Star Wars: Unseen Queen (film)

"The Epic Odyssey of Star Wars Continued...."

- Tagline

Star Wars: Unseen Queen (also known as Star Wars: Dark Nest II - The Unseen Queen) is an American 2D-animated epic space opera film, developed by, and set in the universal franchise by. Based on 's, it is the second installment of the standalone film series, Star Wars: The Dark Nest Trilogy, and the novel-inspired traditional-animation film. It features the voices of, , , , , , , , and.

The film follow up for a year after the events in Joiner King, Jaina Solo and Zekk work as a team to track down smugglers. The New Jedi Order heroes find evidence indicating that the Gorog, or "Dark Nest", are alive and somehow involved in smuggling. UnuThul explains to Mara Jade that the Dark Nest is after her because it had absorbed the consciousness of the wife and daughter of Daxar Ies, a man she killed back when she was an Emperor's Hand operative.

Produced by and Lucasfilm Feature Animation in association with  and, Star Wars: Unseen Queen was released in the United States theatrically by  on December 16, 2006, while it was distributed by  via Buena Vista International in the United Kingdom, Argentina and Spain. Often described as a novel technique of hand-drawn 2D animation, similar to the microseries, the motion of the spaceships was computer enhanced 3D animation. The film received mixed reviews, with some critics hailing it as an improvement over its predecessor, Joiner King, and others considering it the worst installment of the franchise. Like, it was praised for an increased emphasis on action, visual animation effects, musical score, and art design, but criticized for the screenplay, Romano's voice performance, romantic scenes, and underdeveloped characters. Despite receiving mixed reviews from critics, it grossed $150 million worldwide against $89.5 million production budget, marking it the third highest-grossing film of 2006 and the highest-grossing animated film of 2006. It was also nominated an for. Swarm War (2007) followed Unseen Queen, concluding the standalone Dark Nest trilogy.

Plot
A year after the Qoribu crisis, in the Utegetu Nebula, where the Colony established their nests since the Qoribu Truce, the Killiks are having problems with the Galactic Alliance. It turns out that the Killiks are allegedly harboring pirates and smugglers who steal starship fuel and run on black membrosia.

Han and Leia Organa Solo, accompanied by C-3PO , travel to the planet Woteba, the nest of the Saras, in order to find out from UnuThul about the Killiks' side of the story concerning the pirates and smugglers, and if Han and Leia can find out the nature of this pirate-smuggler harboring, then Chief of State Cal Omas will grant the Ithorians a new home planet. Though UnuThul denies any knowledge of the pirates and smugglers, he does keep another end of the bargain that the Colony promised to keep; to tell Mara Jade Skywalker, who is accompanied by her husband, Luke , Saba Sebatyne , and R2-D2, why the Dark Nest has a vendetta against Mara. It turns out that the founders of the Dark Nest were not actually Lomi Plo and the late Welk, as was once thought, but the wife and daughter of the late Imperial bank accountant Daxar Ies, who Mara killed during her time as Emperor's Hand. Mara had killed Ies because he had embezzled two billion credits from Emperor Palpatine's personal bank account. After she killed Ies, she busted into his home in order to find a list that contained all of the other bank accounts that he placed the two billion credits in. When Ies's wife and daughter came home and caught Mara, her conscience prevented her from killing the wife and child, so she sent them off to hide in an unknown location in the galaxy and change their identities. So in obvious conclusion, the Dark Nest's hatred of Mara really stems from Ies's wife and daughter's anger against Mara for killing Daxar. Before UnuThul tells the Skywalker-Solo company all of this, however, the company finds that Woteba is undergoing an epidemic called the Fizz, which degenerates the Killiks and kills them. And following the meeting where UnuThul tells Mara why the Dark Nest are after her, Luke and Han, along with C-3PO and R2-D2, agree to stay on Woteba to not only track down the Dark Nest on the planet, but to also discover the nature of the Fizz. It also turns out that the Killiks believe that the Galactic Alliance gave them the Utegetu Nebula because they knew that the Fizz would kill them, as this epidemic is spreading throughout all the other planets in the nebula, in vengeance for the Killiks causing so much trouble at the Qoribu crisis.

