I remember that feeling we had, my friends and I, walking out of the theatre in 1999 having just seen The Phantom Menace for the first time. “It was good,” we assured each other, the word “good” coming out several octaves high the way words do when you’re full of shit and you know it. It wasn’t good. Parts of it were good. Some of it was okay. Darth Maul was fucking amazing for all of his 6 minutes of screentime (at 7 minute, 30 seconds, Captain Panaka has more screentime. Captain Panaka!) But most of it was just...what the fuck?
The podracing sequence was bloated, the CGI was hit-or-miss and there was too much of it, The Force turned out to be a virus, and don’t get me started on The Gungan Who Shall Not Be Named (I feel genuinely bad for the abuse Ahmed Best had to endure online; to be clear, my issue was never with him, strictly with the absurdly slapstick character he was tasked with playing). We went into the movie hyped for an epic adventure like the ones we grew up with in the ’80s. What we got was like showing up to see Evel Knievel make his big comeback, but instead of jumping 15 buses he pooped himself and went to sleep.
What we got was like showing up to see Evel Knievel make his big comeback, but instead of jumping 15 buses he pooped himself and went to sleep.”
It was just sad.
The next two films got progressively better (Jango Fett almost made up for the mishandling of Maul, and watching Yoda dig deep to kick some ass still makes me giddy). But it was too little too late. Rants about sand? Padmé dying of a broken heart while giving birth to the twins? (How the fuck does Leia remember anything about her?!) When it was all said and done, it felt like the world’s most expensive rough draft: there were a lot of great ideas that would have benefited tremendously from having another writer come in and do a polish or two.
I never hated The Prequels (despite the super clever title of this piece), but I never loved them and that’s a problem. Star Wars defined my childhood. It was my first, and probably still greatest, obsession. Carrie Fisher was my first celebrity crush (one day, I’ll share a very personal and hilarious story about what 5-year-old me thought about her in that slave outfit 😉)
The made-for-TV special on the making of Return of the Jedi planted some of the earliest seeds that would eventually lead me to make films myself. Star Wars is a part of my DNA; anything less than loving it simply wasn’t good enough.
And that’s why I successfully avoided watching The Clone Wars for so many years. Until 2020.
You could say, and George Lucas would agree with you, that the Original Trilogy was made for kids. That is true. From a certain point of view. Kids’ movies in the ’80s were a different creature. They had fangs. They would make you cry. They would make you piss your pants. We had The Dark Crystal, The Secret of NIMH, Labyrinth, and The Neverending Story to name a few. What did the ’90s offer kids? Teletubbies and Elmo. I rest my case.
From the outset, it was clear that The Clone Wars catered to the latter crowd and after being burned by The Prequels I wanted no part of it. It took years of friends vouching for it—and some extra time on my hands thanks to a little virus going around—but I finally gave it a shot a few months ago. I mean, I was already paying for Disney+ thanks to The Mandalorian, so…why not?
Because I was right: this show was kid-pandering shit. After 3 episodes, I couldn’t take it anymore and walked away. This stuff played like fan fiction written for 5-year-olds, by 5-year-olds. Hyperactive 5-year-olds. With a drinking problem.
But I kept hearing the collective voice of my friends ringing in my head: “It gets better, it gets better.” So, after weeks (months? I dunno. Time was weird in the pre-apocalypse), I came back and soldiered on. Not from the beginning—fool me once—but picking up where I left off.
Somehow I powered through the first season. Then I made it through the second. By the third, it had become part of my morning routine (and by "morning," being nocturnal, my day usually starts anywhere between noon and 3ish). By now, I had to watch it while I ate breakfast. And then, halfway through that season, something really interesting happened.
