STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS
I thought it would be bad. It just felt wrong watching a Star Wars movie, with no 20th Century Fox logo, with no opening crawl, and with no John Williams music. The fact that it was originally a TV movie, screened in cinemas just to make George Lucas' pockets overflow more than ever gave me grave doubts.
In all honesty, it really felt like a TV movie screened in cinemas. YET, this does not automatically kick the movie into "bad" category. It was immensely fun and exciting and the animation was fluid and extremely well done. Kudos to the Lucasfilm Animation people. Seeing those Jedi jump here and there kicking the droids (geek speak!) into oblivion was really something to behold. There was plenty of intense and spectacular action that drove the movie forward and I was entertained throughout. The live-action movies focus most of the their time on the melodrama, but this is the movie that really brings the "Wars" part of Star Wars to the screen and it does so extremely effectively! Armies behold!
The characters were also quite fun, and Anakin Skywalker in particular surprised me. In the live-action movies, he was this whiny kid who kept monologuing about the sorrows of his
troubled life. Here, he's still admittedly a bit whiny, but the animators gave him a wisecracking sense of humor, one that actually works. Voice actor Matt Lanter actually gave more weight to his jokes than the monotonous Hayden Christensen (who I found incapable of humor in the series, maybe its the face) and he ends up pulling of a sincere genuine personality. It's no Oscar winner, but it gets the job done, which is more than I can say for some of Christensen's performances. His new apprentice, Ahsoka (voiced by Ashley Eckstein) works well with Anakin, bringing up frequent and entertaining banters between the both of them.Another part of the movie I liked was the portrayal of the clone troopers. Here they behaved like real soldiers who duck and cover when fighting while shouting orders and the like. These soldiers felt more human than their live-action counterparts, thanks to their excellent dialog and scripted behavior. They even have their own personalities! Like Vietnam War soldiers, the clones painted pinup women on their airships and have different hairstyles to differentiate themselves. Nice attention to detail on part of the animation team.
So overall, a good job that would have been a killer Direct-to-DVD release. However, love it though I do, I must admit that it was a bit of a stretch to promote this as a theatrical release. It is good, but the standards of cinema are high and this feels like serving a Big Mac at a posh French restaurant. Still, it was great to see all those battles on the big screen. Therefore, I recommend this movie as a entertaining popcorn movie for Star Wars fans to drool over and for casual moviegoers to just have fun.
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Besides that, I also watched the Dark Knight again. Still fantastic the second time round. Will probably watch it on DVD 8-9 times. (Just kidding!) Besides that, I saw this cool Darth Vader Lego statue at Toys R' Us. I had to sneak a shot of it past the mean counter-boy, who refused photos.
I am your father...ok, lame...Okay, very sleepy now. Exams over and yet I'm sleeping so little. Thanks for reading!
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