Clone Wars, the animated feature film that looks more like the World of Warcraft online game then an actual movie, opens this weekend. If you were looking forward to watching the flick and hearing the familiar voices of Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, or Frank Oz, don’t waste your time. They aren’t in the movie. Instead, their parts are being voiced by unknowns.
Why would George Lucas do something like this? He explains to the good people of MTV:
“It used to be in animation you just had [unknown] actors do the parts. The idea of hiring a really good actor – Tom Hanks [for instance] – was a really revolutionary idea,” Lucas said. “Partly they did it because they were great actors, partly they did it cause they wanted to use them for publicity. To be very honest with you, I don’t really think I need to hire a big movie star to publicize my movie. I don’t need Angelina Jolie here. That’s what it comes down to in the end. They have two days in the studio and then they have like two weeks doing press. They are mainly paid for the press stuff.”
Thank you George Lucas for telling us how it was in the olden times, you douche. Angelina Jolie? Why bring her up? She has nothing to do with the Star Wars universe. If he’s going to do yet another Star Wars movie, he ought to at least bring back all of the actors to reprise their roles.
The characters aren’t going to look anything like they looked in the movies. They might as well sound like they sounded in the movies.
Steve
/ August 12, 2008Between this, and his comments about trying to cram as much CGI into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as possible because he’s “thinking about the future” while Steven Spielberg is “in the past,” is it any wonder that the best Star Wars film is the one which was written and directed by people other than George Lucas?
Bentcorner
/ August 12, 2008What kills me is how Star Wars fans just automatically lap up anything churned out with the Star Wars label attached to it. There is no way of knowing yet that this flick is going to be any good, yet most if not all of the various Star Wars websites are plastering their sites with content from this movie.
My guess is that it is going to suck.
Steve
/ August 12, 2008That’s my guess, too.
You got me curious, so I looked up the cast and found that, while Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, and Natalie Portman will not be voicing characters in the movie, apparently Samuel L. Jackson will be lending his voice to Mace Windu. Interesting that Lucas, who insisted in that quote that he didn’t need big stars to sell his movies, was apparently willing to show some money to get Jackson, the biggest star to appear in the prequel trilogy, to join the cast of Clone Wars.
Speaking of Samuel L. Jackson and Star Wars, was any actor more wasted in those prequels than him? He’s got one of the most electrifying screen presences of anyone in the movies, and Lucas casts him as a monotone, emotionless Jedi who speaks in boring aphorisms. What the prequels were crying out for more than anything was a Han Solo-like character, a major player who wasn’t a Jedi, who could liven things up a little and keep the films from being so plodding and self-serious. Samuel L. Jackson would have been great for that.
Hell, if he really wanted a lightsaber that bad, I’m sure they could’ve found an excuse for him to have one anyway. He would’ve been a lot more fun to watch, anyway.