The Star Wars Prequels

[Vinyadan]

I have been thinking a bit about the SW Prequel trilogy lately. I am not an "expert" -- I think I watched 1 twice, 2 twice, and 3 once. 3 in particular felt like I was doing homework. That was many years ago.

So I watched a few scenes again. I watched the scene in ep3 in which Anakin drives and successfully lands the burning half ship with Wan and the Chancellor inside, and I thought, "How did they blow this up?!". Because the scene is awesome, but the movie, not really.

There don't seem to be many plot holes. But the movies in general are plagued by script and acting troubles. Not many characters look convincing (Obi Wan and Qui Gon are the only ones, I think), simply because everyone else is playing the role of someone who is lying (Dooku, Palpa), or is in doubt/screwing up (Anakin, Padme, Windu), or has no human face. This is a problem when trying to create main characters, in which the watcher should feel invested.
Actually, if we look at the standard plot structure for Hollywood&Fairytales, the beginning is with balance, then something is supposed to happen and disturb the balance. We never see Anakin in balance. His beginnings are being a slave child to a single mother. Then he is a young jedi who really wants to be with Padme, although he shouldn't. But there isn't a "falling in love" scene.
What exactly happened isn't all that clear, but, to me, it looks like Lucas picked up Dante's idea of having fallen in love with his muse when he was nine years old (well, it might have been accidental). Lucas then decides to play it out as an infatuation from which he never managed to grow out. So Anakin is, in a way, always damaged.

Cause #1 of the failure was trying to make a Star Wars movie trilogy about political intrigue. You can easily do this in a king's court, because we have tons of plays about the theme to look to, and because a king's court, however large, can have a few prominent figures that stand out a lot. If we go to galactic government, everything turns complicated, because democracy is complicated, and ridiculously so. There are powers given to certain assemblies, and other powers are given to single people, and people are chosen to take some roles in different ways by different people. So the Chancellor is elected by the Senate, that's OK. But what does the Chancellor even do? Palpa becomes relevant the moment he is given exceptional powers. Even if this is explained, it's still absurd that a moviegoer has to learn the Constitution of the Galactic Republic. This is more evident if you compare the prequels with the originals: the plot there revolves around huge weapons with a simple-to-understand use, clear stages of initiation, and clear urgencies. (also, the Jedi order has its own administration with its own rules and purposes.)

Cause #2 is that there are too many characters, and no protagonist. Obi Wan could have been the protagonist, but Anakin was supposed to be the star, because of Vader. Qui Gon could have been a protagonist, but he was supposed to introduce Obi Wan to Anakin. Padme also does a lot of things: queen, warrior, part of a couple...
The Jedi in particular have a duplication problem. Mace Windu is a Yoda duplicate. He's the part of Yoda that takes decisions and makes mistakes. He gets no characterization beyond supposedly being cool (i.e. purple) and not knowing what to do. I never even got what his job was. I don't think it's specified in the movies, and Yoda being called Grandmaster doesn't exactly help. Or maybe it's Yoda who shouldn't have been there to take the spotlight, and should have just made his cameo appearance with the padawan kids, so that it would be clear that Mace is the leader of the Order.
Many characters are unidimensional. Jar Jar is the one most called out on this. He has plot purposes, but, as a character, he isn't much more than a distraction.

Cause #3 is that a series of flawlessly interconnected events doesn't necessarily make a good story. And a good story doesn't necessarily translate into a good film. A story is a problem of narration -- and the narration of the prequels was very confusing, because it wanted to touch on a lot of different things at the same time. There was Anakin's love story, Anakin's fall, Obi Wan's things, Sidious double acting, the complex ideological conflict faced by the Jedi council as it has to leave its old role for a new one, a Trade Federation (!) doing an embargo (!) in opposition to a change in legislation about Tax Free Areas (!) which is a ploy by the Senator (!) of the planet Naboo to force a Senate vote and become Chancellor (!) in order to be granted exceptional powers. The (!)s mark things that require knowledge of the Galactic Legal Code.
Not only this: the narration was underwhelming. There was a galactic war going on, and it feels like I didn't get to see it. We saw the starting battle in ep2, instead of the closing battle. We saw a few duels, and a good number of one-sided slaughters. There is the feeling that ep3 in particular wasn't written as a story, more like an attempt to sweep all plot point together to have it all nice and ready for the OT.

The small saving factor is that Lee gave the best acting from any Star Wars movie. Otherwise, I am not sure the PT has made the OT more enjoyable.

So, these have been my ramblings. I am curious to read your opinions and views.

