Tag: anakin-skywalker

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones Review

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Back again in Star Wars land with the second feature film: Attack of the Clones.

Ten years after The Phantom Menace, we’re back with the boys Anakin and Obi Wan who are out to find who hired assassins to try and kill the former queen, now senator Padmé.

Blu-Ray time, so unfortunately there’s no online website extras like the older DVDs had.

The movie starts out with the classic text crawl. Padmé leaves her ship for a Senate meeting, and her stand-in gets killed in an explosion. The Jedi are tasked to determine who is trying to kill her, and why.

The first high action sequence is with Obi-Wan and Anakin, now master and apprentice. In the middle of the night they catch an assassin trying to take out Padmé, so it is a high speed space traffic chase.

This scene shows just how big the capitol planet of Corusant is. Layers and layers of cities, and a lot of traffic in between the tall buildings.

It seems that the higher up the planet you are, the better off you live, because when they go further down into the planet, they enter a seedy bar with many sketchy individuals. The assassin is killed off by another unknown assassin, and the Jedi are left to pick up the pieces and discover who the mysterious individual is.

Two different plots play out for the majority of the film after this. Anakin is tasked to protect Padmé, and Obi-Wan is tasked with finding the mysterious assassin.

The action and mystery is with the Obi-Wan plot line, while character development is with Anakin. Both are important to a story, so I am briefly going to talk about the journey of each character:

Obi-Wan

Obi-Wan went out to uncovering where the poison dart that killed the assassin came from. For some reason Corusant has a 50’s diner, and the owner is apparently an old friend.

Just look at this greasy four-armed diner owner. He never actually shows up in any Star Wars media I’ve seen afterwards so this is kind of strange he shows up to exposition and then he’s gone.

The diner owner talks about checking out a planet called Kamino, and Obi-Wan heads to the library to research the planet.

The librarian has no idea what he is talking about. There’s no record of the planet, and she boasts that if there’s no record, then it doesn’t exist. Seems very conceited to me, because it turns out there was a record of the planet, but it was deleted.

Obi-Wan does end up finding the planet, and there he discovers a clone army built for the government, and he meets the template for the army: Jango Fett and his clone son Boba.

He follows them to a nearby planet called Geonosis, where he tries to discover his boss and who hired him to help built the army. He ends up getting captured and meets the leader of the opposing government, Count Dooku, formerly a jedi and Qui Gon’s former master.

This is where Obi-Wan’s separate journey ends.

Anakin

As said earlier, a lot of Anakin’s storyline in the movie is not plot-driven, but rather character-driven.

Anakin was tasked as Padmé’s bodyguard, so they went back to her planet Naboo for safety. It was there that a romance was formed.

Anakin is a jedi and Padmé is a senator, so being in a relationship is forbidden so they do not act on these feelings.

Anakin keeps having dreams of his mother, and they turn out to be force visions of the future. They decide to go to Tatooine where they find out his mother has been freed and married to a Mr Lars. His mom has been captured by some Tuskin Raiders, and he goes out to find her.

She dies in her arms, and in a rage he kills everyone there.

A distraught Anakin is comforted by Padmé and they receive word that Obi-Wan is captured by Dooku. They go off to rescue him.

They get captured too, and all three get placed in an arena for execution.

Jedi come to save the day! Mace Windu with his purple lightsaber kills Jango Fett and leaves Boba an orphan.

It’s not enough to fight the huge army of droids, so Yoda come in last minute with the army of clones to turn the tide. Anakin and Obi-Wan go after Dooku. Dooku wins the battle and cuts of Anakin’s hand, but then runs away when Yoda shows up.

The Clone Wars has begun.

Anakin and Padmé also secretly get married.

There was a lot of slow moments in this movie. The action scenes were good, but even writing this short recap was pretty boring for me. I do think this film helped show a bit of the jedi attitude with the librarian scene, and the peaceful jedi are now turned into a military. A big bounty hunter is killed and we saw the leaders of the opposing side.

Overall, I’d give it 6/10.

Alternate Universe Timeline Review

If you recall during my Phantom Menace review, I place a racing game towards the end of it, and I did not play as Anakin in the race matching the film.

Ody Mandrell finished the tournament in first place!

He won 1200 truguts and I still don’t know what that is, but I’m using it as currency.

Because Anakin never won the first race, he never won his freedom and learned to become a jedi.

In this timeline Anakin never left Tatooine and his mom never died, which is great!

I’m not sure how the war is doing, if the clones ever came into play, but none of that matters in this timeline because racing is life.

Be sure to keep updated on my timeline journey, and I will be posting the next piece of media soon! At the time of writing I’m on the next tv show, so I should have two more things to write soon.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review

kneisguy1 Comment

I have completed the first movie in this timeline marathon.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. I won’t be talking much about the history of the movie, because when it was released in 1999 I was two years old. In this review I will briefly talk about the plot of the film, and then go into key parts that can affect the franchise as a whole.

