What do you think of The Prequel Trilogy? A general discussion. — Page 15

I have multiple layers of opinions and it’s hard to put them into a coherent whole.

Layer 1 - I am disappointed at what they did to the Expanded Universe, and at how they squandered their own potential. The main characters, the Jedi, the Force, the Clone Wars, etc. could have all been more interesting and closer to their pre-1999 counterparts in the original trilogy and the EU. This gets even worse the longer time goes on because the errors it made in depicting the Jedi and the Force have only gotten more extreme in the EU and in Disney canon until now very few people remember how they’re supposed to be.

Layer 2 - I really enjoyed them as a kid. I had a blast going to the theaters and watching them over and over on VHS and DVD. I was fully involved in all the video games and other extra material coming out around all the Clone Wars stuff, so I understand why people of my generation want them so badly to be “misunderstood masterpieces” or something, even though they’re not. My conclusion I’ve come to is that I really like The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith, and I really hate Attack of the Clones. I think the complaints most people have about the movies (myself included), other than the Jar Jar and bad humor in TPM, can be traced back to Attack of the Clones. The characterizations, massive gaps in logic, and CGI failings are truly awful and generated a lot of bad will.

Layer 3 - I have very specific ideas about what people think about the movies as movies. I don’t think that they’re meaningless or shallow cash grabs with no artistry, but I don’t think they’re Secretly Genius or Hidden Masterpieces or Flawed Gems or whatever gobbledygook. You can look at them as pieces of pop entertainment or as serious films or both, but you don’t have to go to extremes either way. They have good parts and bad parts. I think that ROTS is objectively better than the other two but I understand if people disagree.

Layer 4 - I have very specific ideas about what people think about the movies’ history. I was there. They were disliked and considered disappointing. People hated Jar Jar. People hated young Anakin. People hated Anakin/Padme. People thought everything with Jango Fett was pandering. Younger millennials and some zoomers who weren’t even alive at the time try to pull revisionism over this and say that it was a small minority of hater fans and everyone else loved it, but this is absolutely not the case. It’s strange but this is the only site where you can still get honest opinions about this. The movies are not popular now because they’re good, even if you believe they are good. They’re popular due to a mix of nostalgia, memes, and expanded media projects like video games. A lot of this was successful astroturfing. The biggest thing is The Clone Wars show, which isn’t even that good, that “fixes the prequels.” The same people who tell you that they’re great movies that hold up will also tell you to watch eight seasons of animated shows and read extra books and comics to get the whole story.

Layer 5 - I have very specific ideas about what people think about the ideas in the movies. In real life, as a very religious person, I don’t agree with the concept of total celibacy (as in abstaining from marriage.) However, I understand what monks are and why they do what they do, and I have lots of respect for monks and nuns and for other religious traditions in general. I believe that in Star Wars, the Jedi are objectively correct about the Force and how it works. I think that in universe, their rules were a good idea.
This is extra complicated because of Layer 1. The Jedi should never have been like this. It’s too confusing for people to grasp and it wasn’t done well, and it’s inferior from a storytelling point of view to everything that came before. If I put that aside though, I feel compelled to tell people that the Jedi were actually right about almost everything, within the context of the movies.
The hatred people have for the Jedi, the “cult” accusations, and the apologia the fans do for genocide really bothers me. It comes from a place of hatred and stereotypes for religion in real life. It also comes from pseudoscientific pop psychology ideas inherited from Freud, that emotions are inherently sexual, that they “build up” and “explode” if not given “release” and that self-control is unhealthy. It’s like people who say that the problem with school shooters is that they just weren’t exposed to enough porn. It’s disgusting.
So I credit Lucas for having some inkling of these ideas but I blame him for not actually grasping them or depicting them correctly. I think if the movies did any real-life harm (other than the harassment of some of the actors) then this is it. Anakin killing the younglings is meant to be ugly and sad, but it’s also in very poor taste. Not for the unintentional humor, for the unintentional messaging that they deserved it in some way.

Layer 6 - The dialogue and the memes are funny.

