ElJosero said:
Of the two I much prefer the Prequels to the Sequels. I would say that Force Awakens is really a remake of A New Hope, it follows a near identical plot path aside from the occasional tease that Finn is force-sensitive. Last Jedi tried a little too hard to be shocking and wasted what I think was a truly great story for Luke by bogging it down in so much other nonsense like fuel gauges and space Las Vegas. Rise of Skywalker, while visually appealing, is such an utter mess story wise that it really ruined the entire Sequel trilogy for me. Really there was absolutely no need to shoehorn Palpatine nor his lineage into the last movie. I also didn’t appreciate the continued too-subtle hints to Finn’s force sensitivity. Really he had so much wasted potential. He could have gone down a Jedi path, he could have easily become Sith or, perhaps most tantalizingly, he could have been a “grey” Jedi, not fully succumbed to the dark side but not purely light either. Unfortunately he was mostly relegated to the background.
I suppose I should point out the things I did like in the sequels and I will say I actually quite enjoyed Last Jedi before they tried too hard to course correct it. For those who say it wasn’t in Luke’s character to hide and be a hermit seem to forget that his two Jedi mentors were both hermits in hiding themselves when Luke met them. Han Solo in Force Awakens was pretty great, even though Harrison Ford looked to be in slow motion when he was running from the Rathtars.
As for the Prequels, I really enjoyed all 3. There are definite gripes, sure. Really the big one is you could argue that Phantom Menace is actually fairly irrelevant to the overall story and we could have just started with Attack of the Clones and split Revenge of the Sith in to two films. That said, I’m one of the strange individuals that actually really likes Phantom Menace. Perhaps I’m just a sucker for the amazing lightsaber work they did, or perhaps I didn’t find Jar Jar half as irritating as everyone else did. Far as I’m concerned he’s nowhere near as bad as the commentary accompanying the podrace.
The Phantom Menace is despite its reputation the last Lucas Star Wars film(one that he had control over the story for) that was still using a lot of practical effects, more than the original trilogy even and by that I mean all three of those films. Much like The Lord of the Rings, Titanic and the original Jurassic Park trilogy it is a good mesh of practical effects and CGI which has become more and more rare.
It is also the only prequel film that from what I remember does not contradict the Thrawn trilogy. You could say that the Phantom Menace is more 90’s Star Wars than any of the other films.
