Early Thoughts on “Star Wars: Clone Wars”

A two-part Clone Wars cartoon series came out when I was in high school. By that point, I had seen my interest in new Star Wars media diminished by Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Even so, my parents thought the cartoons might be enjoyable and bought them. They totaled about an hour’s running time of… combat. Not much character development or even dialogue, just lots of stylized Star Wars battles. At the time, I found it to be a moderately interesting distraction. What I liked about it was, it introduced us to a wider variety of Star Wars characters and gave them more screen time than what they got in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Sadly, none of that screen time was spent on character development. For all that I wanted to enjoy it, the cartoon just weakened my already-weakened interest in the Star Wars universe.

Probably because of that, it has taken me a long time to get around to the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated television show. It’s been on Netflix for forever, and I’ve heard more and more positive references to it – from friends in person and from Geek to Geek Podcast co-hosts Void and Beej. About a year ago, I sat down and watched the first episode of the series… and felt very “meh” about it. The first episode premise is essentially: Yoda and some clone troopers get stranded on a planet and attacked by General Grievous and the Confederacy during the Clone Wars. They escape. The end.

Hardly something that was extraordinary. I could tell there was some thought and plot, mildly interesting ideas… mildly. Because of that, I knew I would come back to the show eventually, which I did a few weeks ago. I watched episode 2 of Star Wars: Clone Wars, and by the end of that episode, I realized… I’m going to watch the show. The whole show. And Star Wars: Rebels. (Because I know it has a lot of continuity.) I’ve watched a few episodes and briefly wanted to talk about why I really like this show: Clone Wars fixes two of the largest problems with the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Anakin Skywalker

As a character, Anakin Skywalker was mangled and misused in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The movies had only one purpose: to show us the fall of Anakin Skywalker from the Jedi Order to the Dark Side. He’s the main character, so we as the audience are supposed to sympathize with him. I never did. On screen, Hayden Christiansen is a terrible Anakin Skywalker. His on-screen persona flips between naively romantic and an angst-ridden, brooding teenager who doesn’t like doing what his father figure told him to do. (In Christiansen’s defense, he didn’t have a good director.) Oh, and he also sometimes massacres Sand-People. There’s a lot of dissonance there. We see almost no scenes where Anakin is selfless, brave, honorable, or demonstrates any kind of redeeming characteristic. The movies set out to show us Anakin’s fall, and I walk away thinking, “How did the Jedi not see this coming from minute one?”

In one five-minute conversation in the second episode of Star Wars: Clone Wars, all of that is changed. Anakin talks to Ahsoka Tano, his apprentice, about how they need to obey the Jedi Council’s commands for the sake of the war effort. Ahsoka wants to try to rescue the Republic survivors of a Confederate attack. In the end, Anakin agrees to do what Ahsoka thinks is right, against orders. We see him disobeying the Jedi, but the reason for his disobedience is a noble thing to do (and selfless, because they are risking their lives.) The show has already made Anakin a more interesting and sympathetic character to me – in one 4-minute conversation – than all of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith put together.

Someone to Root For (Ahsoka Tano)

I am cheating a little bit for spoiler reasons, but I think that Ahsoka can properly be described as the main character of the show. Not because every episode revolves around her, but because she serves as the audience surrogate in the early episodes: when she speaks, she is usually saying what the audience wants to say to her conversation partners. Six episodes in, she is the most original and most sympathetic character we have been introduced. She’s also just fun to see and hear on-screen. A+ on their character development and creation.

She also has one key element that the prequels badly needed. The fundamental problem with that prequels is, we know how the story ends. (For instance, if you read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit after reading The Lord of the Rings, you feel no sense of concern for Bilbo’s survival. You know how his story turns out.) We know how Anakin’s story turns out in the end. No matter how sympathetic they make him – and they do need him to be sympathetic for their story to work – he cannot be the source of our dramatic tension. Ahsoka Tano serves that purpose because she is made from whole-cloth. From the very beginning, we are intended to like her, to identify with her, and want to know how her story ends.

I’m only five episodes into the show, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. I merely wanted to write about it because it literally only took one four-minute conversation to fix five hours worth of bad movies for me. And that deserves to be acknowledged and praised.

SDG,

Paladin Sioni