Spartacus01 said:

Vladius said:

Layer 4 - I have very specific ideas about what people think about the movies’ history. I was there. They were disliked and considered disappointing. People hated Jar Jar. People hated young Anakin. People hated Anakin/Padme. People thought everything with Jango Fett was pandering. Younger millennials and some zoomers who weren’t even alive at the time try to pull revisionism over this and say that it was a small minority of hater fans and everyone else loved it, but this is absolutely not the case. It’s strange but this is the only site where you can still get honest opinions about this. The movies are not popular now because they’re good, even if you believe they are good. They’re popular due to a mix of nostalgia, memes, and expanded media projects like video games. A lot of this was successful astroturfing. The biggest thing is The Clone Wars show, which isn’t even that good, that “fixes the prequels.” The same people who tell you that they’re great movies that hold up will also tell you to watch eight seasons of animated shows and read extra books and comics to get the whole story.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to attack you or anything. But I think that you are being guilty of the same extremism you are criticizing. You said: “You can look at them as pieces of pop entertainment or as serious films or both, but you don’t have to go to extremes either way”, which is totally correct. But then, when it comes to the history of the movies and their appreciation by the fandom, you did the same thing you are preaching against: generalizing. Sure, I’m one of those millennials who were not around at the time, I became a Star Wars fan in 2018. But I don’t think that saying that everyone hated the movies is fair. I think that it is more fair to say that the fanbase felt very divided about them. I have known a lot of people who liked them from the beginning, just as I have known a lot of people who disliked them from the beginning. There were a lot of fans who liked the Prequels in the 2000s, just as there were a lot of fans who hated them in the same time period. Saying that everyone hated the movies is unfair to the people who always liked them. And they exist, denying their existence is unfair too. Furthermore, I have known a lot of people who became fans of the Saga only in recent years, watched the Prequels as adults, and liked them a lot. I’m one of them. So, to say that they became popular in recent years only because of nostalgia and the memes is a bit unfair too. I liked them when I first watched them. And I was already 18 when I watched them, so I didn’t have any nostalgia for them.

I didn’t say everyone. I also said that I grew up with them and liked them, if you’ll remember. Most people also loved certain aspects that were incredibly popular, like the podrace and Darth Maul. What I said is that the idea that the people who were disappointed or who didn’t like them were a minority is untrue. This entire website exists because of the widespread frustration with the special editions and the prequels.

I don’t know your own personal story so I can’t tell you what happened to you. But their revival in popularity is absolutely due to those things I said. It’s:
*People who grew up with them getting older and looking back
*People first watching and enjoying the Red Letter Media prequel reviews, then the backlash against them
*Contrarianism; blogs, forums, and YouTube video essays that get into politics or film theory to hype up their more intellectual aspects as “underrated”
*Familiarity with the Clone Wars/prequel time period due to video games, specifically Lego Star Wars and Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2
*The Clone Wars animated show and Dave Filoni stuff “fixes the prequels”
*Memes and funny dialogue allow people to enjoy both the good parts and the bad parts; the bad parts are just plugged into a “so bad it’s good” ethos or postmodern internet sense of irony so that they don’t detract from the overall whole

Again this doesn’t apply to everyone, I’m talking about the general trend. I watched all of this happen in real time.

I think Anakin Skywalker fall would have been much more tragic if Anakin had been a character very similar to Luke the Anakin of Lucas Prequels is a kind of a jerk and arrogant that it is difficult to feel empathy for him i know that in TCW they try to fix this but i think that if Anakin had been a more likeable character his transformation into Darth Vader would have been a lot more tragic i think Lucas dropped the ball with the Prequels the idea was good but it needed a better execution but well Disney Sequels are worse than Lucas Prequels so at least i admire Lucas creativity

I started getting into this franchise not long ago after years of avoiding it, so I have no nostalgic attachment to it. (I had watched some of it as a kid with my parents but the movies did not get my attention at the time so I mostly forgot what I saw then)
I don’t have anything new to say about the prequels but I want to highlight that the greatest problem in them is just how much TPM doesn’t advance anything in the plot or relationships.
In the grand scheme of all the trash that gets released into movie theaters, I think the prequels are fine action-adventure space movies, even good at certain points. I see the bad reception as a result of Lucas getting out of touch but also the fans have massively high standards set by an overrated perception of the originals. Prequel fans are accused of being nostalgia biased but the same is true for OT fans who can’t see the issues in those films.
I respect ANH knowing the time it came out and the limitations in technology and budget, but it is a movie that didn’t age well. RotJ has many of the flaws that plague the prequels but it’s not acknowledged enough even by those who criticize it. ESB is the only Star Wars film I believe deserves it’s legendary status, the only things that rival it in quality are the 03 Clone Wars cartoon and a few episodes from TCW.

