With anticipation building for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, fans are revisiting the much-hated prequels. Are they as bad as we remember? Jesse Hassenger of the AV Club says no.
“Some of this is understandable. The very best sequels and prequels earn comparisons with their predecessors, and it would be difficult to argue that the Star Wars prequels are better than the original trilogy; at minimum, they’re less novel and fresh, and their story by design holds fewer surprises. At their worst, the prequels signal a troubling lack of interest from writer-director George Lucas in the apparently tedious business of writing and directing—or at least directing actors. The series was never built on witty banter, but the awkward phrasings stick out more when Lucas seems to focus on digitally pasting together bits of footage into ‘perfect’ compilation takes that don’t always give his actors the space they need to transcend the B-movie dialogue.”
The problem is really that Star Wars was brilliant. It was followed by a fairly robust sequel that knew it was a sequel, Empire Strikes Back. Empire isn’t brilliant in itself, but it’s well shot, engaging, and as it is the “bridge” of a story we got fascinated in, it holds up well. Return of the Jedi is fairly lamentable. We really all know the end of the story by the time it starts, and it’s a painful two hour exposition of something we pretty much guessed from Empire, broken up by the first digression into a children’s movie, with the Ewoks. The movies just get steadily worse from there, but the decline started with Return. We don’t hate it because we cared about the plots and forget that it didn’t do them any particular justice. It’s a problem you often see with authors who had a good idea, but dragged the “exciting conclusion” out till they had nothing else left. The movies just go downhill from there. That said, a new director should bring some new life to the enterprise. Good or bad, the next movie will be a first and stand on its own.