But when the company leaves Luke, Han, C-3PO, and R2-D2 on Woteba, the four of them then encounter Alema Rar and the Dark Nest. Alema works out a deal with Luke; if the Galactic Alliance leaves the Dark Nest alone, then they will not interfere in Luke and Han's attempts at combating the Fizz problem. And Alema promises to seal the deal by unlocking a code in R2-D2's memory banks that will reveal more footage of Luke's parents' past every week, despite Solo's skepticism. When Alema does decide by forcing Artoo with flirty seduction in attempt to show them, one footage is a scene that reveals that Luke's father, Anakin Skywalker, promising his wife, Padmé Amidala , that he will stop her from dying in childbirth while she is carrying Luke and Leia in pregnancy. Vowed to keep the astromech droid’s motivation a secret, Alema then kissed Artoo, in return for her request, letting his body fall to the floor. When Rar asked for her lightsaber, she was angered when Skywalker removed the crystal and crushed it with the Force before handing the useless weapon back to her. Despite her outrage, the Twi'lek had a new crystal installed in the lightsaber within the next couple of days. However, as Rar was responding she was stunned by Han Solo and disarmed. Regardless, going behind the Dark Nest's back, Luke and Han continue their journey to not only solve the Fizz problem, but also the Dark Nest problem.

At the funeral of Sien Sovv, Cal Omas, as part of Sullustan funeral customs, issues a short statement of Sovv and his life. However, his statement that suggests his death was thanks to foul play. It turns out that Sovv and his crew were killed when their ship collided with a smuggler ship because the crew of that ship was under the influence of black membrosia. Omas doesn't just blame the Dark Nest for Sovv's death, but the entire Killik race. In fact, he finds the New Jedi Order to be incompetent in solving the Killik problem and swears to Kyp Durron and Kenth Hamner  at the funeral that he will take matters into his own hands if the Jedi do not solve this problem soon. Meanwhile, Jaina Solo and Zekk (Mark Bazeley), who are still communicating via their Joiner connection since their time with the Killiks, has made them mentally inseparable. Jaina and Zekk are tracking down robbers who are stealing Tibanna on Bespin, and they find that the robbers are acting under the influence of black membrosia. They realize, in horror, that the Gorog, or the Dark Nest, is still alive.

On Hapes, Jacen Solo and Ben Skywalker  arrive in secrecy to respond to a call by Queen Mother Tenel Ka Djo, which took them from a camping trip at Endor. Tenel Ka reveals to Jacen, and unintentionally Ben, their new baby daughter, to whom Tenel Ka used the Force to slow her birth, which is why she is a week old when she should have been a few months old because of the last time Jacen and Tenel Ka met. Tenel Ka reveals that since the baby was born out of wedlock, which is forbidden in Hapan customs, the knowledge of her existence toward the rest of the kingdom is dangerous for the baby, especially if her paternity is ever figured out. In fact, the Dark Nest attack Tenel Ka's palace, and Jacen and Tenel Ka learn via Ben, since he still has a connection to the Gorog, that the Dark Nest wants to kill the baby. Fortunately, the Gorog's attempt fails when Jacen and Tenel Ka successfully kill the assassins, and Tenel Ka deduces that it was her manipulative grandmother, Ta'a Chume, who somehow hired the Gorog to assassinate the baby.

For this, Jacen interrogates Ta'a Chume herself by mentally torturing her with the Force in order to find out why she wanted her great-grandchild dead. She reveals that the Dark Nest came to Ta'a Chume for navigation technology for reasons unknown, because Ta'a Chume never asked the Gorog as to why they wanted the technology. She made a deal with them, however, and the deal was this: If the Dark Nest assassinated Tenel Ka's daughter, then the Gorog could get their navigation technology. Ta'a Chume wanted the baby dead because, as heir to the Hapan throne, she posed a threat to Ta'a Chume's future attempts at coming back as Queen Mother, and that she did not want the throne to be ruled by the child of two Jedi. In retaliation for trying to kill his daughter, Jacen plunges Ta'a Chume into a coma. Then he gets an apocalyptic vision of an eternal war involving people, Chiss, and the Killiks.

