Sometimes the overwhelmingly positive reevaluation of the Prequels that occurred across the Internet around 2015 makes me start thinking that I was too harsh on these movies and I should probably give them another watch and maybe reevaluate the positive aspects. I mean, I really want to like them. But every time I try this, the flaws stand out so sharply to me and I just end up rediscovering why I never liked these movies in the first place.
People often say that the actual story of the Prequels was excellent, and it’s only the implementation or execution that resulted in such flawed films. I agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a particularly compelling or interesting point. The actual story outline of the Prequels - broadly speaking - was already known back in the 1980s: Kenobi trained Anakin to be a Jedi and the two became good friends. A manipulative Senator named Palpatine orchestrated a coup by leveraging influence with Trade Guilds and large corporations, overthrowing the Republic and killing all the Jedi in the process. Anakin betrayed Kenobi and sided with Palpatine who appointed him chief “Jedi Hunter”. Then Anakin and Kenobi dueled near a volcano and Anakin fell into lava. Kenobi then arranged for Anakin’s children to be raised in secret. (Yes, even that specific detail about Trade Guilds was known in the 1980s).
So the basic story outline was already known before Lucas began production of the Prequels in the 1990s, and many Star Wars fans were familiar with this story and how it ends. So the entire point of actually making these Prequel films after all these years was the implementation details - the casting, the dialogue, the performances, the fleshed-out finer-grained plot points surrounding the Clone Wars and Anakin’s fall, the identity and personality of Anakin’s wife, the Jedi Order as it existed during “a more civilized age”, etc. The implementation was what everyone was waiting for. We already knew the story and how it ends, but we wanted to see an implementation of this story realized on the big screen. We wanted to see Kenobi and Anakin fighting side by side while exchanging cheesy quips. We wanted to see their great friendship tragically torn apart after Anakin embraces the Dark Side. And we wanted to see their dramatic final showdown atop the volcano.
And yet, almost every aspect of the implementation was fucked up in some way, beginning with the entire plot of Phantom Menace wasting a whole movie on an irrelevant side quest that had little bearing on the overall saga and prominently featured overtly juvenile characters and tone. The finer-grained implementation details fleshing out the Clone Wars and Palpatine’s conspiracy were mostly under-developed and hand-wavy, and often defied audience expectations in the least interesting way possible or created weirdly unnecessary continuity problems. This botched execution was so consistently pervasive throughout all aspects of all three films that praising the underlying source material registers to me as pointless. I still can’t comprehend how it was even possible to so colossally fuck up such dramatically compelling story material on almost every level. The only major implementation details that genuinely worked well were some of the casting decisions (Ewan McGregor is great), certain elements of the fight choreography, and John William’s score was also great (because of course it was). Even many of the visual effects (which George Lucas is famously known for as a pioneer and visionary) aged poorly due to the over-reliance on early-2000s 3D rendering to portray characters and environments.