This computer-animated adventure - sandwiched between "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith" - is an awkwardly paced and dumbly scripted hodgepodge of battles and chase scenes, a first-person-shooter video game under the guise of a movie.

"Star Wars" fans have wondered about the Clone Wars ever since Princess Leia mentioned them in the original film. Now we have a movie with "Clone Wars" in the title, and still we get little sense of who fought whom or why they mattered in "Star Wars" lore.

Once again, Lucas - or, rather, his minions, director Dave Filoni and writers Henry Gilroy, Steve Melching and Scott Murphy - begin with a giant lump of backstory involving secret alliances and disputes over treaties and trade routes. The story kicks in as Jedi warriors and their clone soldiers try to fight off the 'droid army organized by the evil Count Dooku (voiced by Christopher Lee, one of the few actors from the live-action films to lend his voice here).

Jedi masters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker need reinforcements, but what Anakin gets is a young padawan (that's a Jedi-in-training), Ahsoka Tano, a girl who's as impulsive as Anakin was back in the day.

Dooku has engineered a kidnapping of Jabba the Hutt's baby son, aiming to frame the Jedi and form an evil alliance. It's up to Anakin and Ahsoka to rescue the little polliwog, while Anakin's beloved Padme uncovers the conspiracy on the Republic's home planet of Coruscant - a plot that involves (and I'm not making this up) Jabba's hookah-smoking, English-speaking, Truman Capote-sounding uncle.

The computer animation makes the planet-scapes and spaceships pop, but Lucas, Filoni & Co. make yet another baffling decision - to give the characters' skin the texture and color palette of oil paintings. The results are pretty, but inexpressive. I never thought Anakin could get more wooden than in Hayden Christensen's portrayal, but I was wrong.

As confusing a misfire as "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" is, it's not the worst computer-animated space adventure in theaters this week. That dishonor goes to "Fly Me to the Moon," a dull-as-dirt story about three houseflies who build spacesuits and hitch a ride on Apollo 11. The moon-shot footage looks authentic, and the filmmakers even cajoled astronaut Buzz Aldrin to voice himself - but the idiotic story and low-rent animation will bore children to tears.

Sean P. Means can be reached at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments about this review to livingeditor@ sltrib.com.