Sure, but that’s your opinion. There’s people who would have complained about what you say as well. In fact, I’m sure that if they had really done this, then the Prequels would have been criticized anyway, by using statements like: “They told us about how Anakin lived in slavery and how it was horrible, but it’s impossible to directly relate to it, because we weren’t shown. Please George, show, don’t tell.” I mean, if you really want to find problems, then it’s virtually possible to criticize the Prequels by using every possible argument and counter-argument.
Yeah, some people would complain about it. I don’t really care. Some people complain about stuff in other movies I like and I just disagree.
I disagree with a lot of people’s problems with Return of the Jedi’s narrative choices. Hell I’m an MCU Spider-Man fan, I have to defend controversial creative choices from whiny fanboys who can’t accept change people all the time.
Besides, they didn’t show it in the movie we got, anyway. There’s never any sign he was abused and he’s never scared of his master. Like I’m not saying to show a 10 year old getting whipped (which would just be fucked up), but like at the very least show that Anakin is really scared of his master. I still think it’s ideal to just start him at 19 at the least. Because it’s the backstory, not the story. Breaking Bad didn’t dedicate whole episodes to Walt working at Grey Matter.
It’s not complicated if you pay attention to the movies and notice the details, like the facial expressions, etc. For example, last year I showed all 6 original Star Wars movies to a friend of mine, and when he saw Attack of the Clones for the first time he knew right away that Sidious and Dooku were behind the creation of the Clone Army. When I told him there were people who had trouble understanding it, he literally said: “Really? But how? It’s so obvious…” So, not everyone finds the story complicated. Sure, I think that some parts could have been explained better, but the story is not so complicated to understand if you pay attention.
I’m not referring to “it’s too complicated to understand”. Like yeah, the Prequels are kinda obvious, narratively. We’re talking about the movie with, “If only… Senator Amidala, were here”.
I’m referring to the fact that the movies are overstuffed. Attack of the Clones is a prime example of too much plot, too little character development. Lucas even realized he fucked up not showing any Anakin and Obi-Wan friendship in the movie and put in the elevator scene in pick-ups. But a 1 minute scene in which they recount old adventures didn’t do enough to make people feel they’re such good friends. More legwork that had to be done by Revenge of the Sith.
The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones suffer so much from bloating their plots that so much got pushed back to Revenge of the Sith. Lucas himself even admitted this.
George Lucas said:
But I did run into the reality of the first film. Basically, he is a slave kid. He gets found by the Jedi and he becomes part of the Jedi order and that he loves his mother. You know, that’s maybe a half hour movie. And so I did a kind of jazz riff on the rest of it and I said, “Well, I’m just going to enjoy myself. I have this giant world to play in and I’m going to just move around and have fun with this because, you know, I have to get to the second part.” So, then I got to the second part, and it was kind of the same thing. They fall in love, they can’t and they’re not supposed to, and, you know, little bits of trivia in terms of, you know, setting up the empire and how all that stuff works.That’s about another twenty percent of this story treatment. The first film is twenty percent, the second film is twenty percent and I then ended up with a third film. The problem was the third film was actually more like eighty percent of the story. So, I was sitting there with a lot more story to tell than I actually had time to tell it. It was the reverse of what I had in the first two films.
Most of the story is in Revenge of the Sith. So much screentime in the other two films is wasted because of that.
That’s the whole point of The Phantom Menace. Unless you wanted a single line where they say something like: “Palpatine became Chancellor because he was elected.”
That’s… what I was referring to. I was saying that a better Prequel trilogy would be the content of Revenge of the Sith, some elements of Attack of the Clones (mostly just the beginning of the clone war and Anakin and Padme falling in love, which should’ve been in the first movie), and showing how Palpatine became the Chancellor (AKA a part of The Phantom Menace).
I brought that up in particular as a lot of people suggest already have Palpatine as the Chancellor at the beginning of the trilogy which IMO isn’t a good idea.