Back on Woteba, Luke, Han, C-3PO and R2-D2 track down five smugglers, one Neimoidian and four Aqualish, where they trade starship fuel to members of the Dark Nest for star amber. Soon, a fight erupts between the two parties, where the smugglers and Dark Nest members are killed by the Fizz, and Luke and Han deduce that the Fizz is some sort of chemical that kills everything on Woteba that harms the planet. They tell this to UnuThul, who, in the Colony's gratitude, give them a spinglass replica of Luke's X-wing which he flew to destroy the first Death Star in the Battle of Yavin, and a spinglass replica of Han's Millennium Falcon. However, Alema returns and convinces UnuThul to imprison Luke and Han for a long enough time to become Joiners. And during their imprisonment, they unlock another holofeed from R2-D2's memory banks that shows Anakin, now as Darth Vader, hunting down Jedi children at the old Jedi Temple during Order 66. This unsettles Luke and, fed up with Artoo's failure in every stage of his malfunctioning process, he angrily chews a robot out for not taking things seriously and for covering up the horrendous actions for his father, concluding that he will never be right for the job of Imperial spy droid, calling him incompetent. And, this makes Luke going to meditate for calm his feelings.

At the New Jedi Temple on Ossus, Cilghal finds out from the sample of Fizz that Leia and Saba brought back with them that the Fizz was part of some sort of biological terraforming system that destroys anything that doesn't run parallel to the ecosystem of Woteba. This applies to all other planets in the Utegetu Nebula, because the blast that had formed the nebula had somehow ingrained the biological agents of the Fizz into the planets, which was why they did not have any animals at the time Han, Leia, Alema Rar, Jae Juun, Tarfang, C-3PO, R2-D2, Cakhmaim and Meewalh had first found the nebula. Leia and Saba depart via the Millennium Falcon, with Mara in her StealthX X-wing starfighter, back to Woteba to extract Luke, Han, C-3PO and R2-D2 and tell the Killiks about the Fizz. But the Galactic Alliance has now set up a blockade run by Admiral Nek Bwua'tu by the orders of Cal Omas, who has finally decided to take matters into his own hands. When Leia and Saba try to penetrate the blockade with Mara, they are captured and held prisoner by Bwua'tu's forces, though Mara manages to evade capture.

As for Omas, when he decided to take action against the Killiks by setting up the blockade, he also took advantage of the New Jedi Order's apparent lack of leadership in Luke's absence on Woteba by having Corran Horn become temporary leader of the Order. Omas knows that Corran will act as his temporary puppet in controlling the ruling faction of the New Jedi Order, whereas Kyp Durron decides to take action against this government-Jedi alliance, like he did during the Yuuzhan Vong War, to save Luke, Han, Leia, Mara, and Saba. This causes a rift in the New Jedi Order, and Jacen decides to take advantage of this distraction to gather up his peers who he worked with alongside the Killiks at Qoribu in order to make a preemptive strike against the Chiss so that he can halt the coming eternal war that he has seen. They then make a raid on a storage facility with no Chiss casualties, but Jaina looks down on her brother's actions for intentionally starting the conflict when they could have done it with stealth (considering that they were flying in StealthXs). After the mission is complete, Jaina vows to Jacen that she will never fly with him again.