I do want to address that for some of this timeline marathon I have the physical copy of the movie/tv show/game. If there’s something I enjoy I personally want to get the disc of it to keep and watch offline instead of streaming sometime. For Episode 1 I have a DVD of it, and included in it is an extras page that says there’s unique online special features. I can’t use is on an Apple Macintosh or on my regular blu ray player, but someday I might figure out what online special features there are.

The movie starts off talking about taxes. A group called the Trade Federation has created a blockade around a planet to protest (?) paying higher taxes on the galaxy’s government, The Republic.

Two Jedi: Qui Gon Jinn and Obi Wan Kenobi were sent to negotiate ending the blockade. It does not end well, and the Trade Federation invades the planet with a droid army.

To be completely honest, I don’t get how a blockade around the equator works. Couldn’t the people on the planet go around where there isn’t a blockade, then move to their original landing spot once they’re in the atmosphere?

I’m going to quickly type out the plot points for the rest of the movie. There’s going to be some details I miss, but these are the key moments in the film:

Gungan!

The two Jedi sneak aboard an invading ship to get to the planet Naboo and meet a frog-like creature called Jar-Jar. He leads them to his underwater city, where the other frog-like people (Gungans) give them a ship to go to the above-water city and rescue the Queen.

Podracing!

The gang has to emergency land on a sand planet called and find parts to fix the ship. They don’t have the money! However: they meet a young slave boy named Anakin there who tells them about this upcoming race. They enter the race and he won with his homemade pod racer. The group of travelers win the parts to fix their ship, and wins Anakin’s freedom as well.

Citys!

The team goes to the Republic capitol, Coruscant, to tell the government about the invasion on Naboo, and to get Anakin tested for Jedi school. Unfortunately, neither of those tasks work out. The Senate is stuck on procedures, discussions, and voting instead of actually taking action to do anything. As for Anakin, the Jedi Council decided that despite his high test scores, he is too old to start training to be a Jedi. Jedi take young kids before they become attached to family to help limit their emotions, and Anakin grew up with his mother, so they thing that’s a problem.

War!

Queen Padmé goes back to her home planet to help stop the invasion. She meets with her neighbors the Gungans, and together they form an army that will fight the droids on land, in the palace, and in space.

Anakin sneaks aboard a ship and flies to the spaceship that controls the robots, and on land the Jedi meet for the first time a Dark Jedi: A Sith named Maul.

This is pretty significant to the timeline marathon because in the previous Young Jedi Adventures series, there were no Sith in existence. The most those Young Jedi had to face were pirates, not evil Jedi with the same abilities as them.

Qui-Gon and Obi Wan were fighting to survive this battle, and unfortunately Qui-Gon did not survive. He was stabbed by Maul, and Obi Wan immediately avenged him by cutting Maul in half and throwing him down a shaft.

Up in space Anakin was able to successfully destroy the control station, and all of the droids shut down. The battle has been won.

Although they defeated the droids and Maul, the Jedi are left to wonder where he came from. Obi Wan has also been tasked with training Anakin to be a Jedi, so we will see how that plays out in the next few things to watch.

Favorite Scene

Since this isn’t a television show, I can’t just talk about my favorite episode of the series. I can however say that my favorite scene is probably the podracing scene. Going fast takes skill and Anakin really shows how great of a pilot he is in this scene.

The announcers are probably the best background/side character in this movie. The two headed brothers(?) talk about the events in the race, one in regular language, and the other in an alien dialect.

I think this scene also helps create an expansion on the galaxy in Star Wars. What do people do for fun? What sports do they have on planets since stuff like football and baseball are Earth sports.

Racing is universal. Kachow.

When I finished watching the movie I remembered that earlier this year I downloaded a video game for my Nintendo Switch called “STAR WARS EPISODE I: Racer”. It is quite possibly one of the worst names of a video game I’ve seen, but it’s a pretty fun racer so far.

I turned it on for the first time recently just to try it out, and so far it seems pretty easy to win races. I’m not sure why Anakin and the others in the movie were struggling to beat Sebulba.

I didn’t want to play as Anakin Skywalker during the game. Mostly for the same reason that I never play as Mario in a Mario Party game, but we all know from the movie that he won the race. This game starts at Anakin’s winning race, and then travels to other planets for the racing circuit.

Also, just look at his model in the game. Ugh.

All the other characters are aliens, and are some of the goofiest looking creatures with the silliest names. I won 1200 Truguts for first place as well. What are Truguts? Money I think? Hopefully.

I may continue this game as I go just to see how far in racing I can get. I can upgrade my speeder to get faster and control it even better, and maybe since in my game Anakin never won the race, the future movies and shows will all diverge into a fractured branch and it will alter the course of the timeline marathon.

That is all I have for timeline media number two: Episode One. The names and titles in this series will get even more confusing as we go I’m sure.