It started getting good. Really good. Spoilers ahead for both Clone Wars and Rebels…
What sealed the deal for me was the return of Maul, and not just that he was back, but that he was back and broken. It was a bold choice, especially for this show, but the only choice that made any sense given what he went through. The dude had it all: powerful Sith lord, apprentice to a Machiavellian genius, probably getting him some strange left and right (or so I like to think). And then he literally fell from grace after Obi-Wan cut him in half and sent him tumbling down one of Star Wars’ signature reactor shafts (it just occurred to me that because of where he was bisected, Maul was dickless from then on. And now I kinda think he should’ve been even more pissed at Kenobi). That’s a harsh break, man.
When his brother finally tracked him down, he was clear-the-fuck out of his mind, living in a cave, ranting to himself like Sméagol. He had weird, bio-mechanical spider legs where his lower half used to be, and any trace of the warrior-beast he once was had vanished, replaced by this sad, pathetic thing to be pitied. This was a dramatic departure from the storytelling of the previous seasons. This was dark. This was deep. This was no longer just a “kids” show.
Finally, Star Wars was once again becoming a story all ages could enjoy.
I’m glad I waited so long to give The Clone Wars a shot because if I had been following it live as the episodes originally aired, the wait between the end of season 6, the full run of Star Wars: Rebels, and the return of Clone Wars for its 7th and final season would have driven me as bat-shit as Maul. I chalk that one up to Divine intervention.
Speaking of Rebels, just a quick aside, I’m currently using it to fill the void left by finishing Clone Wars. A worthy successor to be sure. Like its predecessor, Rebels does still pander to kids sometimes. But like its predecessor in its later years, it does so sparingly. I can live with that. Especially after the episode I watched this afternoon, “Twin Suns.” Wow, just…well played, Filoni, well played.
Which brings me to the aftermath, for me, of watching TheClone Wars. In its earliest seasons, the ones I endured to get to the good stuff, Ahsoka was a disrespectful little shit and I couldn’t wrap my head around why she was so popular.
By “The Phantom Apprentice,” she is a full and proper badass, ironically more of a true Jedi now than she was before leaving the Order. Her lightsaber dual with Maul is a jaw-dropping testament to how much she evolved as a character over the run of the show. I now understand why she became a fan-favorite in later years.
One of the brilliant things about The Clone Wars is the way it added depth to The Prequels, including by humanizing the clones themselves. No longer were they a sea of endless red-shirts waiting to be killed off so the heroes could live. They were heroes too. They had names. Rex. Cody. A bunch of others I don’t remember (and that’s not the point). When it turned out Echo had survived the mission at the Citadel only to be captured by the Separatists and turned into a Frankensteinian monster, it mattered. It resonated.
It also had an unexpected side effect.
The final four-episode arc of the series is some of the finest, most cinematic storytelling in all of Star Wars; the last four minutes of the last episode spoke volumes without a single line of dialog.
And since that arc plays out concurrently with Revenge of the Sith it only made sense to follow the finale up by revisiting the film.
As mentioned earlier, I always felt like The Prequels got better as they went along. What I didn’t expect was them getting even better still after spending all this time with characters who never even get mentioned in Sith. The film hadn’t changed, but my perception of it had.
The film hadn’t changed, but my perception of it had.”
Re-watching Anakin fall to the Dark Side--while the emotional gut-punch of Ahsoka feeling it through The Force was still wet paint on my brain--it hit me in a way I’m sure it was always intended to but never did before. The hell that Order 66 unleashed was always a powerful part of the movie, made more so now having witnessed Rex’s struggle as it forced him to turn on his commander, his friend, who we had seen him fight alongside for years.
Context, it would seem, can make all the difference between “like” and “love.”
It’s a shame The Prequels never accomplished on their own what the Original Trilogy did in being standalone classics that benefited from, but didn't rely on, supplemental sources to tell a complete tale. Both trilogies came from two different eras, overseen by a man at two different stages in his life and his career. But if it took an entire series that brought us nearly 50 hours of new Star Wars to flesh out Episodes I-III, then maybe that wasn’t such a terrible deal after all...
Provided you skim the first 20 hours or so.
Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I’ll earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
Comments