Star Wars: The Clone Wars Finale (Review for FilmFisher)

This short appreciation of The Clone Wars finale was written as my contribution to the FilmFisher staff article, “What’s the Best Movie You’ve Seen During Quarantine?”, published on May 31, 2020. The rest of the article can be read here.

A case could be made that the final four episodes of The Clone Wars, released on Disney+ across the month leading up to Star Wars Day, qualify as a film. The initial episodes of Season 7 were fairly standard for the show, but everything about this four-part arc, from the cinematic visuals and ring structure down to the opening title cards, shows it’s in a category all its own and meant to be viewed as a unit. Besides, if a few passable episodes from the show’s first season could be cobbled into a movie back in 2008 — and if coronavirus hadn’t come for the theatrical model like everything else — there’s no reason why these four exceptional episodes shouldn’t be together on the big screen.

The series made two consequential decisions: to give Anakin Skywalker a padawan, Ahsoka Tano, and to humanize the clone soldiers, Captain Rex chief among them. This raised questions for those who knew where the story was headed: will Ahsoka survive the purge of the Jedi — carried out by her own master — and will Rex become a Jedi-killer like his comrades? While the spinoff series Rebels already answered these questions — yes and no — at its heart, The Clone Wars finale beautifully depicts how those answers could work without cheapening anything: how the fate of Ahsoka and Rex could be tragic and triumphant at once, without diminishing either. We already knew that something unspeakably awful would happen to them (the arc draws out that growing dread so achingly), and that somehow they would survive. What we did not know was whether the choices they would make to survive would be honorable. But unlike the antagonist who is their foil, it turns out Ahsoka and Rex would rather die with honor than survive without it. Their final act — in a sublime, wordless coda — is to honor those who, though opposed to them and dangerously deceived, held that same conviction.

The Clone Wars was the last major Star Wars project overseen by George Lucas before selling Lucasfilm in 2012, and the series was discontinued two years later. To see this long-delayed finale now is something like reading the posthumous work of a beloved author — like finding a lost chapter from the writer’s signature novel. While Disney has already told (and will continue to tell) many stories set in the Star Wars universe, each paying tribute to Lucas’ story in different ways, The Clone Wars finale draws its emotional and thematic strength from recognizing that the story has already ended, and indeed had to end. All great endings are bittersweet. It is fitting that, in choosing to parallel Revenge of the Sith both chronologically and symbolically, The Clone Wars ends in the same way Lucas ended his six-part saga: with an elegy for all that was good and noble about an old world that is fast burning away while evil prevails, and an ember of hope for a new and better world yet to rise from the ashes.