Star Wars is dead. Give up the ghost, George. 
What a pathetic career George Lucas has nowadays: leeching off his beloved franchise, sucking the energy and spirit from the worlds he created, and wasting our time with more, more, more Star Wars miscellanea. Bullfrog-looking Lucas, Star Wars’ founding father and sci-fi deity, seems to have committed the rest of his life to tinkering with his most successful creation. Maybe it’s his way of staying productive; then again maybe it’s a ruse, his way of telling us he’s plum out of original ideas. When he concluded his Star Wars prequels in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith, he had come full circle, brilliantly completing a rather risky gamble that united films of different tones and themes with those of his beloved original trilogy. It all ended perfectly, with Anakin Skywalker rising from a haze of smoke as the villain he was destined to become — Darth Vader. That should have been the last Star Wars anything we ever saw again.
Yet here we are rehashing even more Star Wars mythology, this time in a prequel of a prequel called The Clone Wars, which picks up between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, which would make it Star Wars Episode 2.5. Oh, and this one is animated, but that’s not a headline because the last three Star Wars films were basically animated as well with Lucas abandoning everything but real actors (and in some cases even them) for computer trickery. This entire movie comes from one of several pieces of throw-away dialogue from the original Star Wars from 1977. “General Kenobi, years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars,” Princess Leia says in her holographic plea for help. That one disposable line gave Lucas enough room to backtrack 30 years to weave an entire story around. Indeed, that’s what he did with the entire prequel: he took meaningless nothings from the original trilogy and expanded them with histories, backstories and emotional arcs. See those extras in the background of this new movie? They’ll be star characters in Star Wars Episode XII.
Clone Wars picks up with Jedi warriors Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker as they fight an intergalactic war alongside cloned storm troopers, who would later become villains in the 1977 original. They are fighting separatists, or maybe they are the separatists, or perhaps they’re the Imperial Empire, or perhaps not — the politics have grown too cumbersome and unwieldy to even attempt to follow. 
Obi-Wan and Anakin, still all chummy before Anakin turns evil, are tasked with returning the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt so the Jedis can broker a deal with the Hutts to use their shipping lanes in space to uphold galaxy law. Jabba, if you recall, is such a wimp he’s choked out by a bikini-clad Leia in Return of the Jedi, yet here he’s portrayed as a great criminal figure. The infant Hutt is a slimy little slug that makes baby noises (including baby burps and farts) and provides jokes for the toddler audience — “Oh no, you woke the baby,” a character says as laser blasts streak across a ship’s hull. 
As if the baby slug weren’t enough, Anakin is given a young Padawan (an apprentice), Ahsoka Tano, who sounds like she’s voiced by some kind of Miley Cyrus mutant. She gives the movie a kid-friendly cheerfulness that most Star Wars geeks will find abhorrent to an offensive degree. Besides having no interest or respect for the Jedi philosophy, she gives everyone adorable nicknames: Jabba’s son is Stinky, Anakin Skywalker is Sky-Guy, R2-D2 is R-Twoey. If you listen carefully you can almost hear Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons groaning, “Worst. Movie. Ever.” Indeed. It’s frustrating that Lucas would have to tailor Star Wars to a younger audience, especially since the films were already appreciated by a young audience. The wonder of space travel, the bizarre creatures, the laser battles and light saber fights, the space-opera adventure … Star Wars came pre-packaged for everyone, yet here it’s unwrapped and re-formatted for a nose-picking Disney Channel audience. It’s insulting to the Star Wars legacy.
The cutesy kids stuff is my main gripe, but there are others as well: None of the cast is back providing voices (except Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee in minor performances); even Yoda’s voice, forever done by Frank Oz, is replaced. Most of, if not all, the action consists of blankets of lasers shooting from one side of the screen to the other. It doesn’t expand the Jedi ethos, or even the Star Wars story, any further by introducing the Hutts. Finally, the animation of Clone Wars is exaggerated to a degree that it doesn’t look creepy and uncomfortable (this is good), but the faces have no softness and resemble slabs of cold granite. It came as no surprise when I learned The Clone Wars is it’s own prequel of sorts, with another version of it coming to TV by the end of the year — that makes it a prequel of a prequel of a prequel. And knowing George Lucas, there will be even more after that.
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