Every director has their style and eccentricities. I just don’t get how people don’t notice the same issues in his earlier films maybe because they are better movies?
Or maybe he had help with the screenplays.
The whole digital cinema and we’ll fake it in cgi and fix it in post, is almost every major comic book or fantasy or science fiction film now.
Lucas had some help writing the Prequels also - people exaggerate when they claim that Lucas wrote the Prequels entirely by himself. However, it is true that Lucas had way more help writing the Original Trilogy, obviously, where for ESB and ROTJ he mostly wrote plot outlines or very early drafts and then had other people flesh out the actual script.
Also, the Original Trilogy truly had ground-breaking special effects for the time. Nobody had seen anything remotely like the Death Star trench run, for example, with moving star fields and dog fights in space. And while the Prequels certainly had a similar effect in terms of revolutionizing the VFX industry (Jar Jar was the first completely CGI character I think) and pushing digital film-making into the mainstream, the overall impact and “wow factor” was much less pronounced from the perspective of the average audience member.
I mean, I’m fairly old, so I remember experiencing various ground-breaking movies as they were released over the past 30 years. I remember being blown-away by new special-effects technology precisely three times in my life, and the Star Wars Prequels were not one of those three times. Those three times were Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, and the portrayal of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. I haven’t seen anything else that truly seemed revolutionary or game-changing to me, except possibly AI Luke Skywalker in the Boba Fett show a few years ago. But the Prequels never stood out to me as particularly revolutionary in terms of visual effects, even though, factually speaking, I realize they had a dramatic impact in terms of pushing Hollywood in general towards digital film-making, paving the way for all the Marvel stuff we have now. Yet even in 1999 when the effects in Phantom Menace truly were state-of-the-art, some people were already complaining about the overuse of CGI, with some early reviews complaining that some scenes looked less like Star Wars and more like “A Bugs Life” or something.