Jade Defends: The Star Wars prequel trilogy

[JadePharaoh]

In 1977, George Lucas would forever change the way we looked at movies. The release of his space opera, 'Star Wars' (at the time, there was no Episode 4 attached as he didn't know if it was going to do well enough to warrant a follow-up) exploded into a worldwide phenomenon and quickly became one of the most popular and recognizable franchises of all time. It received a sequel a few years later, The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 (it was at this time when they retroactively subtitled the first movie "A New Hope"), closing the trilogy with Return of the Jedi in 1983, telling the story of Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance and their battles against the Galactic Empire and Darth Vader (who *OMG SPOILERS* is Luke's long-lost father Anakin). 

There was just one thing, though. The original movies were subtitled as Episodes 4, 5, and 6; what happened to Episodes 1, 2, and 3? Well, in 1999 we finally got our answer with a brand-new trilogy; one that tells the story of Anakin Skywalker before he became the Sith lord Darth Vader, and of the Old Republic before it was usurped and transformed into the Empire by Palpatine. Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace premiered in 1999 to tremendous fanfare. I myself was stoked for it and watched in in theaters twice (three times if you count the time it came out in 3D a few years back). This would then be followed up with Episode 2: Attack of the Clones in 2002 (finally bringing us the Clone War mentioned in A New Hope), and then brought to a grand finale in Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith in 2005; Anakin goes full Dark Side, Palpatine takes control, and things go to hell until A New Hope brings us full circle. 

I for one thought the movies were great. Maybe I was too blinded by my Star Wars fandom to see anything wrong with them, but I don't think it was until around the time Attack of the Clones came out when I first started seeing and hearing a lot of comments about how much of a disappointment Phantom Menace was. As time went by, I started seeing more and more remarks about how terrible these movies allegedly are. It's reached the point now where it seems to be a universally-accepted truth that the Star Wars prequels are complete and utter garbage and you are not a "true" Star Wars fan unless you despise them with every fiber of your being. Not only that, but it seems that nowhere can you even bring Star Wars up at all without someone making a remark about the prequels and how god-awful they are, whether it had any context in what was being discussed or not. 

So, what went wrong? What happened in these prequels that caused Star Wars fans to unleash their own Dark Side against the man that brought them the original series that they so beloved? Let us start with the biggest elephant in the room, or shall we say Gungan, Jar-Jar Binks

Quigon Jinn and a young Obi-wan Kenobi would encounter this offbeat character shortly after arriving on Naboo and he tags along with them for the remainder of The Phantom Menace. It is quite apparent that he is the comic relief of the movie, and while the series has not been completely without characters like this before (C-3PO seemed to be the main source of comic relief in the original trilogy), Jar-Jar quickly came off as more annoying than funny. Whether it was his grating voice (which some have even gone so far as to call a racist caricature), his incredible clumsiness, his ability to insert himself into key moments in the plot and still come out on top, or most likely a combination of all of the above, Jar-Jar would enjoy a meteoric rise to becoming the most despised character in the franchise. It was likely for this reason that he would have a greatly diminished role in Attack of the Clones (although he is still relevant enough to become a Galactic Senator and is the one to convince the Republic to abandon democracy and grant dictatorial powers to Palpatine), and only makes a couple of brief appearances in Revenge of the Sith with no speaking roles. 

While I can offer little defense for Jar-Jar’s character, I will say this; what if the hatred we feel for him was intentional? I have only recently seen a very compelling fan theory that suggests that Jar-Jar is in fact a powerful Sith lord and the puppet master behind everything that transpires; he’s only been playing the fool the entire time to get close to the protagonists and avoid any suspicion of wrongdoing. (Yoda was likewise introduced in Empire as a goofy, ridiculous creature before he was revealed to be the Jedi master Luke was seeking that entire time.) According to the theory, Lucas backed out from making this reveal due to the major backlash Jar-Jar got and hastily shoehorned in Count Dooku as a placeholder. If this ends up being confirmed, it forces us to look back at the prequels in a completely different light. Check this out for more details on this theory and how it makes a surprising amount of sense:



Something else about Phantom Menace that seems to have bothered some people was the pod race scene. I think it can be widely agreed that that whole scene can more-or-less be summed up as “Wacky Races in space”. My biggest problem with the scene was just that it went on for WAY too long. It’s even worse in the DVD version of the movie, which has an EXTENDED cut of that scene. 

I almost forgot about this one, but there was one more thing... midichlorions. Rather the mystical form of energy that Jedi and Sith can harness, they attempt to give a scientific explanation for The Force by having it be the product of tiny organisms inside one's cells. I guess people really didn't like having science in their science fiction, as the whole thing was quickly and quietly dropped after Phantom Menace.

But what about Clones and Sith? With Jar-Jar’s greatly reduced role, fans should have been much kinder to these movies, right? Wrong. Attack of the Clones may very well be regarded even worse than Phantom Menace depending on who you talk to, and even I’ll admit that I consider it the weakest of all of the movies. My biggest reasons for feeling this way are the pacing as well as how… schizophrenic it is. It feels like it’s trying to do too much within a 2.5 hour time frame yet at the same time feels like it drags on longer than it should. On the one hand we have the blossoming love story between Anakin and Padme. Truth be told, I don’t think Lucas is good at writing romance. The budding romance between Leia and Han in the original movies was kept short and sweet; it was enough for us to know it was happening yet it didn’t need to take up half the movie of the two just sitting around talking about their feelings. Hell, one of the best moments before Han was frozen in carbonite, “I love you!” “I know.”, was ad-libbed by Harrison Ford; Lucas’ original script called for him to just say “I love you too.” before Ford pointed out that just didn’t seem like Han’s style.

