But it doesn't. I think they just took out the title crawl because, you know, reading is hard.

This is basically the first three Cartoon Network "Clone Wars" TV episodes welded together, and they more or less break down as follows:

Episode 1: Against his wishes, Anakin is assigned a Padawan -- a snotty, smirky, profoundly annoying little brat named Ahsoka -- while he and Obi-Wan Kenobi fight an endless battle on Christophsis (which looks like Coruscant with half the buildings removed).

In a gleeful flouting of child-endangerment laws, Anakin and Ahsoka bicker and bond while trying to disable a defense shield. Meanwhile, during surrender negotiations, Obi-Wan stalls the opposing droid commander, who is named, I shit you not, "General Loathsom."

Episode 2: In the Teth System, Anakin, his Scrappy-Doo of a Padawan and a clone-army detachment attempt to rescue Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son from the Separatists and Asajj Ventress (who apparently survived her death at the hands of Genndy Tartakovsky).

Meanwhile -- in a development that will delight any "Phantom Menace" fan -- both Obi-Wan and Dooku are negotiating with Jabba the Hutt in a valiant, desperate struggle for ...

... get ready ...

... the right to use Jabba's trade routes!

Ah, negotiations over trade routes. How I'd missed them.

Anyway. Dooku is also trying to convince Jabba that the Jedi Knights kidnapped Jabba's son -- because Dooku's boss, Darth Sidious, is trying to drain the Republic's resources by getting the Republic into a secondary war with the Hutt Clan, and.... Sorry, I nodded off there for a second.

Episode 3: Anakin tries to deliver the rescued "Huttlet" back to Jabba's Palace on Tatooine (which is now the most over-visited backwater planet in sci-fi history).

Meanwhile, on Coruscant, Padme tries to escape the clutches of lisping sleazeball Ziro the Hutt (more on this outrageous gay stereotype in a second) after Padme accidentally learns of Dooku's double-cross during a diplomatic visit.

2. I liked the way the filmmakers tried to differentiate the clonetroopers by giving them different hairstyles and tattoos, even if it makes them look like they're in some sort of Maori cosplay boy band.

3. I like the way Obi-Wan at one point floats out some slabs of rubble to create an impromptu negotiating table. He's a cool cucumber in his scene with General Loathsom.

4. I also really liked that the filmmakers finally put a junked-out, clunky, asymmetrical spaceship with problems in a prequel story. Anakin steals a piece-of-shit spice freighter to fly the rescued "Huttlet" to Tatooine -- and the ship's shields and guns refuse to work while he's getting chased and shot up by bodyguard droids. Although the dialogue and characters in this sequence are annoying for reasons I'll explain below, it still gave me just a tiny nostalgic twinge for the greatest "Star Wars" sequence ever -- and it also made me realize I would totally poop Froot Loops if Lucas would just spring for the voice cast and make an animated Han-and-Chewie movie, or even just animate the soundbed of NPR's 1981 "Star Wars" radio drama.

5. I want to praise the computer animation, but it's kind of a backhanded compliment -- because, again, I'm praising it for being so clever with its shortcuts and thus seeming more elaborate than it actually is.

Near as I can tell, Lucas (who has made comments that suggest this movie cost less than $10 million to make) gave the animators an interesting engineering problem: Make the Clone Wars look vast without actually spending much money or time. And his team pretty much pulls it off -- thanks to a combination of camera movement, simple painted backgrounds, stark compositions, recycling/slight modification of existing character/vehicle designs in the Lucasfilm hard drives, extensive use of characters who wear helmets or lack eyes and mouths, and the use of looped movements and cloned characters. I expect the ensuing TV series is going to look fabulous on a small screen.

2. There's no nice way to put this: The dialogue (and the delivery of said dialogue) is totally simplistic, totally flat, totally juvenile, and mostly foolish. A few examples (of many):

a. ANAKIN: "This smells like Count Dooku to me!"

b. JABBA'S TRANSLATION DROID: "[Jabba] demands you bring back the slime who kidnapped his punky muffin."

c. ANAKIN: "I knew you'd get here on time!" AHSOKA: "Always in time to save your life!"

d. The whiny Anakin and the even whinier Ahsoka bicker like the anti-Bing-and-Bob, and immediately start calling each other "SkyGuy" and "Snaps." Ahsoka also refers to R2-D2 as "Artooie."

e. On two different occasions, seemingly minutes apart, Anakin responds to one of Ahsoka's lame wisecracks by saying, "Very funny, Snaps." (The "very funny" rejoinder is, of course, the laziest possible laugh-track of a retort that you can use as a screenwriter.)

3. Because you demanded it, Lucas shovels out loads of all-new slapstick comedy with those "Roger Roger" droids. They can't remember simple strings of numbers! They trip off cliffs! They accidentally refer to Asajj Ventress as "sir"!

4. The stolen "Huttlet" baby looks like a bowling ball with a tadpole tail. It belches green fumes. I am also unclear on how Ahsoka can suddenly tell it has a fever.

5. There's a dull, repetitive sameness to the action scenes. This is partly because watching one faceless soldier fight another faceless soldier makes it monumentally tough to care. It's also partly because the movie is three episodes strung together -- meaning you get two or three marching-robot battle scenes that each would have been the high point of an individual episode.

6. The TV-sized music score is by "Stargate," "Enterprise," "Walker, Texas Ranger" and "Wing Commander" composer Kevin Kiner, and it isn't so much awful as it is deeply, generically uninteresting. (It's also apparently a lot less interesting than the score for "The Force Unleashed," if anyone here keeps track of that sort of thing.)

I pity anyone who has to follow John Williams on this gig, but Kiner barely even uses Williams' themes; I've already heard more than one person compare Kiner's drum-driven version of the "Star Wars" main title (you can listen to it here) to something played by a marching band. (Over on the JWFan message boards, one poster wrote: "The [title] track sounds like Hans Zimmer's shot at the Star Wars main title. In other words, a personal nightmare.") If I want remixed "Star Wars" themes, I'll stick to the amazing movie-music mashups by serial-Katie-Sackhoff-interviewer Fatboy Roberts, thank you very much.

7. There's a moment where Anakin refuses to discuss with Ahsoka his bad memories of Tatooine. Oh, that's right: This children's-film hero is a mass murderer!

8. Unless I'm reading these Amazon pages wrong, this new "Clone Wars" is bumping Genndy Tartakovsky's vastly superior 2D-animated "Clone Wars" series out of print on DVD. Please, someone -- confirm or deny.

9. Finally, I have absolutely no idea what to make of Ziro the Hutt. He's a painted, feather-wearing old queen of a nightclub owner who speaks English in a lispy, Truman Capote Southern-fag accent -- reportedly at George Lucas' specific request.

"R.H.," lesbian filmmaker: "Once Anakin said, 'This smells like Count Dooku,' there wasn't a lot left to add."

"T.F.," Lutheran minister: "I suffered through the prequel trilogy enough. I hate the iconography of the prequel trilogy. Why would I bother with something advertising a cartoon show where all the major players' fates are already established? I simply don't -- and can't -- give a shit."

"T.K.," pornographer: "I think I'm finally, truly giving up on anything Lucas has done since, say, 1986, or will ever do, because it's simply not worth the heartache (and the money) to keep throwing attention and money at someone who clearly has no idea what the fuck it is that he's doing. (Not that this particular 90 minutes of bullshit is exactly Lucas's fault -- it looks more like the product of a marketing cluster-fuck than it does anything one person could've cobbled together, but you get my drift.) You've read this thing, right?"

Warmest, Alexandra DuPont.
AlexandraDuPont@yahoo.com