TMBTM said:Another major failure of the PT that is often cited, is its loss of the black vs. white theme we had from the original.
I really don't want to sound too much like a Lucas apologist (well I guess it's too late I'm afraid!) but it's what the PT are all about: showing us that the galaxy was not black vs white twenty years before the OT. Lucas took pretty much all the things we knew and show them in a way that we are not prepare to watch. I don't say that the result is great (far from it), I just say that it was an interesting idea and it should be respected as an artist vision. That's why I usualy don't say "it's sucks" or that "Lucas raped my childhood" kind of thing, because 1: the OT was my childhood (so the only thing I'm really pissed off is the DVD of the true original OT) and 2: if we can't live with the PT we just have to not buy the DVDs (or just to make fanedit maybe! ;) )
This is a complex topic. Yes it was valid to make the PT more gey. That had been the intention from way back for at least the sequel trilogy anyway. But it's a question of HOW you make it more grey. It should have been done with a hint of the original trilogy's approach, because it's in the same universe. One of the keys to the original trilogy is that the villains were seriously sinister and the heroes were sympathetic. That is not entirely incompatible with making it grey, not if you do it carefully. You can have a hero be seriously faulted and going dark and still have them sympathetic in some crucial way, enough to connect you with them. Instead we got annoying useless Anakin, posery Kenobi and lame-in-the-later-two-movies Padme. (In the first movie they managed more ok -Padme was good in that and Qui Gon was sympathetic, though Kenobi was at his worst there.) Also there's respecting the good guys. In the OT you can respect the rebels and their leaders, but in the prequels a lot of people are hard to respect. In the prequels the august Jedi council are such a bunch of idiots. You can't respect them and you can't like them. Sure, I get that the Jedi were supposed to be shown as flawed, but did they have to be portrayed as such annoying useless windbags? I didn't give a fart when they were killed off, and we clearly were supposed to care about and respect them enough to care when they died. Clearly Lucas screwed up here. Pretty much everybody in the prequels is more pretentious than equaivalent characters were in the OT. Some of that may be justified, but certainly it's taken too far. It's not simply that characters are painted grey, rather it's that the films seem to have no faith in you being able to truly like or respect anybody (the last two films anyway). And it's not simpy that things were more artificial in the prequels era, but rather that the creative vision is more artificial and pretentious.
As for villains, they totally screwed up in the portrayal of Palpatine from the point of Windu confronting him onwards. That awful makeup and the overdone performance. Palpatine was overdone in ROTJ, but in a way that worked. In ROTS it was in a way that didn't work. We also had the Trade Federation. Ok, they were meant to be a bit grey, but did they have to be done comically? Or the various enemy droids, done for laughs. If the films were done back in the 80s those droids wouldn't have been done like that. Or General Greivous, who came off totally like a refugee from a disney movie.