That is because the seventh Star Wars film is closing in fast. Just today I read on Twitter a rumor the first official, real trailer for the movie will be released October 16. Which is ridiculous. I've never seen so much pent up excitement for a goddamn trailer in my life. But that's what happens when the first new Star Wars movie in over ten years is a couple months away and there's only been one actual teaser released for the thing. It's a big friggin deal.
It's an amazing hype job by the execs running the new DisCasVel empire, awe-inspiring in its restraint and careful ramping of aphrodisiacs, candles, and massage oils so that fans' collective vaginas are at a foaming 375 degrees Fahrenheit. They know it doesn't take much to steam the windows, so they're only giving enough so that its presence can't be ignored, but its secrets are completely ambiguous to all but the most voracious clue hunters. For normal folks like me that aren't pouring over every pixel of a spy image to see what color paint dripped onto the floor of a tent in Ireland, very few details are known of the characters and story events surrounding the first of the new trilogy. That's something very different from virtually every other major blockbuster that's come out in the last several years.
Excitement among fans usually falls under one of two categories. You're either a bit trepidatious, or balls-to-the-wall "oh my god yes don't stop I want you so bad right now." Of course there can be some mixture of both, depending on how much you liked Star Trek and Super 8, and most importantly how much you loved or hated the Prequels. And that's really where the world hinges on whether The Force Awakens will make a serious and long-lasting impact or not. I knew I had my opinions before, but I also knew the Prequels weren't all that fresh in my memory. Now that my Star Wars hype is reentering a fever pitch not felt since The Phantom Menace, I thought it was a good time to brush up on the films, and brush off my Blu-ray set.
I went into this with an open mind. I was aware that my feelings on the films may have been shaped over the years by being within three feet of the internet at all times, and I remember as a kid definitely not hating the movies when I saw them in theaters. As time went on I had just assumed that was dumb, unrefined kid impressions, and not critically-thinking intellectual grown-up impressions, and had accepted the general consensus that the films were irredeemably flawed. The plot was needlessly convoluted and at times senseless and boring. The characters were at best cardboard and inhuman and at worst offensively annoying. The effects work was overdone and over-reliant on computers. The dialog was awful. The heart wasn't there. The acting was bad. Jar Jar Binks. And most importantly, it just wasn't Star Wars.
Actually a large number of people gave Episode III somewhat of a pass. Others said The Phantom Menace was OK minus the rabbit alien. A lot of people said Attack of the Clones was actually the worst one. For a long time I decided I agreed with all of that. Then I realized I hadn't seen Attack of the Clones since 2002 when it came out. That was honestly the main reason I concluded my opinion was rubbish and I needed a refresher.
So after marathoning the movies, here's how my opinion changed. The Star Wars Prequels....simply aren't bad. They're never offensively awful, and while they might make you cringe from time to time, the experience is generally very entertaining and enjoyable, and when they're all put together, actually a pretty satisfying Star Wars experience. So how about we break it down movie by movie?
***
The Phantom Menace
The Phantom Menace is definitely the worst. The plot is the dryest, the action is the least interesting, and it has by far the most annoying characters. The Prequels on the whole are cast with some very capable actors, so the often flat delivery of dialog mostly comes down to deliberate instruction by the director. These are not a rag-tag group of heroes operating a renegade organization against a ruthless regime. These are mostly politicians, royal guards, and all-around Ivory Tower-dwelling rich folk. So I suppose the idea is that they talk in a sort of aristocratic upper-class way. The dialog is often cheesy, but that's actually been the case since the beginning for most of Star Wars.
There's definitely too much emphasis on politics. Watching the movie as a kid, none of it made sense, and on the whole the plot had so much going on that it was almost impossible for a child to follow character motivations and the connection from one scene to the next. As an adult, the politics are actually somewhat simplistic (compared to real-life) but still a strange thread to put so much spotlight on. It's understandable looking back, however, since the formation of the Empire was necessary to the telling of the events leading up to A New Hope, and is obviously something very political in nature. Whether you feel like that story needed telling probably coincides with whether you think the Prequels should have existed or not. To each their own, but I'm fine with it. I just think it could have been done from a more (pardon the idiom) down-to-Earth manner, from the perspective of a character that aligned and related to the audience much better.
Young Anakin was supposed to be that character, standing in for the audience so that events could be explained to us in the simplest manner. That didn't really happen, however. Anakin is only in the picture for roughly half of the time, and will easily alienate the audience by being, in my opinion, the most annoying character in the movie. He's loud, he talks too much, and he's just really badly acted, in a way several times amplified from your typical bad child acting. Jar Jar Binks gets close, but he's largely a throwaway element—a part of the backdrop that you can kind of ignore. But you can't ignore Anakin. He literally becomes the focal point of the narrative.
As much crap as they tried to cram into the story, however, very little of the time seems to be spent on events that influence the overall trilogy. Why do we need a sub-plot involving the Gungans, and their fight against the Battle Droids? They are a race that's never mentioned again in the series. And the pod race, which seems to be there literally just to inject action into an otherwise mundane script. Aside from that, we're introduced to Padme, Padme is introduced to Anakin, Anakin becomes apprenticed under Obi Wan, Palpatine is elected Supreme Chancellor, and there's also the Trade Federation which feeds into Palpatine's plot in the Clone Wars later on.
