Photo courtesy of Lucasfilms

Written by Steven Bielefield

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really interested in writing a review of the movies I saw over the past couple weeks. Well, okay, there was one, but I’m not really supposed to review movies that Sommer already took, so I can’t do Gone Girl. So then I figured, okay, I could write a Throwback-Thursday-type review. So with that, here’s a quick look at the Star Wars prequels.

I love Star Wars. I still do, and always will. When I was a kid I watched all three of them and they had a pretty big influence on my life. And like everyone else, once I saw them I was so excited when I heard there would be more Star Wars films. Then I saw Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and… I liked it. That was probably because I was a kid, though. It wasn’t until later that I discovered just how hated the prequels were. But are they really that bad? Do they really deserve all that hate?

Okay, yes they are bad. But since that isn’t gonna be enough, I figured, why not go into an overview of why they’re bad? Sure, you’ve probably already heard this sort of thing a million times before, but I’ve got an article to write so here we go.

Since I do like to concentrate on positive things more than negative, let’s start with the good stuff about the prequels. For starters, they are very… pretty. I don’t know what other word I would use for that, but they are. The CGI is quite good, and gives a fantastic visualization of the worlds visited in the trilogy. There’s an impressive level of detail. The big battle scenes are great and the lightsaber fights are much more impressive and fun to watch than the original films (where the characters swung a saber like a Louisville Slugger).

But those things alone a good film do not make, so what went wrong? Well, for starters, the very idea of a prequel is a bad one. I mean, look at the awesome characters the first had: The suave and cool Han Solo, the heroic Luke and Leia, the menacing Darth Vader. What do we have in the prequels? Bratty little kid Anakin, young and inexperienced Obi-Wan, and Samuel L. Jackson. The issue with prequels is that we have to see our favorite characters as less interesting than we knew them (if we see them at all; Han was nowhere in the prequels).

Additionally, the problem with the prequels has to do with the writing. The films are at the same time too simplistic and overly complicated. The plots seem streamlined for children to enjoy more, and yet at the same time Lucas threw in some random political drama in there that no one cares about. It’s strange. And character motivation is entirely non-diegetic.

What does that mean? Well, there is no actual in-universe motivation for any characters’ actions. The entire reason for the actions of Anakin and Obi-Wan and whoever else is only because they needed to happen. For instance: Anakin decides to turn to the dark side. Why? Because he needed to so he could become Darth Vader later (spoilers, by the way).

The first films were simple adventure films with lovable and memorable characters. That’s all they needed to be. They didn’t need to be complicated and they naturally flowed because they were simple fun. And that’s all Star Wars needs to be. That’s why I’m looking forward to the new films made by J.J. Abrams. They’re probably gonna be bog-standard action-adventure films. But you know what? They’ll probably be the best movies of the franchise since The Empire Strikes Back.

So now another article has been written about why the Star Wars prequels are bad. Because the Internet totally needed that.