I watched this behind the scenes thing that aired on 60 minutes which i never saw when it aired someone put it on youtube, the whole thing comes off as Lucas directing a video game not a movie. This is on Phantom Menace. Lucas pointing out all the stuff the animators have to cgi into the movie while he sits in that theater with the journalist.

I’m kind of glad i never saw that and went into the movie not knowing how much of it was green screens and fake cgi backgrounds and characters, because i had no expectations. I would have been like what the heck if i saw the unfinished unflattering behind the scenes as is footage.

MORC said:

I started getting into this franchise not long ago after years of avoiding it, so I have no nostalgic attachment to it. (I had watched some of it as a kid with my parents but the movies did not get my attention at the time so I mostly forgot what I saw then)
I don’t have anything new to say about the prequels but I want to highlight that the greatest problem in them is just how much TPM doesn’t advance anything in the plot or relationships.
In the grand scheme of all the trash that gets released into movie theaters, I think the prequels are fine action-adventure space movies, even good at certain points. I see the bad reception as a result of Lucas getting out of touch but also the fans have massively high standards set by an overrated perception of the originals. Prequel fans are accused of being nostalgia biased but the same is true for OT fans who can’t see the issues in those films.
I respect ANH knowing the time it came out and the limitations in technology and budget, but it is a movie that didn’t age well. RotJ has many of the flaws that plague the prequels but it’s not acknowledged enough even by those who criticize it. ESB is the only Star Wars film I believe deserves it’s legendary status, the only things that rival it in quality are the 03 Clone Wars cartoon and a few episodes from TCW.

Original Star Wars aged plenty well. I think people see the Tantive IV explosion at the beginning and start immediately going “oh nooooooo 1970s cheesy baddd” but the effects generally are really well done. Everything feels tactile and real. It would be nice if the audio on the dialogue were a little bit higher quality but it’s unfair to expect that.

Same with Return of the Jedi. I think you’ll find that a lot of people do criticize it and compare it with the prequels. I completely disagree with those people. It’s a fantastic movie in so many ways.

The high standards are not unreasonable given that the whole point of the prequels was to make money by filling in three more slots in a story that was already finished. If three movies in a row were all incredible, and you now have the effects budget, the technology, the time, and the momentum to supposedly do things even better than before, why don’t you do that?

For what it’s worth, both my youngest brother, and my wife, who had not seen the Star Wars movies before, watched all six with me on two separate occasions. (My wife didn’t even know Vader was Luke’s father.) We watched them in release order. Both of them independently thought the original trilogy was better. Granted you might argue that I had conditioned them in some way or told them that I liked one more than the other, or told them what parts I liked or didn’t like. That might have happened a few times but in general I tried to avoid it. My wife really liked Jar Jar, and they thought the incest thing in the OT was funny, but in almost every way they had the same praises and criticisms people have always had about the prequels before the 2010s pseudo-revival.

Spartacus01 said:

Vladius said:
but in almost every way they had the same praises and criticisms people have always had about the prequels before the 2010s pseudo-revival

So they thought that the Prequels are the worst thing that ever happened to Star Wars and thought that they should be destroyed and remade? Because that’s what “people” thought before the “pseudo-revival”.

Anyway, every time I introduced a friend to Star Wars, I always made him/her watch the movies in chronological order, and every time it turned out that they actually liked the Prequels. For some reason, when people watch the Prequels first, they tend to like them more than if they watch them after the OT.

You’re coming across as ultra defensive and also that you weren’t alive then…or aware then. So since you obviously weren’t around for the release of the PT then sit down and chill out. Love the PT all you want.

I think it’s cruel you showed the movies in chronological order haha. You ruin the surprises of the OT. And on the other hand I DON’T believe you that they liked the PT more 🤷‍♂️.

