Garrett’s Grumblings – Are The Star Wars Prequels Really That Bad?

Well, that does it. As The Force Awakens Day (December 18th) inches closer and closer, I am at wit’s end. I have sat on the sidelines and waited for Law and Moreno to finally give the go ahead to us doing the Star Wars Episodes I – VI commentaries, which I know are coming eventually. But I have so much to say about the merits of the much derided Star Wars prequels that I thought I would give a little preview in this column. I feel that Star Wars is this generation’s Woodstock. It is such a massive cultural phenomenon that it’s impossible to examine out of context. There are so many layers through which it gets viewed that you can’t peel all of them away at once. That in itself is what makes the outrage connected to the prequels so fascinating to me. More on that later. First, let me explore what the original trilogy means to me.

I find myself wondering even in this age of instant internet knowledge whether there are still people who do not know that there was a time when Episode IV: A New Hope was simply known as—Star Wars. Despite what the series would eventually become, I have always held the first film in the highest of regards. Reason being that I have always thought what made the first Star Wars movie so good was that it didn’t have to live up to the hype of being a ‘Star Wars‘ movie like the subsequent films did. The charm that comes with what would eventually become known as Episode IV drips off of every frame of film as it plays, and the much maligned -most famously by Harrison Ford himself- stilted dialogue does nothing to get in the way of what a fun piece of filmmaking it is. Also, despite its relative low end $10 million budget, all influences of George Lucas’s childhood are right there on the screen for us to see. From Flash Gordon to Shakespeare, Star Wars is a pure distillation of its influences, meaning that Lucas borrowed well from his childhood, and hired better hands to carry them out.

The Empire Strikes Back, it can be argued, is the one movie in the franchise that does not, in one way or another, cater to kids. Its storyline is very dark, as there is no hope for all our heroes, and we as an audience have no choice but to sit and watch them suffer. Luke loses his hand, and finds out not only that his mentor lied to him about who Vader is, but the man who did it is his father. Han is captured by Vader when he is betrayed by temporary turncoat Lando Calrissian, and there is an aura of hopelessness that permeates the screen. Still, Empire is a film that gets better and better with subsequent viewings, and everything director Irvin Kershner did behind the scenes matched the polish job writer Lawrence Kasdan did at his word processor. Which is to say, sheer perfection.

Return of the Jedi is where most people start pointing out kinks in Lucas’s armor. Whereas I look at it as a triumphant conclusion -or at least I thought conclusion at the time- to the series I grew up loving. The first 45 minutes is thought to be a slog by many. Me, I find it to be a testament to how important a character Han Solo was. Star Wars purists know that Ford wanted to be the martyr of the series. Which to me translates to getting the hell out of the white and black uniform because he didn’t want to don it anymore. Yet, Jedi pushes his importance by pushing his friends’ efforts to save him. Of course, it moved on to Endor, and here is where people see it as going downhill. While George Lucas might have propelled the Vietnam metaphor with his Ewoks a little far, even as a child I saw what he was doing. These furballs were put in a position to defend themselves against enemies with higher technology using their inferior weaponry. Plus, revolving the entire final act around Vader’s redemption, and John Williams’s EPIC final pieces of score make that film work for me.

Then—-we have the prequels. First, let me say this. I have a theory, which is that people actually hate these three films because they don’t follow the typical hero’s journey, and most of the “heroes” in them are deeply compromised. The original films were about good overcoming evil. The prequels were about supposedly good guys eventually becoming corrupted and then revealed to be not much better than the villains. When Anakin says “from my point of view, the Jedi are evil” in Episode III, he is not wrong. The fact he has gone from a prepubescent wide eyed child eager to learn into an angry and defiant young man corrupted by a dictator giving him a much better scenario is moons away from what people were used to. But does this make them bad? As portrayed in all three films, the Jedi are thugs enforcing the rules of the corrupt Republic. People picked up on this and didn’t like it. I think people generally wanted the fall of the Republic to have happened entirely due to evil people doing evil things, but Palpatine’s genius Lucas showed was in how he gets the “good guys” to do a lot of his work for him.

