Last night my wife and I joined some friends for a showing of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. As a huge Star Wars fanatic, I was looking forward to seeing this stylized animated flick. Regardless of the bad reviews, I took them with a grain of salt and hoped that it wasn’t as bad as most people made the movie to be. I wish I had heeded their warning and had not seen The Clone Wars. It was that bad.

Our first clue should have been the amount of people in the theater. A 9pm Saturday night showing of the movie, in its 2nd week of release, and there were a whopping 5-6 other people in the theater with us. It was only 5 minutes into the movie before I looked at my watch to see how much more I would have to endure of this crapfest.

The story takes place between Episode II and Episode III of the prequels. The Republic is in the middle of an all out war with the Separatists. While fighting the Battle droid army, Anakin Skywalker is given a Padawan learner, the highly annoying Ahsoka. The main plot of the movie revolves around crime lord Jabba The Hutt’s kidnapped larva errr child Rotta aka Stinky. Both the Jedis and the Separatists attempt to save and bring back Rotta to Jabba, and whomever does will be given safe passage in the Hutt controlled Outer Rim shipping lanes.

Throughout the entire movie I felt like I was watching a 90 minute long videogame cutscene. The animation itself, especially the humanoid animation, was very bad. Characters looked like they were floating/gliding when walking, the speech movements were way off and the walking movement was awkward. However, the rendering was well done, the backgrounds were for the most part beautiful, and the chalk like textures were very well done for a computer animated flick.

This being a Star Wars movie, I expected the dialogue to be cheesy, but Clone Wars takes it to a whole new dimension of cheesiness. The dialogue is infinitely worse than the Jake Lloyd/ Jar Jar scenes of the prequels. Heck, the prequels seem Shakespearean compared the the Crap Clone Wars. Suffering through Ahsoka and the Battle Droid dialogues I didn’t think things could get any worse. But oh god did they ever. Ziro the Hutt, Jabba’s gay queen uncle, has to be the absolute worse character in the Star Wars movies, far worse than Jar Jar and the young Anakin. Decked out in makeup and tattoos, the very effeminate speaking and acting slug was just jaw droppingly awful.

My friend had a theory regarding the prequels and Clone Wars. He theorizes that George Lucas is purposely out to destroy Star Wars so that no one will even want to touch that universe once he retires from filmmaking. After seeing Clone Wars that theory seems more and more probable. What was also frustrating is that parts of the movie showed tiny twinkles of potential, but every time that happened some very cheesy dialogue or plot point would rear its ugly head and totally annihilate it.

While watching the prequels, as bad as one of them was, I could at least find some entertaining aspects to them and I could see what Lucas was trying to acheive. With Clone Wars there is absolutely no redeeming qualities and entertainment value. I don’t even think this could have succeeded as a Saturday morning cartoon. I feel like good ol’ uncle George has destroyed a part of my childhood. After seeing Clone Wars, I’m not sure that I can spend any of my hard earned cash on anything Star Wars related (and that includes the upcoming Force Unleashed videogame that I was looking forward to). When leaving the theater I felt like I needed a very hot shower to get the stink off of me, and a few shots of tequilla to take away the bad taste that the movie left in my mouth.

If you’re at all a Star Wars fan to any degree, do yourself a favour and don’t watch this movie. It will ruin everything Star Wars for you and there’s no way to ignore or erase this. I give Clone Wars a 1 out of 10 stars.