okay I've fallen into watching "Star Wars: Clone Wars" out of my sheer boredom at this season's scifi offerings. It is widely regarded as a slow year.
anyway, the "destroy Malevolence" 3 parter was decent if formulaic, but this was easily the best episode they've made yet
why?
**This is not a great series. It's not as good as Tartakovsy's cartoon short series. It could...BECOME fairly good over time, but now its not.
The biggest problem, I feel, was in releasing the opening in theaters: this was at worst, another attempt purely to get money, or at best, an honest attempt at a publicity stunt that went awry. This was a miscalculation based on extreme hubris I think, and the simple rule I had with Episode I : "at some point did you bother to screen the finished product with a test audience"? at no point before this did people react and tell you it wasn't good enough to be in theaters?
The baby Hutt thing and others stuff from the movie aside.....and the fact that they're obviously not getting back the movie voices....the voice actors they hired for this, for the main cast, are just really untalented.......though again, maybe that is the script, so i'll focus on that:
the scripting of Anakin and his padawan girl is godawful and cringe-worthy.
Obi-wan is kind of an archetypal stalwart so he's not cringeworthy but he's wooden.
The animation isn't movie-quality. It *is* kind of TV quality...if you consider that lots of kids TV uses moderate-quality CGI like this nowadays.
**You guys don't like the droid humor? That's one of the reasons I tune in. It helps that droids in CGI don't have to look real and are SUPPOSED to be kind of one-dimensional characters.
Interesting that they were developing the Clone Trooper/Storm Troopers this time out.
weird, as it was in the entire prequel trilogy, that they're supposed to be "the good guys" now then turn around in episode III
but anyway, this episode was good because it didn't focus on the main characters, whom they've already kind of wrecked (compared even to the prequel trilogy itself) but on guest-characters who can give you more of a splice-of-life look at other characters and events in the storyverse
its good that for a children's show (which it obviously is) they do let them kill not just droids but clone troopers too (apparently because they wear mostly armor and even then, they just get shot with laser-lights basically)
and that line at the end by "Heavy" was pretty fun:
(Droid Commandos have Heavy wounded and pinned down, but pause to ask their squad leader) : "Wait, do we take prisoners?" (on this mission)
Heavy: "I don't" (Heavy lunges forward and hits the bases's self-destruct button, blowing them all to pieces)
Long story short: they should have been doing more stuff like this, than that stupid Ashoka stuff and Anakin stuff
....I'm willing to consider that maybe we got off on the wrong foot with this series
but still: episode 1x05 Rookies was enjoyable, but still a little clunky in places, but in a "yeah we know its cheesy just dive into it, it's not BSG and meant for kids" kind of way
and yes, there's the whole "well is Star Wars a kids movie?" thing
answer: no, it's meant for "kids of all ages" or rather; please don't write it just for 6 year olds that need a new action figure, write it for intelligent kids or adults who haven't lost their sense of whimsy.
So was it good? It was pretty good, enough that I was entertained and it held by interest, but there were a few rough patches; dialogue occassionally a little stilted or clunky
nonetheless, it was of the "wow, this is your first season and you still have bugs to work out, but you probably will eventually" kind of "mostly good with bad parts"
....NOT, and I repeat, NOT, the "bad" which was the summer movie and first episodes, which were "it was officially an embarrassment that this was ever released" kind of way
So "Clone Wars" if more episodes are like "Rookies" would be "not an embarrassment".....that's still a while away from being actually "good". It says something that when at the end of "the learnign curve"...you fought your way up to "lackluster"
still, a step in the right direction