The main flaw with Episodes I – III is the fact that they are prequels which don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. I will also say from midichlorians to an over abundance of one character named Binks, there are some insanely bad choices made in the prequels, and they don’t hold up as well as the original series. However, I would completely defend Episode I as being thematically consistent with the rest of the series. While many elements within it are sub-par or bland, there is really nothing out of place with respect to the type of story it is trying to tell. For those who are not so interested in expecting stone cold tension or snappy dialogue, it works as a story of a force becoming what could either be the best pilot in the galaxy or its oppressor.

Episode II felt like it had an actual story to tell, it’s just really bad at romance. This is why I can really get behind revising the romantic moments of Episode II. If Lucas had continued on the storyline concerning the threats on Padme’s life, the tension would have strengthened and helped Anakin’s overall storyline. We could have seen them falling in love while evading would be assassins and spies traveling across the stars. Instead, we have Padme wearing a costume more ridiculous than anything Leia wore in the previous trilogy and are stuck watching Anakin ride CG’d animals. Still, you take out all romance aspects, and Episode II has a ton about it to enjoy.

I understand that Padme and Anakin are really bad at romance. However, here is the wall I run into with people who complain about it. The romance between them isn’t strong if seen as a classic hero/love interest romance, which is the way everyone viewed it. This is a bizarre relationship that evolved out of an acquaintance when the guy was a kid and the girl was almost an adult (and holding a position with adult responsibility). Padme is consistently portrayed by Natalie Portman as fatally naive, and Anakin is an emotional firecracker as played by Hayden Christensan. We are not supposed to be charmed by them or their relationship. Being anywhere from uneasy to horrified about it is more like it, and viewed a certain way, it’s vitally important to the story. The problem is Lucas didn’t count on people not liking the relationship for the wrong reasons. This is when another director would have helped, because the battles and detective story I enjoyed so much in Episode II are thrown off by, again, seeing Anakin ride CG’d monsters.

Episode III is widely considered to be the best of the three. However despite its intense final forty minutes, its worst flaw, besides the dialogue, is the seeming intentional forgetting about the Clone Wars (the years between II and III), in which Anakin becomes, as Obi-Wan outlined in Episode IV, ‘the best star pilot in the galaxy, a cunning warrior, and a good friend.’ Yet the guy spends YEARS battling enormous droids and rescuing Republic allies, and when he comes home, Mace Windu (Samuel L Jackson) just remembers how the kid had some offbeat moments in the second movie. “I don’t trust him” is his warning to Obi-Wan. Gee, thanks Captain Obvious.

My fundamental storylined conclusion about all three prequels is that Anakin starts off as a nice guy who means well and makes mistakes, subsequently learning from them. He intuitively stumbles into the fall-and-redemption arc that George Lucas was going for the entire saga. This fall from grace won’t work as well if you watch Episodes I-III and just can’t just shut down that suspension of disbelief long enough to take the poor dialogue, impractical backgrounds, and uneven acting on constant display. Seriously seasoned actors and actresses don’t act in these films as much as just speak words on camera. So I must ask. Is this any different than the original trilogy?

The rage that greets a meer mention of these films on the internet is nothing short of baffling to me. In regards to Jar Jar in particular, there’s a fascinating irony in that a lot of Star Wars fans feel so passionate and intense about Star Wars because it represented such a huge part of their childhood/pop-culture world. Yet they get angry when Lucas makes prequels that rather specifically target kids like they were when they first fell in love with Star Wars. Sort of an odd phenomenon if you ask me.

All of that being said, I feel there are far more good in the prequels than bad. They’re visually inventive, with Lucas filling each frame with the same kind of science fiction weirdness and wonderfully fantastic touches that I generally associate with the franchise, Not to mention the downright sneaky uprising Sith plot that winds up bringing everything down and causes birth to the Galactic Empire has a much smarter build and payoff than its reputation leads you to believe. So much like Return, I take the good with the bad, and it is this payoff -which in my mind is an interesting bit of parallelism with Luke’s arc- that makes me able to stick through the storylines associated with the Ewoks and Gungans.

This is all I am going to disclose as my prequel defense for now, as I have much more to say. All of that will be saved for the upcoming commentaries for the Star Wars series, which I will say right now are an absolute dream for me to do. So sit back, and get even more excited, as December 18th will be upon us before we know it.