I originally saw the Star Wars prequels when the came out. I was in high school and then college, loved the original trilogy like everybody, and was absolutely torqued to see these films. So, as you might imagine, I was personally furious at George Lucas and have spent the intervening decades openly sneering at what he did to his own greatest creation.
When my wife this week suggested that we re-watch the entire Star Wars saga in chronological order, I realized it was time to revisit that opinion. This time I went in with expectations low, like “if this movie doesn’t poop on my carpet it’ll be fine” low, which is always a great place to watch a movie.
Long story short: They’re still quite bad, but they’re bad for reasons I now understand and in their badness they have redeeming value. This is quite in contrast to, say, “The Matrix: Resurrections”, which is bad in a joyless, sterile way.
In other words: The new Matrix was *cringe* because it settled for winky jokes and rehashed tropes. This trilogy is *off the rails* because it has too many ideas and too much ambition without Lawrence Kasdan (who wrote “Empire Strikes Back) to bring it all together and make it sing. But the latter is much preferable! And without the white hot rage of youth, I can appreciate the prequels a lot more, and will definitely show them to my kids one day.
SPOILER: Just for anyone who is not familiar, this trilogy concerns the tragic character arc of Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader, from slave-boy to Jedi Knight to traitor and mass murderer. Using his love for Queen Amidala as a lever, the scheming Senator (a.k.a. Emperor) Palpatine pries Anakin—the most powerful Jedi of all time—away from goodness and towards the Dark Side of the Force.
So first, the bad. Why do these movies suck so much?
1) The Jedi are not interesting as characters.
Like big picture of course they’re compelling in their galactic scope and immense power. But in any given scene, they’re minimally emotional, annoyingly honorable, and (at least in these scripts) just kinda dumb.
Plus, they all have basically the same personality, so none of the arguments are very interesting. It’s a bunch of reasonable, in-control people sitting around and having heated-but-polite discussions about things while the galaxy burns around them. Everybody is constantly disagreeing and yet nobody ever changes anybody’s mind and nothing comes of it.
Jedi work great as a complementary perspective, with the story anchored in someone like a Han Solo or a Luke Skywalker, who are more emotionally-driven and less predictable. These films put the Jedi at the center and put the script in a hole from the start.
2) The love story is strange from minute one.
Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) is a fourteen-year-old girl who is aware of the existence of Ewan Macgregor, official handsomest Jedi in the galaxy. She is a straight woman. Yet she doesn’t really seem to notice him, goes on the run with Liam Neeson, and instead forms an immediate connection with the local nine-year-old slave boy who (and I understand that actor is a kid and I blame the script and not him, but he genuinely) has the charisma of a dirty rock.
Things don’t get much better from there. She gets together with him after a halting courtship, desperately attracted to him despite him being immature even for a teenager (which he still is, and she’s twenty-four, and he’s of age and I get that this happens with the genders swapped all the time so I’m not judging it morally, but I just don’t understand why she would be so into him even though he looks like Hayden Christiansen).
Then in the third movie (which really is is the best of the three despite the rest of this sentence), Amidala gets pregnant, and suddenly becomes just an absolute plot device and nothing more, and the men go off to decide what they’re going to do with The Force while she sits around and cries and pines for Anakin and then eventually *dies* basically of a broken heart despite the fact that she knows the guy she’s pining for is a homicidal maniac, and her last words are “there’s still good in him”. Oi gevault.
3) Jar Jar Binks isn’t just racist—he’s in a different movie.
The racist stuff is obvious and I won’t rehash it. There are racist accents all over these movies, and I don’t think anyone involved in making them had a racist thought in their heads. If you were actually a racist, you wouldn’t dare do things this obvious, even back then. This trilogy finished in the 21st century!
Here’s a great wired profile of Ahmed Best, the black actor who played Jar Jar Binks: https://www.wired.com/2017/07/ahmed-best-jar-jar-binks-new-podcast/
I learned a lot from that piece, and I think it encapsulates a lot of what’s so hard about making art in general. Best is extremely likable and, after a long time in the wilderness, has recovered to have a career and some peace with what happened.
The other problem with Jar Jar, though, is that he’s just never doing anything that relates to the story of the movie. He wanders in the background, stumbling into things, in the back of talky scenes full of emotional expressions. At points it’s as if he literally got a different script than the other actors, in the hopes that the confusion could provide comic relief.
4) Nothing about the plot is thought through or makes sense.
All of the following occurs *just in the second act of the third (and best of the trilogy) film*:
Count Dooku is aware of the “Rule of Two”, where there can only be two Sith Lords at any given time and when a new one is made one must be killed. And yet, he fights both Obi Wan and Anakin while the Emperor just sits there, yet he never wonders if he might be getting replaced, and appears shocked when the Emperor orders Anakin to kill him after the fight.
