Posted by Bob Mackey
George Lucas’ latest good taste litmus test, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is somehow making money at the box office, even though it’s tied into the worst chapters of his “saga” and looks like cutscenes from a PS2 game. My faith in humanity would be shaken further if the man wasn’t such a pop culture rapist/media-savvy vulture. Or is he? Could George Lucas just be spinning his wheels in the medium of film when there’s much more money to be had and much less dignity to be lost?
To shed some light on the titular point of this post, check out this excerpt from Something Awful’s review of The Clone Wars, which likens the film-watching experience to playing a lousy video game:
The movie establishes its key elements early: Blathering expository dialogue, numbingly staged Jedi-vs.-robot battles, flickering hologram correspondence, horizontal screen wipes. This sequence repeats several dozen times, and while the order of the procession occasionally changes, the components never do. Robots miss hundreds of point-blank laser shots, their multicolored projectiles whizzing past the Jedi like harmless neon donut sprinkles. Once it's clear the good guys can't get injured, let alone killed, these scenes become monotonous and maddening, like waiting for your turn at a two-player game while the jerk hogging the controller uses an invulnerability cheat code.
And everyone’s pal Roger Ebert says just about the same thing in his 1.5 star review:
The battle scenes are interminable, especially once we realize that although the air is filled with bullets, shells and explosive rockets, no one we like is going to be killed. The two armies attack each other, for some reason, only on a wide street in a towering city. First one army advances, then the other. Why not a more fluid battle plan? To save money on backgrounds, I assume. The trick that Anakin and his Padawan learner use to get behind the enemy force field (essentially, they hide under a box) wouldn't even have fooled anybody in a Hopalong Cassidy movie -- especially when they stand up and run with their legs visible, but can't see where they're going.
Since the most entertaining things to come out of the Star Wars universe in the past decade have been interactive Lego recreations of the original films, it only makes sense for Lucas to start moving the franchise to a medium where the standard for narratives is much, much lower. So why hasn’t he? The guy started LucasFilm Games (now The Star Wars Media Factory) in the 80s with the intention to innovate in a different medium, but since PC adventure games keeled over, his company has done nothing but release shoddy adaptations of the Star Wars Universe. If The Clone Wars is so much like a video game, why couldn’t it have been a video game from the start?
It seems that George hasn’t really been paying much attention to the world of interactive entertainment lately; if he saw what Hideo Kojima’s been getting away with for the past decade, surely he’d realize that video games could be the money-generating sanctuary he needs to buy all of those expensive shirts and imported haircuts. And, given that the Knights of the Old Republic games have beaten Lucas at his own schtick, you'd think he’d want to compete instead of letting the Extended Universe kick his ass. I wouldn’t necessarily play through a new game-exclusive Star Wars Trilogy, but it would certainly make for a much more tolerable world.
Related Links:
Screen Test: Star Wars – The Force Unleashed
Star Wars: A New Halo
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About Bob Mackey
For a brief period of time I was Bull from TV's
Night Court, but some of you may know me from the humor column I wrote for Youngstown State University's The Jambar, Kent State University's The Stater, and Youngstown's alternative newspaper, The Walruss. I'm perhaps most well-known for my bi-weekly pieces on Something Awful. I've also blogged for Valley24.com and have written articles for EGM, 1UP, GameSpite and Cracked. For all of my writing over the years, I have made a total of twenty American dollars. It's also said that I draw cartoons, which people have described with words such as "legible." I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and am looking to do so again in the future.
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