THE CLONE WARS (THEATRICAL)

WATCH REPORT FOR: February 19, 2022

WATCHED: Star Wars: The Clone Wars

SUMMARY: Jabba the Hutt's son is kidnapped and Supreme Chancellor Palpatine suggests that the Jedi assign some of their own to rescue the child. The only possible candidates are Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker who are still engaged in the defense of Christophsis. A youngling named Ahsoka Tano arrives on Christophsis and informs Anakin that she is to become his Padawan, on orders from Jedi Master Yoda. Anakin unhappily accepts mentorship of Ahsoka and they work together to shut down a Separatist shield generator while Obi-Wan commands the clone divisions against the droid armies.

After the battle, Yoda arrives on Christophsis and instructs Anakin and Ahsoka to find Rotta the Hutt, while Obi-Wan is tasked with parlaying with Jabba on Tatooine. Anakin and Ahsoka track Rotta to the planet Teth and rescue the baby Hutt, who is gravely ill. Asajj Ventress records footage of the two Jedi and the Hutt, which appears to show Rotta suffering at their hands. This footage is relayed to Count Dooku, who shows it to Jabba and accuses the Jedi of kidnapping Rotta. Ventress then ambushes the Jedi with a droid army, planning to recapture and kill Rotta, for which the Jed will also be blamed, turning the Hutts against the Republic. Obi-Wan arrives on Teth with clone troopers and duels Ventress while Anakin, Ahsoka and Rotta escape.

Returning to Tatooine, master and padawan split up, and Anakin is attacked by Dooku in the Dune Sea. They duel and Dooku delivers a deathblow to Rotta in Anakin's backpack, but Anakin reveals it was a decoy. Ahsoka fights her way to Jabba's palace and delivers Rotta. Jabba remains suspicious until he is contacted by Senator Padme Amidala, whose investigations revealed that Rotta's kidnapping was a conspiracy between Count Dooku and Jabba's uncle, Ziro the Hutt. Jabba ultimately grants the Republic use of hyperspace lanes controlled by the Hutts, which will allow the clone army to move freely through the galaxy against the separatists.

OVERALL REVIEW: First things first, this is where Ahsoka enters the saga, and she's pretty great, right?

In my estimation, Lucas chose poorly when structuring the prequel movies, specifically with regards to Anakin's age. In The Phantom Menace he's too young, veering into too-precious, too-precocious territory. Attack of the Clones takes place ten years later, because by that installment Anakin needs to be old enough to be a leading man who could conceivably woo and wed Padme. Lots of things in the script make the love story hard to swallow, but Anakin's age isn't one of them. However this version of Anakin is simultaneously immature, petulant, prone to angry outbursts, moody, and generally not what one might expect after a decade of studies at the Jedi temple. Arguably this is all deliberate and underscores the shorcomings of Jedi philosophy when practiced by real people not reared in the religion from infancy, but none of it makes Anakin particularly likable.

Ahsoka, on the other hand, comes across as about thirteen, and that's perfect. She's not a twee little child, and she's not a stunted overgrown adolescent. She's an actual adolescent, and her defiance and independence feel developmentally appropriate. When Anakin gets bratty in AOTC, it's offputting, but when Ahsoka gets bratty, it feels different somehow. They took another swing at what Anakin could have been if TPM and AOTC had been timed differently, and this time they hit the mark. Of course changing the dynamic helps. Personally, I'm a sucker for Obi-Wan, he's my favorite character in the prequels (if not the entire saga); the fact that Obi-Wan takes on Anakin as a padawan to honor the dying wishes of Qui-Gon makes it that much more grating and galling whenever Anakin has one of his "Obi-Wan is the worst" tantrums. The Clone Wars smartly flips the script and makes Anakin accept a padawan contrary to his own preferences, and Anakin and Ahsoka end up dishing out and taking approximately equal amounts of guff from each other, which makes Ahsoka (and, incidentally, Anakin!) a lot more sympathetic.

One of the reasons why I wanted to do this long watch-through including The Cone Wars was because I wanted to do a deeper dive on Ahsoka, so I'm off to a good start and looking forward to more.

Anyway, the movie overall is entertaining. Obi-Wan is given some scenes all to himself where he gets to be charmingly insouciant, which I love. There are some moments of humor which actually work, the best example being an exchange where a battle droid is asking Ventress if they should report their failure to stop Anakin and Ahsoka, while she is still seething, and Ventress force-shoves the battle droid off a cliff in response. The droid screams and at first it sounds like "Waahhh!" but as it falls and fades it resolves into "Whyyyyy?" and that cracked me up. The kidnapping plot has twists and turns that keep it propulsive throughout the runtime.

On the downside of the plot, once again, and hopefully I'll stop harping on this before I sound like too much of a broken record, it's a little hard to square how exactly Palpatine is trying to play both sides against each other. And ultimately this is a disaster for the Separatists. Dooku's scheme is found out on every level, he conspired to kidnap Rotta and he lied about the Jedi involvement. Not only does it fail to discredit the Jedi, and fail to secure an alliance between the Separatists and the Hutt clans, it backfires so spectacularly that no other worlds should ever join the Separatist faction, and some of them should abandon it, based on the revelation that Dooku is such a dirty, crooked, untrustworthy slime. But I don't think this ever really plays out. The whole "hearts and minds" thing doesn't get a lot of play. We'll see if that ever changes.

HOW MANY TIMES DOES ANAKIN HANG UP ON OBI-WAN? Amazingly enough, none. It's not as though this movie predates the trope, because it happened in the 2-D cartoons five years earlier. But for various reasons Anakin never has cause to blatantly disobey his master and abruptly terminate electronic communication. On the contrary, Obi-Wan comes close to hanging up on Anakin once or twice, since Obi-Wan is in the middle of combat while Anakin and Ahsoka are off on their mission.