“Tell me you didn’t watch the prequel’s without telling me you didn’t watch the prequels”

Also btw, lots of this post is a joke, it’s fun looking at your replies and i understand them

Yeah, I enjoy watching the PT, but I definitely agree it's overrated.

Some my issues with it:

• The villains were kind of wasted. Maul is killed off by Episode I, Dooku is introduced in Episode II and is killed off right when Episode III starts. As much as I like Grievous, I felt like he was just added in along the way because George realized he needed another villain after Dooku died.

• Anakin and Padme's relationship. It goes from 9-year-old slave boy crushing on this 14-year-old queen, to Padme marrying a genocidal maniac. Even if Padme overlooked his evil actions, Anakin is still a walking red flag.

• Speaking of Anakin, there's a whole plethora of problems with his character. Aside from having some of the worst dialogue ever, he is still not likeable. He can't take criticism; he throws a fit when the council doesn't grant him the rank of master and he's whiny. He falls to the Dark Side to save Padme but then kills her on Mustafar. Like I get that he thought she betrayed him but force choking her really undid any reason he had for turning to the Dark Side in the first place. Either he is just really stupid, has dementia, or can't make up his mind on why he joined the Dark Side.

Look, I get that some people will say "but those problems were fixed in TCW!", but I disagree. Sure, they could've fixed lore-wise, but that doesn't fix the actual movies we saw.

^You make a valid point about the writing of the romance.

I was personally not bothered by the somewhat swift elimination of each of the secondary antagonists, seeing that the main villain remained the same throughout the entire trilogy. But I can see where you’re coming from.

But your arguments about Anakin’s flaws and how he isn’t likeable is actually to a large degree how he was meant to be portrayed, in my opinion.

Anakin being arrogant, being hotheaded, being easily wounded in his pride, being overconfident, and being possessive are definitely traits his character is meant to have since they are the ones who lead him to the dark side.

And I‘d argue that he didn’t hurt Padme because he was dumb or because the writing was flawed - on the contrary, Anakin’s reaction on Mustafar is a main point of the entire series. He lost himself to the dark side. He believed he was able to control it but, as usual with the dark side, that was a lie. Anakin was always impulsive and somewhat jealous/possessive and when he officially turned to the dark side, it increased tenfold. He was filled with so much anger and darkness at this point, he wasn’t acting rationally anymore.

It‘s nothing to do with being dumb but with letting your darkness get ahold of you. That’s the entire point of Anakin’s story. His weaknesses and their increase were presented in every media he appeared in in order to explain how he fell to the dark side.

Now, it is probably a fair criticism that it isn’t that easy to sympathize with him if he appeared as unlikeable from the start. That’s probably due to the time jumps between the movies since Lucas seems to have wanted to cover different periods in Anakin’s life in only three movies. So, I‘d say the issue is less that Anakin appears as unlikeable (he ended up as an infamous Sith Lord; he needed to have some undesirable qualities), and more that the transition between the movies wasn’t all that smooth

I mean, I seriously think Anakin's turn to the darkside was wayyy too quick and that didn't make sense.

^Anakin's turn to the dark side started in Episode I. He didn't want things to change, he wanted to hold on to coming and passing things, he wanted to own, to possess things in his life, even though they're only passing through your life and life itself passes through you. This resulted in him being afraid of him losing his mother, which was his fear of not having the happiness in his life. "But you can't stop change any more than you can stop the suns from setting" as Shmi teaches him. This is attachment, as opposed to compassion, which is unconditional love, wanting another person to be happy and free from suffering. This is why he was deemed unfit to be a Jedi Knight: fear is behind anger, anger is behind hate, Yoda basically spells his turn to the dark side. In Episode II, Anakin loses his mother, his fear turns into anger and hate and revenge, wiping out the village, and even though he regrets it terribly, we witness a temporary shift into Darth Vader. He swears to learn how to stop people from dying, i.e. he swears to stop the suns from setting. In Episode III, when he has a premonition that Padmé is going to die, Yoda tells him, he must accept that things come and things go, and that attachment is leading to suffering, but when Sidious lies that he can teach him how to stop the suns from setting, i.e. keeping Padmé and others he loves alive and in his life so they can make him happy, even though he is unhappy with the stuff Sidious wants him to do in turn, he pledges, "I will do anything you ask, just help me save Padmé's life, I can't live without her!" And he does anything he is told to do, including killing younglings.

Anakin: Possession is 9/10 of the law.

Fans: Is that legal?

Anakin: I will make it legal.

