Prequel Discourse

Last Saturday, I went to see the twentieth anniversary re-release of Revenge of the Sith in theaters. And it was fun! I had a lot of thoughts about it. Hopefully, there will be a Movie Munchies review, though I’m a bit behind on things there. I meant to have up a Fellowship of the Ring review and that’s lagging.

I have a busy weekend, so I started working on this ahead of time. I am presently reading The Divider, a nonfiction account of our president’s tumultuous first term in office. After that… re-read Delilah Dirk, probably? And I have some other nonfiction books from the library to get through.

I might need a new planner soon.

Tomorrow is Star Wars Day!

The Prequel Discourse

Do you guys remember the backlash to the Prequel Trilogy? No? Well, it was pretty bad.

If you don’t remember, the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was the punching bag for popular culture, a go-to example for bad movies. If you were anywhere on the Internet, you knew that evidently, everyone who had something to say hated these movies. The prevailing wisdom was this was: they ruined Star Wars, George Lucas was obviously a hack who didn’t understand his own work, and Jar-Jar Binks was the Devil. As someone who was an actual child when these movies started coming out, the irrational hatred that overtook pop culture was both frustrating and a little frightening.

Welps, the backlash to these movies led to the approach Disney took with the Sequel Trilogy, and making Star Wars content in general. The Force Awakens was deliberately crafted to be as appealing to those frustrated fans as possible. And it worked, because so many fans acted like the movie was “finally, Star Wars done right.” I mean, it was also a remake of the original movie, so you can see why some people thought that.

And then The Last Jedi came out.

It’s not that the Prequels never had fans; Internet reviewer MikeJ had a trilogy of videos explaining why he, as a casual fan of the series, loved the Prequels. 

[Full disclosure: I wanted to link to the videos themselves, but I can’t find them anymore, probably not helped because he used to be one of the reviewers on Channel Awesome, a website that has fallen apart after getting rocked by scandals (that MikeJ was not a part of).]

The Sequel Trilogy under Disney, however, got its own backlash. I’ve talked enough about them in these essays, I think, so we’re not getting into that. But! The issues people had with those movies led many to re-evaluating the Prequel Trilogy, and many renewing their interest and even admitting enjoyment. After all, the people who saw these movies as kids, the people more inclined to liking these movies, had grown up; The Force Awakens came out ten years after Revenge of the Sith.

There is a bit of a problem I’ve noticed though: Prequel defenders tend to view those movies now as being untouchable masterpieces and, uh… okay, guys, I have fun with these movies, but they’re not that, either. They are very far from perfect and it’s almost as frustrating to see people act like George Lucas did nothing wrong in telling those stories. I came across a video knocking the famous Prequel reviews by Red Letter Media, and how they’ve influenced the critical conversation, which led to a lot of recommendations about the Prequels which tend to paint them as incredible movies, pointing out all the things Lucas was aiming for, citing his comments, the cinematic allusions, and how it all comes together.

Here’s the thing: ambition is not achievement. Because yeah, there is a lot of bad faith criticism of the Prequels, and yeah, it’s kind of messed up how one YouTube channel’s complaints became absorbed as if they were Gospel. That doesn’t mean that everything is great, though. The dialogue still sucks, something that Lucas himself admitted that he’s bad at, and the entire story comes together rather awkwardly. Even attempts to fix this, like The Clone Wars, have problems in that it often feels like they’re using weird, AU versions of the characters from the movies in order to make them more likable.

[Also, given that George Lucas has changed his story on production and how many movies he originally planned, he’s not precisely a reliable source.]

I’m also tempted to say that Lucas was better at movie-making because he had a grand vision, that he was telling an epic story versus trying to build a franchise without an overarching plan. Except a lot of the Original Trilogy was made without an overarching plan, too, and while yes, he was trying to build an epic, he was also building a franchise. Look at how much merchandise came out of his Star Wars.

That isn’t to say that there wasn't anything good to come out of the Prequels: the more awesome fight scenes, the expanded worldbuilding, and seeing more of the Jedi. They’re also something new in the SW universe–Lucas purposefully set out to make new worlds and plots, rather than reuse the same ones over and over again, as Disney has chosen to do (no, not everything needs to happen on Tatooine). But they’re not masterpieces; I’d never argue that.

Art doesn’t need perfection to have merit, though. This isn’t an all-or-nothing game. We can say, “The Prequel Trilogy is a set of movies I find entertaining, though it has flaws.” We don’t need to say, “They were garbage fires,” or “They were the greatest things since Scripture.” Just because the original backlash was unfair and often rancid, that doesn’t mean they’re free from criticism. Troublingly, I’m seeing this notion come up in other fandoms, too: Pirates of the Caribbean and Twilight come to mind, where people are arguing that, in light of recent failures in those genres or from those companies, that everything those serieses did was gold. And, uh, no, it wasn’t. Everything past the first Pirates movie is still a mess, and Twilight is still incredibly troubling in its depiction of romance.

Seeing mistakes and failures in storytelling now doesn’t mean that missteps didn’t happen before. That’s not how it works. It doesn’t excuse either side. It’s just part of life, and part of storytelling that things aren’t usually perfect. That doesn’t make George Lucas evil, it doesn’t make the Prequels high art, it doesn’t make them the lowest trash, either. 

You’re allowed to like things that aren’t flawless. It’s fine.

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