The Emperor puts Anakin on the Jedi Council, but then the Council gratuitously insults him by refusing him the rank of master, and there’s no scene where we see them debate that decision! They just do it casually and Obi Wan gives a side-eye look like “This wasn’t my call” and it totally changes the course of galactic history, seemingly without anyone ever going “should we make this kid a master and see how he handles it rather that make him all instantly despise us”.
Then Anakin—a seasoned fighter and the most talented Jedi ever born—throws an instant public tantrum for about thirty seconds, is told to shut up one time, then folds, apologizes and accepts his fate, then goes and apologizes to Obi Wan again for general insolence, with no apparent reason for the about face.
Later, Anakin approaches Mace Windu (Sam Jackson) and warns him that the Emperor is actually a Sith Lord. This seems like a pretty serious statement of character! And yet, Mace doesn’t miss a beat before telling him he can’t be trusted enough to help arrest the Emperor, then leaving him alone without having him watched, apparently trusting that he’ll follow orders?
There is literally a line where Obi Wan says to Anakin “How did this happen? We’re smarter than this!” and Anakin replies “Apparently not.” Pretty much sums it up.
5) We know way too much of what’s going to happen.
As my wife pointed out just now, anyone who has seen the original trilogy (approximately everyone) knows that Yoda and Obi Wan are going to live, the Emperor and Anakin are going to get disfigured, and the Empire will be in charge when the credits roll.
There’s a certain amount of fan-service-value in playing out these big moments everyone knows are coming, and they certainly play that card with gusto, but it’s never going to be as good as a genuinely surprising plot, and it’s not.
6) Even Natalie Portman is bad in these movies.
There’s no better argument for the importance of screenwriting than the fact that Stephen Baldwin was fantastic in “The Usual Suspects” and Natalie Portman is wooden and one-note in these clunkers. Case Closed.
HOWEVER:
There are some really great parts to these movies:
The CGI got a lot better from the first to the third movie. Like a LOT better. They were made at a crucial point in the development of CGI, between the amazing-for-the-time-but-obviously-a-movie Aah-nold and Stallone flicks of the 90s and the you-could-forget-it’s-not-real magic that started really being possible in the 2010s. Lucas changed the game again from that standpoint, even though the scripts put a ceiling on the overall quality.
Lots of the set pieces are genuinely fun and well-designed. Pod-racing drags on way too long and isn’t set up to have real emotional stakes, and that got a lot of attention, but later in the series George Lucas’ genuine talent for creating unique situations asserts itself. The Palpatine-Yoda fight is a gem, and the Obi Wan-Anakin fight has inventive elements, and culminates in the best shot of the entire trilogy, as Vader gets his helmet put on for the first time, and draws that first mechanical, wheezing breath.
Here’s a transcript of a development meeting in 1978 between George Lucas, Steven Spielburg, and Lawrence Kasdan about the new movie they were developing, “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”: https://maddogmovies.com/almost/scripts/raidersstoryconference1978.pdf
It’s a deep dive, but I’ve read that entire document 5+ times and it’s really informed the way I think about stories, and about developing ideas in general, and I think it’s worth your time if that’s something you care about. Three geniuses in the same room, plying their trade together, and that’s the point—George Lucas writes corny, on-the-nose dialogue, but there’s genius under there.
ON THE INTERNET:
There is a significant community of adult fans on the internet who genuinely love these films, and consider them ‘better’ in some sense than the originals. (Lots of overlap with the people who think the TobeyMacguire/Sam Raimi Spiderman movies are better than the later Marvel ones, but that’s the subject of a different essay.)
They congregate (among other places) on Reddit at reddit.com/r/prequelmemes where they share their loves for the series in the form of extremely inside jokes and meta-memes that my wife and I understood less than half of when we browsed it after watching the third movie. This one did make me laugh though:
(There’s no explaining this, you either get it or not depending on how well you remember “Revenge of the Sith”.)
/r/PrequelMemes is a well down which you could lose yourself, but the point is that it exists. These films to have an enduring power—they have a point of view. That’s what makes them better than the new Matrix or other sci fi-schlock. These movies aren’t schlocky at all! Nobody was phoning it in. They’re zany and under-developed and the product of a singular mind in a way almost nothing with this budget ever is in Hollywood.
George Lucas is a complete weirdo who thinks people complaining about sand is compelling character work and writes love stories like a thirteen-year-old with a spectrum disorder, and these movies reflect that fact. The latest Star Wars movies are certainly slicker and better written, but they’ve taken on some of the polished sterility of Everything Else. When the last weirdo is gone, and everything is either perfect or a bummer, we’ll miss having movies like these to make fun of with our friends and loved ones.
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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, please feel free to like, comment, or share! I’ll be back next Sunday with another original story. Until then, have a great week!