So half the movie was the awkward romance between Anakin and Padme, the other half was Obi-wan tracking down the source of the recent assassination attempts on Padme. While this part of the movie certainly had its moments, there are parts of it that I felt were some wasted potential. The first was all of the stuff involving the Clone Army. Obi-wan stumbles on it accidentally while following the assassin’s trail and finds that it has been worked on for the last several years, under the order of a Jedi master named Sifadeas (who, according to Obi-wan, died some time ago). Who was Sifadeas? When and why did he order this clone army? We never find out; he is never mentioned again after this. We are also introduced to Jango Fett, the template for the Clone Army, and is the bounty hunter responsible for the assassination attempts, under the orders of one Darth Tyranus. We see a pretty epic fight scene with him and Obi-wan, but then he’s hardly seen again until near the end of the movie where he’s killed off in a somewhat anticlimactic fashion. Oh, and we also meet his son, Boba, who we will naturally be seeing more of later… Finally this brings us to Darth Tyranus himself, aka Count Dooku. Despite being played by the late, great Christopher Lee, it felt as though his overall role in the movie was largely insignificant. His purpose was mainly just Palpatine’s errand boy to the Geonosians, retrieve the blueprints for what would become the Death Star, have an epic lightsaber battle with Obi-wan, then Anakin, and then Yoda, and that’s about it. No backstory, no motivation, barely any buildup to him, not much of anything. I think this fits nicely with the Jar-Jar theory mentioned above; that Lucas originally intended for Jar-Jar to be revealed as Darth Tyranus before he got cold feet and quickly wrote in Dooku as a stand-in. Overall, I'd say these parts of the movie would have been better if they took time that was allotted to the Anakin/Padme romance and used it to fill in some of these gaps instead.

Finally, this brings us to Revenge of the Sith. And this one, more than either of the other two, I cannot for the life of me understand why people hate this one too. I thought RotS was excellent. But, I’ll get into the biggest criticisms I saw. First one, people felt Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side was too abrupt. I don’t think it was abrupt at all. We’ve seen Anakin wrestling with his fear and anger throughout the previous two movies. His fear of losing his mother and later Padme, losing nearly all sight of anything besides those things, his blind massacre of a Tuskan village when his mother was killed, his arrogance and disrespect toward his fellow Jedi, etc. His helping Palpatine kill Mace Windu was the final push that drove him over the edge, but he had been teetering on it for almost this entire time. 

Another big point of contention is Padme’s death. She gives birth to Luke and Leia, and then just dies for reasons that the medical droids are completely unable to explain (other than why she’s not in the original trilogy). They speculate that she just “lost the will to live” after losing Anakin to the Dark Side or that she died of a “broken heart”, but most fans, myself included, find that a tough pill to swallow given how strong-willed Padme has always been up until this time, for her to just abruptly give up on not only her own life, but her two newborn babies as well, because of a “broken heart”. I’ve read yet another fan theory that makes much more sense; that Palpatine drained the living Force from her to save the mortally-wounded Anakin. Even though the movie doesn’t come right out and say this is what happens, the subtleties are indeed there.



Finally, there was Vader’s big “NOOOOOOOOOO!!!”. This scene has been ridiculed so much, and while it’s pretty hammy, I don’t see it as any less hammy than Luke’s big “NOOOOOOOOOO!!!” at the end of Empire after the “I am your father” reveal.



If you ask me, however, I think the biggest reason the prequels are so widely despised, is pure Nostalgia Filter. Most people tend to look at the original trilogy through rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. When the new movies came out, 16 years after the Return of the Jedi, people built up such a monolithic standard for them that they had no chance of living up to, hence the massive disappointment. I felt the exact same thing happened when Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull got ripped to shreds by Indy fans (it was no Last Crusade, but I felt it was alright too).

So I’ve been talking about the negatives of the trilogy for awhile now, be them criticisms I’ve heard from others or my own in the case of Episode 2. But all things considered, I do not think these issues make them bad movies. Especially since they had just as many awesome moments that are frequently ignored in the interest of accentuating the negative. The lightsaber battles are frequently the biggest highlights of these movies, being much more visually impressive than the ones in the original trilogy. Although old-school fans were highly critical about the over-reliance on CGI, it still showed us just how much LucasFilm and ILM could continue to push the envelope in creating amazing visual effects, just as the original trilogy did for 1970s-80s special effects. People focus on Hayden Christenson’s Anakin and his allegedly poor acting, but ignore the many great actors. Ewan McGregor did a fantastic job as Obi-wan (and as far as I can tell, never openly declared his resentment toward the movies as the previous Obi-wan, Alec Guinness did), and his emotional lines near the end of Sith as he fights his former friend and comrade are pretty chilling. The BMF himself, Samuel Jackson as Mace Windu was great, especially his face-off with Palpatine partway through RotS. Ian McDiarmid was absolutely fantastic as Palpatine. Especially in RotS when in full Sith mode he didn’t just chew the scenery, he ravenously devoured it and demanded seconds. The biggest problem with the plot, I think, was the same as it is whenever you do a prequel; everything from Anakin being corrupted by the Dark Side, the fall of the Jedi, Palpatine plunging the Republic into tyranny, etc, is a foregone conclusion. Otherwise, the political intrigue of the plot was pretty good, even if it didn’t live up to its full potential.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say on it for now, I guess. Episode 7: The Force Awakens comes out very soon, and people seem to be very excited for it; seemingly because Lucas is no longer affiliated with the franchise, rather than in spite of it. As someone who still enjoyed the prequels despite the perceived flaws, I have little doubt the new trilogy will be great as well.