[Dragonexx]

You've basically hit the nail on the head. I like the prequels, but there are a lot of flaws that draw them back. However i will give them credit for showing the rise of the empire and not going for a rehash of the OT like the sequels seem to be doing. In a lot of stories the evil empire just exists. The prequels go into why and how it came into being, how people could initially support the rise of a totalitarian regime. If you have the time, look up cinemawins analysis of them. Their quite interesting.

[Peelee]

I've said it countless times, and I'll keep on saying it.

The problem with the prequel trilogies was that George Lucas effectively said, "OK, we have this setting where space wizards with laser swords fight evil people in spaceships shooting lasers at each other, while badass space princesses also fight evil people, and also space pirates run around. Now, how can we make kids like it?"

[Yora]

The real problem of the movies are indeed the scripts. Scenes just happen with very little coherence between them. Many of the scenes are actually really good and some I think are quite fantastic. They just don't come together as an interesting story of any kind.
The script also seems to be to blame for much of the poor acting. The lines are so bad that it's really hard to imagine how anyone would deliver them in a way that sounds convincing. I actually agree with the assesment that Anakin is played really well in Episod 3 any time he is not talking. From what I heard, Lucas is also not much of a director, giving actors very little guidance on what the final scene is supposed to feel like when it's edited and all the CGI added. Ewan McGregor stands out so much because he seems to have a rare skill of directing himself and making a good guess about how the scene will turn out in the end. Ian McDiarmid plays Palpatine in a really cheesy and hammy way, but at the very least he throws himself into the role with everything he has. Which really is many times better than nothing.
The Jedi Council is especially bad. The actors are probably supposed to act serene, but instead they come across as simple bored and nodding of. Look at Samuel Jackson. When you think of him as a Jedi, do you imagine someone who seems to be just waking up from anesthesia? The jokes practically make themselves.

It could be my age, but I grew up on Star Wars stuff in the 90s and looking back I feel like the whole prequel era didn't really add anything to the universe. There are some cool bits, but it didn't really exapand the classic movie universe.

Though I have to say, from an artistic angle, the three movies still beat the new ones by length. Lucas' scripts are awful and his directing apparenty insufficient, but now that we have movies without his involvement to compare, he really understood the style that made Star Wars tick.

[hamishspence]

The fact that I read them all as novelizations far more often than watching them, might be one reason why I like the prequels on average.

[Sapphire Guard]

Part of the problem is that they stepped on people's headcanons. Contested new entries in series are fairly common, and the more invested the fanbase is, the harder it can turn on the interloper. It happened with the FF7 Compilation, Hunger Games 3. People build their headcanons, then the creator knocks them out of contention., In Star Wars, they had 30 years to build their own headcanons, and then they were replaced. It was always going to be a hard sell.

This could be why I had an easier time accepting the prequels than TFA.

[Peelee]

Part of the problem is that they stepped on people's headcanons established EU canon.

I've tried to move away from "fixed that for you" for the most part, but now it's much more accurate. Not to say that the established EU canon was rock-solid to begin with, but it just became a mess afterwards.

[Sapphire Guard]

What was the canon before the prequels?

[factotum]

The problem with the prequel trilogies was that George Lucas effectively said, "OK, we have this setting where space wizards with laser swords fight evil people in spaceships shooting lasers at each other, while badass space princesses also fight evil people, and also space pirates run around. Now, how can we make kids like it?"

But on the other hand he made the first prequel nominally about a trade dispute, which isn't exactly a kid-friendly subject. As for the other two, yes, the script bears a lot of blame for how they came out, but the actors involved don't get away scot free. I mean, is there anybody here who can really convince themselves that Padme and Anakin's romance was real when you have Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman exhibiting all the raw romantic chemistry of a pair of housebricks? Even given the woeful material, the likes of Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor managed to be watchable, if they'd had actors of that quality in the other roles the films might even have cleared the mediocre bar and started heading towards good.

One other note about Lucas' dreadful writing--that was there in the earlier movies too. Didn't Harrison Ford famously say to Lucas that he could write this stuff, but nobody could actually say it?

[Peelee]

What was the canon before the prequels?

The fastest example is Boba Fett was basically a kind of cop named Jaster Mereel, who was exiled and changed his name.

The Jaster Mereel/Fett family relationship was heavily altered after Ep. II.