It's sort of a weak, ho-hum start to a much larger story, which on the whole is fairly forgivable and actually pretty typical of the beginnings to many other series and franchises in movies and on TV. It takes a little while to get things rolling, but TPM is never really boring, and it's certainly not a bad movie. But I'm not sure it's good, either. I'd put it alongside other passable movies like Man of Steel or John Carter, while somehow managing to be much more memorable than those films. The plot often suffocates the characters, and the emotional beats just aren't there, specifically where we're supposed to feel something for Anakin leaving his mother—a particularly poorly done scene. It often gets a pass for being the movie with Darth Maul, certainly a cool character but not one where I necessarily understand all the fervor. It's just a somewhat mediocre movie, with a few highlight moments. It's only really enjoyable in the context of the other two films.
***
Attack of the Clones
This is where I encountered the most surprises. It was the movie I remembered the least, the one people seemed to have the most complaints when it came to the core of the story. The Clone Wars itself is all well and good, but then you have the romance between Anakin and Padme, and I will admit, this is where the movie really falls short.
Padme as a character is a bit of an oddity. She just doesn't make much sense, and whatever feelings are going on in her head aren't really explained very well, or never had much logic to begin with. At every turn Anakin, especially under the care of Hayden Christensen, comes off as an awkward, douchey mess of a person. He's way too blunt and creepy about his feelings, is argumentative with Padme and insults her profession, and just comes off very negative and arrogant. At one point he even turns into a murderous lunatic, and she's apparently cool with it. I don't understand how their relationship is supposed to work, why Padme develops feelings for him, and how those feelings get to be so strong so quickly. It's all very forced and artificial feeling, and does the movie a huge disservice.
But you can get over that, because the rest of the movie is a lot of fun. Obi Wan's sub-plot to find a planet erased from archives and ultimately the clone army is an interesting one, and takes interesting turns with the introduction of Count Dooku. When the larger battle ensues, I found it really engaging. I was excited and sucked in, and in the final arc the movie is just a real joy to watch.
AOTC just ups the ante in a big way from start to finish, and especially in regards to the action and flow of the events. There aren't the annoying characters and pointless plot threads to muddle through, and even Christensen, some overacting aside, wasn't nearly as bad as I had braced myself for. It's a big improvement over TPM, and goes from a John Carter to a Jumanji in terms of a movie that's fun, if not a little flawed.
***
Revenge of the Sith
Revenge of the Sith is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the best. It was a movie that seemed to take a lot of the issues of the first two and really plug away at them. Withstanding a couple moments of cringy line delivery, the acting is more colored and human, especially the repartee between Obi Wan and Anakin. The action is even tighter, the dramatic bits actually work, which is astounding, and the overall result is just a plain good film.
I honestly don't have much more to say about this one. I liked it the best before, and I still do now. Does it ascend to the heights of Original Trilogy greatness? Probably not, because it literally takes to Episode III to start caring about the characters and having an emotional reaction to what's happening with them. It's a really good finish on an on-the-whole uneven and somewhat jerky story epic. But in the end it's the movie that really redeems the Prequel trilogy for me, and helps to make it feel like a legitimate addition to the Star Wars anthology. I actually hurt for Anakin, even though he was a twisted monster much of the time, and that's a real feat and something that adds dimension to the character going into the Original Trilogy. And I'm just really happy this movie exists to help bring everything together.
Overall the movies probably won't hold up unless you let your expectations drop a bit. The hate is understandable—more than the crazed, unyielding love the other side has—especially when you consider the context of the Original Trilogy and its unfathomable indentation on virtually everything in human culture. You can't match that kind of impact, and you can't replicate the love fans have for the original's characters and story to the exact degree. The Prequels will never be as good as the OT, but I can't see a reason to hate them either. I'm of the opinion we're better off now that they exist, having helped shaped and fleshed out the universe that, quite honestly, we didn't actually see much of with the first three films. Vader is still a really evil guy, but he's a so much more nuanced guy now. Obi Wan isn't just a wise old man, now that we've seen he was actually once a charming, cool and interesting dude (that kicked loads of ass). And Luke and Leia have a mother now. A very perplexing, misguided and somewhat thick-headed mother. Also Yoda is improbably nimble, though that apparently took a steep turn at some point in the 30-ish years when he suddenly hit the end of his 900 year lifespan.
I'm glad I went back and rewatched the Prequels, because now I can own my opinion on more grounded footing, and my appreciation for Star Wars is much more broad now. I can enjoy the Prequels for what they are, never treating them with some great reverence or regarding them as works of sheer genius, but still feeling gratified for the entertainment they provide and what they add to the Star Wars mythos. And on the footsteps of another huge trilogy, and in many ways a retread of the resurgence Star Wars received over 15 years ago, it's nice to feel like I can appreciate both the old and the new in this series. I actually crave another modern treatment of the franchise in a way I didn't before, when I still thought that the original approach was best. There's a lot more that looking through a contemporary cinematic lens can lend to Star Wars, and I'm even more excited to see what it is.
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