ChrisThilk Blog

Back around 1991 Star Wars fans were introduced to the “Expanded Universe” with the publication of the novel Heir to the Empire. Where there had been a scattering of novels and a couple of animated series that had told a handful of Star Wars stories, this seemed to be different…bigger. This was a story involving all the major characters which picked up well after the end of Return of the Jedi, the first such story to be told. After that a swell of novels, comics and other media were released which told various stories in, for the most part, the post-RoTJ timeline.

But there was a sense that these stories would be confined to anything but movie theater screens. That was emphasized with the release of the Prequel Trilogy. Anything that was on the big screen was canon, anything that wasn’t wasn’t.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars changes that equation to some extent. While the movie wasn’t really meant from the outset to be a movie but instead was spliced together from the first three episodes of a new TV series, it did appear in theaters and so, rightly or wrongly, has to be judged against the six existing cinematic entries in the saga.

Against that measure it does not hold up particularly well. The Clone Wars is an interesting enough story (the Jedi have to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s son in order to maintain access to travel lanes that are important to the war effort), it’s unfortunately weighed down by too many things that seem out of place in the Star Wars universe.

Chief among them is Ahsoka, a teenage girl who is assigned by Yoda to be Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan learner. Right there we have a couple of problems. Not only is Ahsoka never mentioned in Revenge of the Sith (she therefore logically bites it at some point in between) but Anakin is not a Jedi Master and everything up to this point says only Masters can have Padawans. Anakin is only made a full-fledged Knight just before RoTS (in the “Clone Wars” animated series from a couple years ago, which adds even more confusion to the situation - where does *that* story fit into this timeline now?) and giving him a Padawan seems like a cheap excuse to wedge in a sassy teen character.

And it’s that character that is the other chief problem. There’s NO WAY someone with this sort of attitude gets past Master Yoda. She’s disrespectful, reckless and just plain annoying. Almost immediately she begins referring to Anakin as “Sky Guy” and throwing around all sorts of attitude that seems pulled straight from a Tiger Beat demographic survey. It’s best just to ignore her when she’s on screen.

It’s a shame that she’s around for so long because aside from her the story is actually alright. It’s certainly not on the scale of the other six Star Wars movies but does work if you view it as a TV show. The action is fast-paced (the Clone Troopers actually wind up being the most interesting characters) and the animation certainly is top-notch.

Overall The Clone Wars is a good lead in to the series and is probably best for an audience that doesn’t obsess over where events happen in the Star Wars timeline and other issues like that. If you can get beyond those problems it’s a pretty enjoyable part of the Star Wars saga.

I wrote a full review of Hellboy II - The Golden Army over at SpoutBlog. It’s sort of half a review of the movie and half an examination of how Hellboy fits into the pantheon of stoic, emotionally stunted male action heroes.

The three-disc special edition I received to review contains a digital copy of the movie you can transfer to iTunes, possibly my favorite feature that’s being added to DVDs right now.

In Hellboy’s case, his laconic “Oh crap” is a massive sarcastic understatement when he’s faced with, as in one scene in The Golden Army, a massive flower god that’s spreading itself all over Manhattan. But while he works to betray little in the way of uncertainty in situations like that, the thing that’s causing him the most pain - his relationship with the human fire-starter Liz Sherman played by Selma Blair -  is always at the tip of his tongue. The fact that he can’t figure out her wants and needs continue to be the one problem in his life he can’t punch away, and that’s incredibly frustrating to him.

At the end of the first movie the narration intoned that embracing his love of Blair’s Sherman had fully made Hellboy a man. But he continues to act out in a decidedly immature way throughout the second movie. That changes, though, when he finds out that Sherman is pregnant with his child. That knowledge is, quite literally in the story, what gives him the will to live. Even though at that point he still acts first and thinks things through later, he does step up in the final showdown and embrace, if not his role as destroyer of worlds, certainly his role as the leader of the societal subset he and his cohorts inhabit.

As a longtime fan of Marvel Comics characters I’m having a blast with all the movies that have been coming out in the last eight years or so, going back to 2000’s X-Men. But while they’ve been alternately fun or exciting it’s just now that it’s getting interesting, with Marvel now tying all their movies together in anticipation of 2011’s The Avengers.

The Incredible Hulk is quite good, and this is coming from someone who actually more or less enjoys 2003’s Ang Lee-directed Hulk. Edward Norton does a good job as Bruce Banner and everyone else, including Liv Tyler, is enjoyable as his love interest Betty Ross.

What The Incredible Hulk manages to do is both be more serious and be more of a comic book movie. It’s fast-paced and exciting. Plus there’s a lot of inside Marvel stuff going on, including a lot of stuff about the Super Soldier serum that’s likely to tie into the upcoming Captain America movie.