But on the other hand he made the first prequel nominally about a trade dispute, which isn't exactly a kid-friendly subject

A kid's idea of a trade dispute, you mean. They try to resolve a trade dispute by warships and tanks, they invade the planet on the wrong side of the planet, they try to get a queen to sign a treaty while under duress, they keep trying to get the queen (ostensibly to sign the aforementioned treaty) after she told the Galactic Senate that they were trying to force her to sign a treaty, they fight an actual battle after claiming they hadn't invaded.... nothing makes sense. At all. It's a flimsy excuse for events to happen.

[Mechalich]

The PT has the fundamental problem that it is turning backstory - material initially developed to support the OT - into story. That backstory specifically was about how a tyrant rose to power by manipulating the levers of government and how a prodigy falls from grace by loving his wife too much. The first is simply not a good subject for an action film franchise, as it requires too much manipulation of what the levers of government actually are - various novels and portions of the Clone Wars TV series handles Palpatine's agglomeration of power much better because they had more time to focus on little parts of it and to provide the necessary exposition. The second aligns the least-loved (and if we're being honest least Western) aspect of Jedi philosophy as a motive, and that's a fairy heavy hurdle for the audience to buy into even if the actors had been devoted to selling it, which they simply weren't, and the specific circumstances surrounding both the Anakin/Padme romance and Padme's ultimate death are just poorly setup. Other Star Wars writers have at various points tried to sell Jedi detachment and it has always been hard - Timothy Zhan's Hand of Thrawn Duology has the best explanation - that if a Jedi loves someone they have to be able to still treat that person no differently than anyone else when it comes to priorities and that this is incredibly hard and therefore risky but still reaches the opposite conclusion and lets Luke love anyway. It would have been far better to focus Anakin's downfall on his pride and arrogance - and there are points of that in the PT - rather than on his relationship with Padme.

[Sapphire Guard]

The fastest example is Boba Fett was basically a kind of cop named Jaster Mereel, who was exiled and changed his name.

The Jaster Mereel/Fett family relationship was heavily altered after Ep. II.

Google tells me that that and some references in Thrawn to 'clonemasters' are among the key changes. But on the whole those seem like minor changes, a 'from a certain point of view' type deal. You'd expect TFA to be hit much harder on this, no Jacen Solo, no Mara Jade (unless she shows up in TLJ), the Beloved Thrawn books probably gone...

[Peelee]

Google tells me that that and some references in Thrawn to 'clonemasters' are among the key changes. But on the whole those seem like minor changes, a 'from a certain point of view' type deal.

Much of the plot of the entire Thrawn trilogy revolved around him finding the Spaarti cloning cylinders used to make the clones for the Clone Wars, and using them to bolster the Empire's military.

I would not call that a "minor, 'certain point of view'" change so much as I would call it a "massive, gaping plot hole" change.

[Zevox]

Google tells me that that and some references in Thrawn to 'clonemasters' are among the key changes. But on the whole those seem like minor changes, a 'from a certain point of view' type deal. You'd expect TFA to be hit much harder on this, no Jacen Solo, no Mara Jade (unless she shows up in TLJ), the Beloved Thrawn books probably gone...

Yeah, I have to say, I don't remember the prequels upending the EU canon that much. They don't jive with many of the references to the Clone Wars and cloning that Zahn made in the original Thrawn Trilogy, but the precise details are unimportant enough that it doesn't really hurt those books in any way. Regardless of who made the original clones or what the Clone Wars were like, Thrawn getting ahold of cloning technology from a secret cache the Emperor squirreled away on well-hidden world and using it to crew the Katana Fleet far faster than the New Republic expected works as a story. The problems with the prequels are with the prequels themselves, not the EU.

As for TFA and the EU, by the time that happened there was so much crap in the EU that Disney deciding to throw it all out of canon (except, for some reason, for the Clone Wars cartoon) was sort of a mixed thing. Yes, canon loses great stories like the Thrawn Trilogy - but it also dumps crap like, say, everything written post-New Jedi Order, and offered the chance to start anew without that. Plus, there was always going to be the potential to get the good elements of the old EU back - such as has happened with Thrawn, who was reintroduced into the canon by that new cartoon and a recent novel.

[Knaight]

I've tried to move away from "fixed that for you" for the most part, but now it's much more accurate. Not to say that the established EU canon was rock-solid to begin with, but it just became a mess afterwards.

I doubt it. The prequels were not well received, and the breadth of that poor reception is way too vast for the comparatively tiny core fandom who actually cared about the EU canon to have been a significant factor.

[dps]

I doubt it. The prequels were not well received, and the breadth of that poor reception is way too vast for the comparatively tiny core fandom who actually cared about the EU canon to have been a significant factor.