On Woteba, Han decides to formulate a plan for him, Luke, C-3PO, and R2-D2 to escape by the aid of Jae Juun and Tarfang, who are running the spinglass replicas for the Killiks, which they have delivered to the Fifth Fleet. Han shatters his Falcon replica, which turns out to be Gorog assassins in disguise. Luke and Han kill the assassins, and they all realize that Juun and Tarfang have delivered something that can destroy the Galactic Alliance. Then, Luke, Han, C-3PO and R2-D2, thanks to Juun and Tarfang, escape the planet, where they then travel to an unnamed world in the Tusken's Eye after a brief battle against pirate forces working for the Dark Nest. Then the company hops aboard a nest ship for one of the Killik nests. It travels into hyperspace toward the Murgo Choke where the Alliance blockade is set up to prevent anyone going in or coming out of the Utegetu Nebula. This begins the Battle of the Murgo Choke.

Aboard the Admiral Ackbar, Bwua'tu's battleship and where Leia and Saba are imprisoned, the two Jedi escape but fail to convince Bwua'tu to call off the blockade. However, when the Dark Nest attacks via the spinglass busts handed to them by Juun and Tarfang, Leia convinces Bwua'tu to work with her in order to survive. Then Leia, Saba, and Bwua'tu, along with the other surviving crew members of the Admiral Ackbar, find that with the Dark Nest attacking the ship from the inside, it would be best to abandon ship to the enemy. But not before Leia and Alema launch into a lightsaber duel rematch from their last time on Woteba. Leia severs Alema's left arm with his lightsaber, wins the duel, but Alema escapes. Aboard the Gorog nest ship where Luke, Han, C-3PO, R2-D2, Juun, and Tarfang traveled on to go to the Murgo Choke, they travel along its length so that they can find the spot where Mara, in her StealthX, can blow the hyperspace generator for the nest ship and Luke can kill Lomi Plo. However, when Luke does duel Lomi Plo, it turns out that she is invisible, therefore the unseen queen of the Dark Nest, because she uses the doubts of others in order to stay invisible through the dark side of the Force. The doubt that Plo uses against Luke is the doubt sprouted by UnuThul's story that it was indirectly Mara's fault that the Dark Nest exists by sparing Dexar Ies's family. Though Mara successfully destroys the Dark Nest ship's hyperspace generator, Lomi Plo escapes, and Luke, Han, C-3PO, R2-D2, Juun, Tarfang, and Mara all retreat to the Mon Mothma, Admiral Bwua'tu's new flagship since the Killiks took the Admiral Ackbar. Luke narrowly survives a decompression death from his leaking spacesuit that resulted in his fight with Plo. The characters aboard the Mon Mothma are then thrown into sorrow because of the events of the Battle of the Murgo Choke, as well as the Jedi Knights' Chiss raid. And because of these events, the Swarm War has begun.

Voice cast

 * Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker
 * Harrison Ford as Han Solo
 * Carrie Fisher as Leia Organa Solo
 * Misty Lee as Mara Jade Skywalker
 * Rino Romano as Jacen Solo
 * Kira Buckland as Jaina Solo
 * Mark Bazeley as Zekk
 * Julie Ann Taylor as Tenel Ka
 * Michelle Ruff as Ben Skywalker
 * Lucille Bliss as Saba Sebatyne
 * Scott McNeil as Jae Juun
 * Peter Dinklage as Tarfang
 * Anthony Daniels as C-3PO
 * as
 * Troy Baker as Kyp Durron
 * Raphael Sbarge as Corran Horn
 * Philece Sampler as Cilghal
 * Tom Kane as Kenth Hamner
 * as Tresina Lobi
 * as Kyle Katarn
 * as Lowbacca
 * as Tahiri Veila
 * as Tesar Sebatyne
 * as Tekli
 * Ed Asner as Chief Cal Omas
 * Dave Fennoy as Admiral Nek Bwau’tu
 * as Gavin Darklighter
 * Carol Anne-Day as Ta'a Chume
 * Kate Higgins as Lomi Plo
 * Michael Kopsa as Raynar Thul/UnuThul
 * Chloe Hollings as Alema Rar
 * as Killiks
 * Grey Delisie as Padmé Amidala
 * Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker

Sound Effects
Star Wars: Unseen Queen (film)/Sound Effects