OK, rant against Star Wars fans out of the way, “The Clone Wars” isn’t something that I jumped on board with right away. Not that I had anything against it. I just never got around to it. I binged through the first three seasons a couple summers ago. Got stuck in the mud at the beginning of season four, then finished seasons four through seven this past month. I timed that really well because I didn’t have to wait six years to see the final season.
In regards to said final season, I will say I was finding it rather strange that they allotted themselves just 12 short episodes to wrap this thing up, then spent most of their time dragging their feet with story arcs that meant nothing to the overall plot. Because, yeah, this season is split into three sections. There’s three different story arcs, split evenly into four episodes each. The first four are classic “Clone Wars” stuff. Fun and enjoyable. But it didn’t feel like “final season” material. The second four episodes are even more confusing because, while we do learn what Ahsoka was doing following her falling out with the Jedi in season five, it was a story arc that really meant nothing and had little emotional impact.
But those last four episodes is why we’re all here. I’m a bit confuzzled as to why we didn’t start there and expand that specific story out into 12 episodes, but it is what it is. Without saying too much, these are the four episodes that connect “Clone Wars” to “Revenge of the Sith,” then continue through “Sith” by showing us what was happening to Ahsoka while Anakin was busy killing younglings and all the Jedi were busy dying by the cheapest cop-out in cinema history with Order 66. Yeah, I have my issues with “Revenge of the Sith.” It’s the best of the prequels, but it’s also extremely rushed. Mr. Lucas was so busy playing with his fancy computers in the first two movies that he ran out time to tell a proper story. Instead of expanding to five or six movies, he used Order 66 as a plot devise to consolidate three movie’s worth of content into about 10 minutes, simply because he ran out of time to finish the plot naturally.
Yet the thing that is so impressive here is that “Clone Wars” has this magic ability to take a big pile of dung and transform it into a beautiful treasure. Watching Ahsoka deal with all the clones during Order 66 was beyond captivating. And it led to a finale that was some of the best work I’ve seen in television. Like, seriously, the final 5-10 minutes of “Clone Wars” season seven is perhaps one of the best moments in Star Wars history. Movies or TV.
Tiger King
Because, yeah, the most fascinating thing about “Tiger King” is that it’s so insanely bizarre, yet there’s no one to really latch onto. Usually documentaries have some sort of angle they’re pushing or agenda they have. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. They go in with a purpose and they create a narrative based on a story they want to tell. I don’t know exactly what was in the heads of the filmmakers behind “Tiger King,” but it seemed to be more along the lines of “This is a weird group of people. Let’s start filming and see what happens.” And they hit a goldmine. On one side you have a lady who probably killed her husband and spends her time hypocritically preaching “Save the animals!” when she is in fact using them for pretty much the same exact purposes as the others. And on the other hand you have a crazy redneck who owns a bunch of big cats that he should not have and got caught red-handed in his attempt to kill his lady rival of his who continues to ruin his life. And in the middle, you have a whole bunch of other weirdos who just add to the wonkiness.
And that’s the beauty of it all. Everyone’s crazy. There’s no “hero” or “protagonist” to root for. And the story just devolves into madness, proving that truth is stranger than fiction. And now we have three separate “Tiger King” shows in the works? Yeah, they’re going to milk this for all it’s worth and I’m not sure that’s a good thing, although the idea of Nic Cage starring as Joe Exotic in a “Tiger King” series is highly amusing to me. But even if we all get super sick of “Tiger King” when all is said and done, it doesn’t change the fact that this one of the strangest and most bizarre documentaries I’ve seen. Definitely worth the watch.
The Chosen
Yet I’m the bad guy when I looked at their business model and thought it was a big load of horse manure. All the studios rightfully brought them to court for breaking every copyright law in the book, yet all they could do the whole lawsuit was play the victim card by claiming the studios were shutting them down because the studios don’t want filtered content. No, that’s not true at all. I mean, Disney was their biggest enemy, yet Disney is all about family-friendly content. It’s just that you gotta play by the rules. Like it or not, the studios own the films and they reserve the right to say whether or not someone can stream them or not. And yet again, I’m the bad guy among my friends when I claim I’m with the studios the whole time. What VidAngel was doing was 100 percent illegal. And that’s why the end of the very long lawsuit resulted in a jury ordering VidAngel to pay $62 million of damages just this past June.