I have to agree. I don't care for the prequels, and I'm familiar with almost none of the EU.

The big problem is that there isn't really anything in the prequels to make you think that the Jedi are the good guys--we certainly have no reason to think they're bad guys, but we don't really see them do anything productive, either. Heck, for all we can tell, the Trade Federation were in the right in their dispute with Naboo, though they put themselves in the wrong by resorting to violence. Either way, the prequel Jedi mostly seem, well, incompetent.

[Peelee]

I doubt it. The prequels were not well received, and the breadth of that poor reception is way too vast for the comparatively tiny core fandom who actually cared about the EU canon to have been a significant factor.

Fair point. I will maintain that, for those who did care enough about the EU, it certainly exacerbated things.

[FreddyNoNose]

But on the other hand he made the first prequel nominally about a trade dispute, which isn't exactly a kid-friendly subject. As for the other two, yes, the script bears a lot of blame for how they came out, but the actors involved don't get away scot free. I mean, is there anybody here who can really convince themselves that Padme and Anakin's romance was real when you have Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman exhibiting all the raw romantic chemistry of a pair of housebricks? Even given the woeful material, the likes of Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor managed to be watchable, if they'd had actors of that quality in the other roles the films might even have cleared the mediocre bar and started heading towards good.

One other note about Lucas' dreadful writing--that was there in the earlier movies too. Didn't Harrison Ford famously say to Lucas that he could write this stuff, but nobody could actually say it?

Why you gotta drag housebricks into this? What did they do to you?

For me the bad: Jar Jar, Little Anakin, Older Anakin, Padme, their romance....That Pod Race!

The good: fights between jedi and sith. Palpatine. Liam and Ewan too. Order 66.

[Kitten Champion]

I watched The Phantom Menace before I was 10, and I didn't like it whatsoever. I actually distinctly recall the point in the movie where Darth Maul raises his cowl and reveals those little horns of his that the audience breaking out into spontaneous laughter at how corny it was. Which was the only reaction anyone had the whole time.

God, I know dumping on Jake Lloyd has been overdone and I don't want to come off that way, but as a kid around his age at the time - and this goes for a lot of portrayals of children in media - I don't understand why writers approach them as they do. Somewhere between precocious and painfully saccharine, it's mind-numbing. I know Jar Jar gets a lot the steaming manure pushed his way but I just found him literally incomprehensible, Anakin however was cringe-inducing.

I did go back to watch The Attack of the Clones because we had a new theater built down the road (which has changed hands at least 4 times since) and my parents wanted to revel in the air conditioning more than anything. However, even with the somewhat lowered expectation it was absolute dreck, the worst movie I've seen in theaters to this date. The jumbled plot, the wooden dumb-as-bricks dialogue, the overblown action ending between two armies of which neither I gave a crap about, and the distinct impression that light-sabers are a giant crutch to make up for everything else.

Above all though AotC's real sin is making Anakin Skywalker into both an awful character and terrible human being. If you're defining the work around his tragic fall on the backdrop of the fall of an ancient democracy into tyrannical fascism then you need sympathetic qualities for actual pathos rather than telling us he's a great man repeatedly and showing him be nothing but a possessive self-absorbed a-hole equally prone to childish tantrums and homicidal rages. Likewise, I didn't give a damn about the Republic, I barely knew anything about it and every character within it was some degree of uninteresting or laughably written.

I didn't watch Revenge of the Sith until a while after its release, it's just... nothing. There are no emotional stakes to any of it, despite the heavy-handed melodrama in the script that try to declare otherwise. Seeing the summation of the trilogy's events elicited nothing but "meh" from me.

[Peelee]

I did go back to watch The Attack of the Clones because we had a new theater built down the road (which has changed hands at least 4 times since) and my parents wanted to revel in the air conditioning more than anything.

Being from the South, I've never been able to relate to the "let's go to the movies because they have air conditioning" mentality.

[Thrudd]

I don't think that the prequels upset a lot of EU - from my understanding, at a certain point (probably when they started thinking the prequels could one day get made) the Lucas licensing people specifically forbade people to write stories within the time period of the prequels and dealing with the histories of the main characters or the clone wars. The history of Boba Fett was written in an early short story collection about all the bounty hunters from ESB, before the prequels were conceived of as a possibility. There were also other totally different origin stories told of him before Lucas locked down the EU.

