Star Wars: The Clone Wars Review

Lucasfilm cut the opening arc of a television series into a feature and charged admission for it, and the seams never stop showing. The stylized character designs, all carved planes and thick outlines, look striking in still frames and stiff in motion, with faces that cannot hold an expression long enough to sell a reaction. Matt Lanter and James Arnold Taylor do solid voice work as Anakin and Obi-Wan, though the script leaves them trading quips while the story marches through a kidnapped Hutt infant and a run of clone skirmishes that would land better as weekly installments.

Ashley Eckstein's Ahsoka Tano arrives mostly as a nickname generator, and it takes years of the series that followed before the character becomes the reason anyone remembers this at all. The Teth monastery assault is the one sustained piece of staging that works, clones climbing a sheer cliff face under fire while the camera holds wide enough to register the losses.

Then there is Ziro the Hutt, voiced as a drawling nightclub grotesque, a choice so misjudged it derails every scene he occupies. Kevin Kiner's score, all taiko drums and electric guitar, keeps the energy up when nothing on screen has earned it.