Star Wars - The Clone Wars

From the beginning things are different: the Star Wars fanfare is slightly different, the Clone Wars title appears and then there is no opening crawl! Instead a voice over and a montage of fast cut scenes recounting the story so far. It's very Saturday morning serial, and of course it's more kid friendly, no quick passing words to read. I liked it, it was fun.

And then straight into the action, and when I mean action I mean battles and fighting, in space and on planets. There is a lot of action in this film, and a lot of fighting, akin to the Clone Wars cartoon. The space battles are particularly impressive, but the ground battles are pretty cool too, with clones dying all over the place and battle droids being blown, and chopped, into pieces.

Much has been made about the fact that this is a cartoon and they are not attempting photo realism. This is evident in the human(ish) characters, whose faces are stylised and whose movements are slightly too fast to be real (especially the jedi). With the droids and machines it's less evident, whilst in space the ships wouldn't look too far out of space in one of the films.

I also enjoyed the direction, it's not all smash zooms and shaky camera shots, there's some interesting cuts and angles and shots, and it's all very energetic and enjoyable. And the music is a real change too, not a John Williams score, but strange exotic twangy bits and atmospheric mood music, with the occasional familiar orchestral theme returning now and again.

The plot doesn't do anything too interesting, the Jedi have to rescue Jabba The Hutt's son, but it allows us to see Anakin and his new Padawan Ashoka in action, Obi-Wan in action, the seedy side of Coruscant with Zero The Hutt and some lightsaber action including Count Dooku and the double blade wielding Ashaj Ventress. I liked Zero The Hutt's use of IG assassin droids as his minions, all bedecked with UV glowing symbols. I'm not entirely sure what the plot gained Palpatine, who is of course pulling all the strings again, perhaps he just wanted to spread the war to as much of the galaxy as possible? Minor points, it what is an enjoyable adventure.

It didn't really feel like another "real" Star Wars film, but it did feel like the opening to what could be an excellent TV series, which I am now looking forward to immensely.