Superweapon VII said:

Spartacus01 said:

Also, the chronological order is the order George Lucas told us to watch the movies, and there is a reason for that.

Yeah, 'cause he’s a revisionist. Star Wars is the Tragedy of Darth Vader. Star Wars has always been the Tragedy of Darth Vader.

Yeah if you read the story conference for Splinter of the Mind’s eye you know it isn’t true.

But i think he started towards that line of thinking during Return of the Jedi, and if not then at least when he was being interviewed for from star wars to jedi. Then you go all the way up to the year he started writing the prequel and those Leonard Maltin interviews.

People take what he says and believe it when it would be easier to just admit that he Lucas constantly revises.

I don’t begrudge him for wanting the prequel to be different from the OT i can also be critical of it, too much focus on the setting and cgi and not enough on the characters and the plot. Also its not the same fun serial adventure style of the OT.

As much as Lucas says they should be watched chronologically he made those movies with the OT in mind. Half of the interesting aspect of the PT is knowing exactly where everything and everyone will end up.

A prequel trilogy where Anakin is going on Luke’s journey would work. Then his fall could be offscreen, keeping the twists intact.

[Spartacus01 said:]Also, the chronological order is the order George Lucas told us to watch the movies, and there is a reason for that.

George Lucas would say that; but the PT (as with most prequels) are informed by the films that came first. They communicate with the audience based on things they already know, beyond the obvious twists from the OT that are spoiled. I get why people watch them chronilogically but dear lord I would never reccommend it. With all due respect to Lucas, he doesn’t even want us watching the films that made him and the series.

I think they were a missed opportunity. Its so strange Lucas earlier outline was so good, yes it was very vague but it didn’t mess with OT continuity. Its like he overthought it when he finally started writing Phantom Menace. Added a bunch of not necessary exposition and new characters. The Original trilogy was simple and self contained. Its like he wanted to up his game for the prequel and fell flat on his face. The worldbuilding might be decent but the prequel lore is suspect. Others might disagree, that is fine.

People keep saying the lore is good and deep and well thought out and poorly executed.

What i understood Anakin was the chosen one, there was a bunch of other stuff about the Dark Side clouding the Jedi’s vision. I just don’t see good writing, likable characters. Believable relationships. I wish they were equal to the OT and connected with them, they don’t. Everybody complains about Disney Star Wars, the prequel is where Star Wars died. As a Saga of Cinema. Obviously the animated side, the comics and novels and games were good enough to keep the embers burning.

To me the fatal flaw of the entire prequel trilogy is how Anakin was written, his entire arc. Everyone singles out PM but i think its fine even if it should have started with a teenage Anakin or maybe even in his 20s. AOTC is only somewhat salvageable, ROTS is where it all goes off the rails. Anakin’s sudden turn makes no sense.

JadedSkywalker said:

Anakin’s sudden turn makes no sense.

This one statement reminded me of what Plinkett says in his review of ROTS, that all we end up learning is that Anakin is just a crazy violent person who needs to be locked up in a mental institution.

Spartacus01 said:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to attack you or anything. But I think that you are being guilty of the same extremism you are criticizing. You said: “You can look at them as pieces of pop entertainment or as serious films or both, but you don’t have to go to extremes either way”, which is totally correct. But then, when it comes to the history of the movies and their appreciation by the fandom, you did the same thing you are preaching against: generalizing. Sure, I’m one of those millennials who were not around at the time, I became a Star Wars fan in 2018. But I don’t think that saying that everyone hated the movies is fair. I think that it is more fair to say that the fanbase felt very divided about them. I have known a lot of people who liked them from the beginning, just as I have known a lot of people who disliked them from the beginning. There were a lot of fans who liked the Prequels in the 2000s, just as there were a lot of fans who hated them in the same time period. Saying that everyone hated the movies is unfair to the people who always liked them. And they exist, denying their existence is unfair too. Furthermore, I have known a lot of people who became fans of the Saga only in recent years, watched the Prequels as adults, and liked them a lot. I’m one of them. So, to say that they became popular in recent years only because of nostalgia and the memes is a bit unfair too. I liked them when I first watched them. And I was already 18 when I watched them, so I didn’t have any nostalgia for them.

