. So leave it to television writers to sit down and come up with a classic solution to lagging ratings. Their genius booster shot in the arm of suckdom? A plucky tween girl sidekick who keeps getting herself into trouble while being delightfully precocious and calling Anakin-Darth fucking Vader himself-Skyguy. Again. And again. And again. Every time this 14-year-old little monster opens her mouth to say something "witty" my jaw went slack and my eyes rolled into the back of my skull. She's unbearable, absolutely excruciating to watch, and yet she finds herself in almost every scene of the film. She's around so much I half expected her to pop up in scenes with the emperor or the Hutts, just stumbling into frame while saying something "cute" like "Oops, wrong door" or "This isn't the shuttle bay."
Seriously, the only way she could be any more annoying is if she added the word MEESA to the beginning of every sentence and BOMBAD to the end of it. You beginning to feel me? I get that they might be working towards a Luke Skywalker type transformation, but that doesn't replace the fact that A) her very presence makes me want to punch the person nearest me in the face repeatedly and B) she will not, ever, play a part in the mythology of the original films - or the fanfic prequel films - at all, unless Lucas goes back in to tinker with them AGAIN. So odds are she will meet a bitter untimely end sometime later in the series, like randomly slamming into an asteroid like the Han Solo clone from Shadows of the Empire. If and when that happens, I MIGHT tune in. If I don't just youtube the scene. Again. And again. And again.
Then there's the unending problem of putting characters in peril that we already know the fates of. Look, George. Having Anakin and Count Dooku have a dual ISN'T EXCITING. We already know what happens to Dooku. He died on screen YEARS AGO. We know he doesn't die at the hands of Skywalker. Nor does Skywalker get so much as a scratch from him. We know this already. So why devote so much time to it, unless you're completely out of ideas.
The party's over guys. The only ones left here are the folks who haven't realized it yet. I'm sure the Star wars fan forums are going to be aflutter with the revelations that Dooku once fought Anakin or that Anakin actually once went back to Tatooine, or that Jabba has an Uncle that - unlike other Hutts - sounds like a bad New Orleans piano player. But for the rest of us? This is just another episode in a long line of attempts to charge you for something you loved as a kid. I mean honestly, how much shit would we be giving Coppola if he had greenlit The Further Adventures of the Corleone's? Because that's what this is.
Will I be watching the series? After an hour and a half of being bored to tears? Not on your life. That path leads only to fear and anger, and we all know that once you start down that path, there is no turning back. If you WANT this to be good rather than KNOWING it will be good, odds are you're gonna be in the same boat as myself. This is no better than the Prequels. Scrub that hope out of your heart now.
I guess he didn't like it?