I think they are enjoyable

To me the reason why the prequels got better because both The Clone Wars and Rebels helped them to be great movies

Plus shows now like The Bad Batch, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Tales of the Jedi is what thee prequels even more entertaining

I hear your points and can’t negate them. I was in my freshman year of college when the PT came out and I kind of poo-pooed it until someone told me about Joseph Campbell & mythos & how George Lucas sought his counsel when writing all of Star Wars (effectively being Campbell’s padawan), about the Hero’s journey. At first I was like: “nnnmooooo all the cgi”, but if you boil down the essential story and ignore the clunky new (at the time) technology, it makes the whole experience so much richer. Like, I grew up thinking Luke was the Main Character. I had no idea until the prequels that it is Anakin.

I have always loved the prequels in spite of their flaws, but I grew up with them. Probably the most appealing thing about them for my friends and me was the worldbuilding to the universe, not just from the trilogy but also from that era of Star Wars content that it kicked off in general.

The two worst flaws of the prequels in my opinion are the depiction of Anakin and Padmé's relationship dynamic on-screen and the lackluster scriptwriting in general.

For the former, I disagree with the most prevailing criticism of Padmé "condoning" Anakin's massacre of the Tusken Raider tribes because in the context of that particular moment (Padmé was anxious all night at both Anakin and Shmi's wellbeing), of their relationship (she actually saw him as a real friend who she cared about), and Padmé's personality (a martyr complex who struggle with boundaries), it is not at all realistic to expect her to ghost Anakin right then and there. The problem is that the movie does not present the canonical dynamics of their relationship well to us due to poor editing decisions that truncated their dialogue, poor acting direction, and poor chemistry between the actors, all leading to the film telling us that Anakin creeps Padmé out and then she suddenly falls in love with him anyways. That is apparently not the narrative intent as clarified in the novel, which is that Padmé was already attracted to Anakin when they first met again as adults, had an emotional need that he could fulfill, and that they both felt conflicted. The fact that Attack of the Clones pretty much portrayed the opposite is its most substantial flaw... but for me, it is a testament to its other merits that it is still a good movie overall.

I think their romance tends to overshadow those other merits, like all the incredible work that went into the cinematography, the world design, and the sound design, or how the plot in general is concise, well-paced, and fits into the overall saga. If you rewatch some scenes in isolation, like the pursuit of Zam Wesell, the fight between Obi-Wan and Jango on Kamino, and the subsequent dogfight over Geonosis, Attack of the Clones has some truly amazing cinematic scenes.

For that matter, there is nothing wrong with Palpatine's assassination attempt of Padmé. His aim was to eliminate the leader of the opposition to the Military Creation Act, and hitmen subcontracting to other hitmen is true to reality (there was a funny story that came out of China once where hitmen kept on subcontracting the hit until like 8 rounds later the last guy felt that the cut wasn't worth the trouble and reported them all 😂). Jango Fett using a dart he thought would be untraceable is a genuine and realistic tactical mistake, which the Visual Dictionary published at the time already addressed in the form of a dispute with Zam Wesell about the stealthiness of the attack vs. leaving behind evidence.

As for Revenge of the Sith, I wholeheartedly believe that it was a 10/10 across all metrics except the fight choreography (of Anakin vs. Dooku & duel vs. Sidious) and the dialogue, which was pitifully weak and dampened (but did not ruin) the emotional impact of some critical scenes like the duel on Mustafar. Unfortunately, dialogue is a huge part of what makes or breaks a movie, and again, it is a testament to the strengths of the film that it was not ruined because of the terrible lines. It has what is in my opinion the best opening cinematic out of every film in history, as well as one of the most creative plot twists (Order 66) that we now tend to take for granted.

Anakin's fall to the dark side is very profound, and he is one of the most well written characters in fiction in my opinion. I notice a lot of people miss the complex psychological issues that led up to it, like his inability to confront his own mistake of getting Mace Windu killed, the egotism behind his love for Padmé resulting ultimately in domestic violence, and his underlying tendency to devalue the lives of people in his out-group.

As for The Phantom Menace, my issue with this movie even back when I was a kid is just that it is relatively boring. It is a plateau the entire way, and I never hit a high watching it. Only the climactic duel with Darth Maul comes close. Even reading the novel, I felt like I was reading one of those boring Scholastic novels back in elementary school. But boredom aside, the plot is genuinely okay. There aren't critical lorebreaking problems with it unlike with the sequel trilogy.

Finally, I also never understood the criticisms of the CGI beyond that it was challenging for the actors. The CGI of the prequels was actually groundbreaking for their time and are better than a lot of the CGI in recent Marvel movies and Star Wars shows.