I was a teenager when TPM came out in 1999. I wouldn’t say everyone hated the Prequels initially at the time. But it would be hard to be alive during 1999 thru 2005 and not conclude that, in general, on average, people did not like these movies. These were not to be new classics, like the OT. They were instead the endless punch line of jokes across pop culture (e.g. the Southpark episode mocking Jar Jar, etc.) I never actually met anyone at the time (in my circle of friends or outside it) who actually thought these movies were genuinely good. At best, you had people saying that ROTS was good but the others sucked.

Now - of course, the whole paragraph I just typed is nothing but anecdotal evidence. It proves nothing. And of course, there were also many Prequel fans in 1999-2005 as well who passionately defended these films (just look at theforce.net). To get a truly accurate sense of general public or average fan opinion at the time these movies were released, you would need to have conducted properly-worded opinion polls that randomly sampled some cross section of movie-goers. Unfortunately, such comprehensive scientific polls were not conducted as far as I know. So the only thing I have is my anecdotal impression from having lived through that time. My conjecture, based on anecdotal evidence, is something like 60% to 70% of Star Wars fans (provided we could agree on the definition of “Star Wars fan”) had a negative opinion of two or more of these films. But again, I certainly cannot prove this, and I admit that negative opinions are likely to be voiced more loudly than positive opinions, potentially biasing my impression.

A bit more objectively, I can say that the media at least was more hostile to the Prequels than they were to the first two Disney films, which may have affected fan opinion. If I were inclined to devote time to it, I could probably prove this assertion by randomly sampling popular Internet or print publications or opinion pieces discussing the Prequels from 1999 through 2005. This would probably produce something like 65% negative, 35% positive sentiment, averaged across the three films, in my estimate (again a conjecture). Maybe closer to 60% negative, 40% positive right after ROTS. I could be wildly off, but I would be very surprised.

What I can say for sure is that nowadays there are a lot of ideas about the Prequels floating around the Internet that are blatant revisionist history. These ideas include things like “everyone loved the Prequels until those Plinkett reviews came out in 2009”. This is certainly false. Almost every single criticism made in those videos was typical stuff discussed between friends and pre-social media Internet forums long before Plinkett. (For fun, here’s a 1999 review of TPM that essentially makes the same points found in your typical anti-Prequel youtube video nowadays).

Also, remember that in 1999, TPM was hyped as this monumental, Earth-shattering event - with Lucas descending once again from Mount Sinai Skywalker Ranch to deliver unto us a New Testament from a Galaxy far far away. I lived through both the hype of Phantom Menace and the hype of Force Awakens, and the hype for Force Awakens was nothing compared to what happened in 1999. Remember, at this time, the fanbase was mostly unified, and viewed George Lucas as this master storyteller of unparalleled creative genius who could do no wrong (except Howard the Duck). This environment certainly did not help when the movies came out and not only failed to live up to the hype, but seemed to be just weirdly mediocre movies in general.

Spartacus01 said:
The problem is that, as Mark Hamill also said, the hatred for the Prequels at the time went far beyond the simple “I don’t like them”. There are actors who have received death threats, actors who have even tried to commit suicide, and George Lucas was covered by a mountain of poop for almost 10 years.

I mean… who cares? Among any passionate fanbase, there will always be some small percentage of irredeemable assholes. But this stuff is often brought up to deflect criticism of the Prequels, or to imply that all criticism of the Prequels is somehow invalid or dangerous simply because it’s vaguely congruent with more extreme, anti-social behavior coming from 0.000000000001% of the fanbase. Anyone that actually sends a death threat to an actor over something like this is clearly deranged.

I mean, I do feel sympathy for people like Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best, considering what they had to go through for the sake of their day job. But honestly that’s a sideshow, and it has nothing to do with how the Prequels were received in general. (Also Ahmed Best has a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu so I doubt any of these deranged morons would make fun of him to his face. He’s also clearly quite comfortable with making fun of the character he played, since he voiced Jar Jar in some Robot Chicken skits about Star Wars. As for Lucas, he’s actually covered with a mountain of cash, not poop.)

Anyway, the same thing happened again more recently with the Sequels. Some idiots on Twitter decide to harass one of the actors, and therefore all criticism of the Sequels is forever deflected. It’s like poetry, it rhymes.