Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)

I own this movie on DVD.

I have seen this film twice now. Maybe 3 times. I know I watched it when it first came out and was in theaters. And at that time, I liked it. I would have been 18 at that point.
Then recently when me and my dad have been going through and watching all of Star Wars in chronological order, we of course watched this together before jumping into the series itself.
With that more recent re-watch, I have a more critical eye of this. I don't dislike the film, but It could have been much better and think it's OK.

This serves as pretty much a pilot for the following Clone Wars TV series, and well it very much shows. They hadn't fully figured out what they were doing with the series yet, and this was more or less a test, but done in feature length.
With the subsequent TV series and getting into later seasons, the stories and characters would improve drastically. But it still started here.

Set a few months after the end of Attack of the Clones, somehow Anakin has become a full Jedi Knight now... and it's time for him to be saddled with a padawan of his own. Something he's very much not to keen about. Yet after the insistence of Yoda and Obi-Wan, he takes the new character Ahsoka under his wing.

This is where the movie's major problem starts. This character. While yes she goes on later in the series and franchise to become a well liked character by the fandom, she's nothing short of insufferable here. Yet I know some of that was supposed to be by design. She's a small girl, inexperienced and cocky, ready to take on the world and hot headed herself. They needed someone for Anakin to bounce off and sometimes seem like the less reckless one and try to get his own act together while teaching her. That said, they went a bit overboard with her in this film, and even in the first season of the show.
Here she's too annoying, too self centered and too much a liability. To where I'm surprised Anakin embraces her as his padawan by the end.

The film still holds up well enough though, even if Obi-wan commits a serious war crime in this film lmao. If you're going to watch the full Clone Wars TV series, this is still a must for where to start, unless you've already seen it. If you're just doing a re-watch of the series, you can probably skip this film.

Solid 3 out of 5 stars. It's not great, but it's not terrible either. And as we will see in more recent years... Star Wars can get much worse than this.

Mistake Status: I will probably get to this and the show at some point.

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