The problem for me was not that they stepped on some kind of headcannon or EU stuff about the clone wars, but that they were just bad, poorly thought out stories without the emotional impact that Anakin's fall to darkness could have had. They couldn't even be bothered to establish a believable continuity with the information about that time period that was given in the original trilogy. Regarding Anakin, Obi Wan and Yoda's relationship. Uncle Owen and Anakin's relationship during the clone wars "he felt he should've stayed here instead of getting involved". And then Leia's memories of her mother. They decide instead to make Obi Wan an even bigger liar than he already was about Vader's identity, yet never address this character flaw. It would have made more sense for him to basically be a rogue jedi himself - the "maverick cop" who doesn't play by the rules, lying to Anakin during their training which contributes to Anakin's disillusionment with the jedi.


I feel like almost anything that anyone who is a fan of Star Wars can think of as a prequel story would be better than what Lucas gave us.

[Lethologica]

At the structural level...There's a great story hidden in the prequels, but they decided to tell separate and really bad half-stories instead. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Galactic Republic has no weight, because most of it happens offscreen (unless you watch Clone Wars), and none of it is tied to the characters or their development. Meanwhile, there's character drama between Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Padme that lacks weight because none of it is tied to the greater story. That's when there's character drama at all, which isn't the case in the first movie.

At the moment-to-moment level...whether by acting or direction or excessive CGI, everyone is flat-faced and -voiced (except McDiarmid, the good ham, and Hayden Christensen, the rotten ham, and McGregor, the wise-cracker). And while not all of the dialogue was terrible, it should have been rewritten from scratch.

[leoryff]

Much of the plot of the entire Thrawn trilogy revolved around him finding the Spaarti cloning cylinders used to make the clones for the Clone Wars, and using them to bolster the Empire's military.

I would not call that a "minor, 'certain point of view'" change so much as I would call it a "massive, gaping plot hole" change.

Cause, you know, it's not at all possible that a massive galaxy wide civilization would have multiple methods of cloning. Or that a sociopath like Palpatine would use lesser clones to supplement his army at some point in his rule.

That'd just be unrealistic.

[Peelee]

Cause, you know, it's not at all possible that a massive galaxy wide civilization would have multiple methods of cloning. Or that a sociopath like Palpatine would use lesser clones to supplement his army at some point in his rule.

That'd just be unrealistic.

EU did have multiple methods of cloning. And Thrawn grabbed the cloning cylinders that were explicitly exclusively used by the Emperor, which were also a secret to everybody else. Meanwhile, the films and later EU explicitly state that all Republic clone soldiers were Kaminoan, and based off Jango Fett.

[DataNinja]

Meanwhile, the films and later EU explicitly state that all Republic clone soldiers were Kaminoan, and based off Jango Fett.

Actually, the later Republic Commando books included flash-trained clone troops from Spartii Cylinders, based out of a facility on Centax-2, one of the moons of Coruscant.

[hamishspence]

EU did have multiple methods of cloning. And Thrawn grabbed the cloning cylinders that were explicitly exclusively used by the Emperor, which were also a secret to everybody else. Meanwhile, the films and later EU explicitly state that all Republic clone soldiers were Kaminoan, and based off Jango Fett.

The post-AOTC EU also introduced other cloners besides the Kaminoans, producing "fast-grown" Jango clones (Arkania, which grew them much faster, but they were less effective - Republic Commando series).

Zahn even wrote a story for Star Wars Insider explaining exactly how that batch of Spaarti cloning cylinders ended up in the Chancellor's hands - Heroes of Cartao.

The EU had to do a lot of work to reconcile older ideas with the PT - but its writers were generally willing to do this.

[Peelee]

Wasn't a big part of the Spaarri cylinders that clones had to be grown in real-time until Thrawn figured out how to get away with speeding it up?

Regardless, y'all are right, I'll accept they I'm wrong here.

[DataNinja]

Wasn't a big part of the Spaarri cylinders that clones had to be grown in real-time until Thrawn figured out how to get away with speeding it up?

Not real-time, but still on the scale of about a year, IIRC. Better than the 10 years of Kamino, so, fine for the Republic, but still not ideal for Thrawn - who managed to cut that down to weeks or days (I can't remember which).

[hamishspence]

Wasn't a big part of the Spaarri cylinders that clones had to be grown in real-time until Thrawn figured out how to get away with speeding it up?

1 year though (and the clones will only just pass muster) - still slower than 15-20 days (Thrawn's speed) - but fast enough that it's plausible for the project to be started during the war and for the clones to be serving alongside Kamino clones in the last weeks of the war.

[DataNinja]

Clearly, I should just leave this all to hamishspence, who knows the details far better than I.