Star Wars: The Clone Wars (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

Nor is the new background music particularly special. Composer Kevin Kiner comes up with perfectly competent mood fillers and transitions that, nonetheless, lack the breadth and drama of John Williams's original score. Indeed, whenever snippets of the old Williams score do pop up, they remind us all the more what we're missing.

I had the feeling after sitting through "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" that I was watching the pilot episode of the new "Clone Wars" television series. The whole movie has a made-for-television feel about it, with little plot and almost nothing but redundant action. It becomes tiresome very fast.

Video:
The Warners engineers use an anamorphic transfer to capture the movie's original 2.40:1 theatrical aspect ratio. The colors appear intentionally subdued to give the film a dark, noirish look, and definition and detailing are slightly on the soft side, again probably on purpose. There is nothing about the video that pops out at a viewer, nothing that calls attention to itself. The picture is like the CGI animation itself: sort of wooden and blocky and nondescript.

Audio:
The sound is at a consistently high volume level, so it's hard to gauge the dynamics. Everything sounds the same: loud and in your face. The Dolby Digital 5.1 EX sonics generally do their part well, yet impact seems oddly lacking despite a good, deep bass. The rear channels convey a proper sense of musical ambience along with reproducing a few aural effects such as spaceships careening overhead and explosions and such. Don't expect it to amount to much more than pure noise, though, because there isn't much variety to any of the sound, little subtlety or nuance.

Extras:
Disc one of this Two-Disc Special Edition contains the feature film plus an audio commentary by director Dave Filoni, producer Catherine Winder, writer Henry Gilroy, and editor Jason W.A. Tucker. In addition, we get an unaccustomed forty-six scene selections; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; French and Spanish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Disc two contains the rest of the extras. Here we find "The Clone Wars: Untold Stories," a twenty-five-minute documentary on the filmmaking, with plenty of background material. After that is a ten-minute featurette, "The Voices of the Clone Wars," on the voice talent involved. Then, there's an eleven-minute featurette, "A New Score," dealing with Kevin Kiner's music for the film. Following that is a gallery of concept and production art, followed by six Webisodes, little making-of featurettes totaling about twenty-one minutes with chapters titled "Introducing the Clone Wars," "Epic Battles," "The Clones Are Coming," Heroes," "Villains," and "Anakan's Padawan." Next, there are four deleted scenes: "Cargo Bay," "Platform Droid Fight," "Rancor Pit," and "Through the Tanks," totaling about eleven minutes. Things finish up with access to a digital copy of the movie (compatible with iTunes and Windows Media devices), two theatrical trailers, and a video-game trailer.

The two discs come housed in a double slim-line keep case, further enclosed in a cardboard slipcover with a holographic picture on the front.

Parting Shots:
I was as disappointed as anyone in this animated "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" motion picture. It has practically no story, practically no characterizations, practically no character interaction except on a rather juvenile level, and practically nothing but nonstop fighting. The movie bored me about twenty minutes in, and things didn't get any better. The funny thing is that during that first twenty minutes, I thought I just wasn't understanding it, and I felt kind of dumb. Turns out, there wasn't much to understand. There is almost no plot to the movie, just a lot of shooting and running around. Very noisy. Very loud. Very monotonous.

---

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---