What is there to be said that hasn’t already been said? They’re good movie (TPM) and two crimes against cinema (AOTC and ROTS). This trilogy needed TCW to save it and explain things it couldn’t. A side effect of TCW is that it made ROTS infinitely less enjoyable as a finale to the PT and a finale to TCW.
TROS is very rushed and sloppy, but I’d contend that ROTS is similarly flawed (albeit to a lesser extent in this regard). It’s burdened with telling the PT’s entire arc in most of the movie, suffering from the dilly-dallying in the previous two movies. Also, deciding Anakin’s fall through reshoots is somewhat noticeable in the final product. It’s not super-sloppy, but the whole fall feels like it was scribbled on a napkin.
The accusations of “nostalgia bait” should also apply to the PT after Phantom Menace. That movie had such an excellent aesthetic, largely divorced from anything we’d seen in the OT. The later two movies, however, give in to the baiting/universe shrinkage with characters (the Fett family, Chewbacca, and the Vader suit being the main marketing push of ROTS) and reshaping the aesthetic to be more OT-like (but not slavish OT replicas like the ST). I get wanting to push towards the OT as it got closer timeline-wise, but part of me thinks it was responding to TPM backlash.
The meta reasons for disliking the PT are also there. The creation of the Special Editions, compressing the saga’s timeline, the proliferation of unfunny memes, and how Lucasfilm tried to reframe the entire saga as “The Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, the chosen one.” When looking at the OT, it makes very little internal sense to interpret it as the continuation of “Vader’s tragedy.” If there is one good thing the ST did (I’d argue it did many), is that it removed the chosen one reframing.
I know there’s been pushback on the idea that George needed other people to reshape his stories to make them better and that he needed to have fewer “yes” men around him (e.g., Rick McCallum). Well, it’s still true. A movie made with a few more passes on the scripts and with a different director (still making George’s story, mind you) would’ve been better than what we got.
When comparing them to the ST, I like the ST more. I simply do. Those movies are incredibly flawed and made by a wretched entertainment conglomerate, but there’s something about them that feels more in tune with the OT (and not in a nostalgia-bait way). TLJ is an excellent piece as a distant epilogue to the OT, much like how TPM is a fantastic distant prologue to the OT (just change it to be 50 years before the OT instead of 30). The Abrams movies are forgettable (but improved with fanedits), but I’ll take forgettable over whatever the later two PT movies were.
I agree with most of what you have written here. The transformation of the saga to The Tragedy of Darth Vader in particular really bothered me. It is really a stretch. But this leads back to my original post that the wrong story is being told. The OT is Luke’s story, and the PT should have been Obi-wan’s. Vader is the thread that ties them together, but it is not his story.
I also agree that Lucase made creative decisions based on what he thought (or people were telling him) the fans wanted more of after TPM. I honestly feel like the Fetts were shoehorned into AOTC. But that movie is a total mess in terms of pacing, motivations etc.
I think Hayden gives a good performance in parts of ROTS.
Qui-gon Jinn was a mistake. His character serves only to delay our exploration of Obi-wan and Anakin’s friendship. This was a rare case of what the films needed and what the fans wanted being in accord.
Really, the PT did not need a female lead. The romance thing again takes away from developing the Obi/Ani friendship. Mother Skywalker should have been relegated to a supporting role, with a few short cameos. But of course Lucas decided that she was going to be the reason for Anakin’s fall so…
But the acting quality also plays a role, even though I said I didn’t want to touch on it. There is great chemistry developed between our leads in the 45 minutes we are on the Death Star in SW77 - more than is developed between the leads through the course of 6 hours in the PT. I feel also that the way the films are shot plays a role. Am I crazy in feeling that the OT tried to shoot Fisher so that we wouldn’t notice how short she is, whereas in the PT there is no attempt to frame Portman in the same way. She always comes off as a teenager in appearance. Even the pitch of her voice seems like it. Maybe she should have kept the Amidala accent?
Probably my favourite single shot of the PT is the closeup of Padme on when she arrives on Mustafar, with her head on her hand wondering how it could have come to this, where did it all go wrong. A meta moment if ever there was one!