So forgive me for being hesitant to support anything that VidAngel does. There’s kinda some bitter feelings there. Lucky for me I discovered there’s a free app where you can watch “The Chosen” without paying a dime. And even though they try to guilt trip you into paying for each episode, all guilt wipes away when I see the VidAngel logo in the beginning of the credits. But hey, you didn’t just come here to listen to me rant about VidAngel. You wanted my thoughts on “The Chosen.” And honestly, even with VidAngel aside, I wasn’t 100 percent sold on “The Chosen.” It’s a bit of a weird thing to put into words because I consider myself a devout Christian. It’s just that there’s such an oversaturation of movies and shows that have done so that you have to forgive me for wondering what this one will bring to the table that the other 156,987 haven’t already done. If you know what I mean.
What I will say about this that I really liked is how authentic it felt. The casting of Jesus himself is probably the best part of this series. Most other shows about Jesus do a great job of making everyone else look Middle Eastern, but Jesus often looks like he came straight from the United States or The U.K. I mean, I get it. They want to make him stand out a bit because he’s the Son of God. But some of his biggest opponents at the time didn’t buy into him because he was one of them who was now claiming to be the Messiah. Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah “hath no form of comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2 KJV). Yet often people make fun of movies about Jesus for portraying him as the “Hot Jesus.” See the issue there? Yet in this series, Jesus looked so much like everyone else that even I had a second take when he first showed up. Was that really Jesus?
The other thing I really liked is how young the apostles were. Oftentimes Peter, James, and John are portrayed as old men. Or at least men in their 40s or 50s. Yet in this series they looked like they were in their late 20s or early 30s. That’s also genius. Because you really see the naivety of their characters. Peter especially. He’s so gung ho about following Jesus, yet he has absolutely no idea what he was doing. He has all the heart and all the spirit, but he’s a child in the gospel. Jesus has to spend a lot of time teaching him and being patient with his mistakes. And when Peter’s appearance is more like a very young man who just grew into adulthood rather than a seasoned adult with decades of experience as a husband and father, it’s a lot more believable. I also like how much Peter’s brother Andrew is used in the show. He’s one of the apostles in the New Testament, but is rarely mentioned.
As far as the rest of the series goes, it’s perfectly acceptable. They spend a lot of time on the early stages of character development. And that’s certainly a positive on many fronts. But it’s also a slight hindrance because by the end of the first season, we’ve barely progressed the plot forward. Jesus’ first public miracle, changing the water to wine, begins the second half of the season. Jesus’ sermon or teaching directed at Nicodemus in John 3 is the second to last episode. At this pace, they could make 50 seasons of this show before they finally got to the end of the gospels, especially if each season is only eight episodes. And there’s a LOT of time spent of Nicodemus, Matthew and Peter’s wife. Not that those were bad arcs. The contrast of Nicodemus vs. Matthew was rather fascinating. It’s just that they could probably pick up the pace a bit in future seasons and I wouldn’t complain too much.
Speaking of future seasons, there’s another element here that’s both of positive and a bit of a hindrance. This movie has the visual and technical feel of a show that a lot of time and money was dumped into. I definitely appreciated that. But I also think that they could’ve pulled off the same or similar thing without spending so much money. I don’t know how much they put into season one, but they’ve spent the last year begging for funding for a second season. And it’s $10 million that they’re asking for. According to their app, they’re only $4 million in. And the first half of the first season showed up in April 2019. I’m not so sure a completely crowd-funded project is the best business strategy, especially if they want to do seven seasons. But they don’t really have a whole lot of options at the moment. I mean, their distributor just got ordered to fork over $62 million in between the debut of the first and second half of the initial season. So some rich Christian billionaire just needs to fork over $100 million to them so that it doesn’t take them 100 years to fund all seven seasons.
