Is the plot really that convoluted and irrelevant though? TPM has very few Palpatine scenes, and mostly sticks to the action-plot and eventually Anakin’s story (which ties in with Qui-Gon’s story). There’s not too much going on character-wise, but it is supposed to simply set the stage and establish the characters.
The problem isn’t just “Palpatine scenes,” although TPM does suffer from far too much bickering scenes between Sidious and the Trade Federation, which really bogs the film down and tend to be largely unnecessary (both in the macro and micro sense).
If the purpose of the film was to set the stage and establish characters, it failed. It sets a stage that is merely a semi-tangential preamble to the primary conflict of the trilogy (the Clone Wars). Of the characters introduced, Qui-Gon is killed and has little bearing on the rest of the trilogy, Obi-wan does nothing whatsoever except show up, and Anakin is so changed by the ten year gap that he might as well be a different character entirely. Padme is really the only one that follows through, but even then there’s the fact that her story is partially obscured in TPM (and also much of the bandwidth of the rest of her story for the trilogy is spent on her romance with Anakin, which let’s just say wasn’t set up in TPM for fear of the alternate).
The only PT film where I find that the politics/plot gets out of hand is AOTC. Though even it stays very focused on both Anakin and Obi-Wan, mostly using the politics as part of the “mystery-plot” that Obi-Wan has to solve, while Anakin is off having his awkwardly written emotional conflicts. AOTC is a very clumsy story in many ways, but I’d say the fault mostly lies in awkward characterization and simple technical execution). The important thing is Anakin’s development, which despite its weird execution, it does communicate quite clearly.
Ironically AOTC handles the politics the best in some ways. There it tends to be mostly the backdrop. Except because of this we run into some confusing shenanigans in terms of why they want Padme assassinated in the first place. In addition to all the otherwise character related problems you mention.
ROTS has a lot of politics and Palpatine scenes, but all of it relates to Anakin’s story and character development, and clearly follows up on what was established in AOTC. I don’t see how the Palpatine scenes can be considered irrelevant to Anakin’s story, when his whole plot relates to Anakin in one way or another. There’s hardly any Palpatine scenes in ROTS that doesn’t directly or indirectly affect Anakin and move his character forward.
Again, the problem isn’t merely the existence of “Palpatine scenes.” The problem for me with ROTS is focusing on minute, pesky squabbles between Palpatine and the Jedi council, which Anakin just happens to be in the middle of. Anakin’s fall and disillusionment with the Jedi should be due to factors grander and more mythic than that (which in fairness Lucas tried to accomplish with the saving Padme stuff, but that’s only one half of the equation).
It’s far from perfect, but I’d hardly say Lucas forgot he was making a trilogy about Anakin as the main character and just focused on the world-building.
He didn’t forget, he just did it poorly, in part because the interests of the films were split.
(Plus, in many ways, but to a slightly lesser degree, it’s also Obi-Wan’s story. Which in-of-itself is very important to Anakin’s story.)
I agree. If only he had fleshed that out in a meaningful way.