Seriously, WHY Do People Consider The Star Wars Prequels to be Horrendous?

[surg3n]

You have to really watch these movies again to realise just how bad they were.

Seriously, I watched about 3 minutes of the 3rd movie last weekend, just caught the bit with the Chewies doing the Tarzan call, and the ''Wild Bantha chase'' quote. That's enough, right there in the space of 3 minutes, I have enough to hate all 3 movies... and that's scratching the surface.

George Lucus got lazy. Seriously - anyone who's seen the Star Wars exhibition stuff, like the models from all the movies. The prequels used these shoddy, vague models then CGI'd everything to death. It looks pathetic. But then if you look at the models from the old movies, like the Falcon, Leia on her flying bike thing, the big wedge ships - the models are all immensely fricken cool. Imaculate detail on some of it, at least the models that have been protected, put in glass cabinets etc. Now the models from the prequels, cotton buds for people, old airfix kids, pod racers made from scrap.

I guess what I'm saying is, we never needed Yoda to be an acrobat, we never needed big shiny space ships, because Star Wars 4-6 is a visual treat, it's gritty and realistic and no amount of Lucus fuckery will change that. He got it right first time, then phoned it in when it counted.

In fact, the only movie I've ever seen where I thought the CGI was even good, is Nick Cage's Knowing. Watch the scene on the bridge with the plane crash, it's absolutely stunning work, the best example of CGI, ever, in my opinion at least. Why Lucus with his effects company couldn't do a decent job I'll never know - neither will he, because he's a fucktard who thinks he can rewrite our childhoods.

 

[Slycne]

Here's the thing, yes the prequels work on a "eh, they're mediocre/not great but fun level." The problem is that if you dig into them even a little they start to fall apart on so many levels.

It's really stupid things too, even basic plot issues. Like for example, why did the droid army land on the opposite side of Naboo? It's already established that Naboo has practically no military to speak of. They have bloody spaceships, they could have landed right next to the capitol. The only reason for this is that the writers backed themselves into a corner of needing to get the jedi to meet the Gungan and travel through the center of a planet.

These things litter the whole prequel trilogy, and once you start to notice them it takes it's toll.

 

[Violator[xL]]

Because the whole feel and look of the movies, everything looks more advanced instead of less, especially the forcefield gunbots and evil spaceNinja's wielding twohanded lightsabers.

JarJar Binks.

 

[AlexWinter]

Because they are horrendous?

'I had a dream about my wife dying and a Sith Lord told me he could save her, so I choose to ignore years of Jedi training to trust a Sith Lord even though said Jedi training would have involved me learning that Sith Lords are not to be trusted.

Also, I'll just go an kill all the young padawans for reasons.'

The writing is fucking awful.

Well, he did have a dream about his mother dying who subsequently did and to my memory he didn't know that Palpatine was a Sith Lord until Windu tried to take him down at which point he was probably just freaking out.

The Jedi were being assholes towards him too, in his opinion, by not making him a master... Or something.

 

[dantoddd]

I had little issues with EP:1 it was ok without being good. The second was horrible mostly because of Anikin & Padme failed in every conceivable way. But Obi-Wan was awesome. The third movie was actually the best of the three. The darker tone of the movie & the two epic fights compensated for the fact that it was very difficult to care about any one the characters

 

[Fappy]

Here's the thing, yes the prequels work on a "eh, they're mediocre/not great but fun level." The problem is that if you dig into them even a little they start to fall apart on so many levels.

It's really stupid things too, even basic plot issues. Like for example, why did the droid army land on the opposite side of Naboo? It's already established that Naboo has practically no military to speak of. They have bloody spaceships, they could have landed right next to the capitol. The only reason for this is that the writers backed themselves into a corner of needing to get the jedi to meet the Gungan and travel through the center of a planet.

These things litter the whole prequel trilogy, and once you start to notice them it takes it's toll.

I wonder why that happened...

 

[Varis]

Well, I like the prequels. There's an overflowing amount of nostalgia involved in that sentence, but I like them. I also like the original trilogy. I've tried to be objective when watching the prequels to get a grasp of the reason behind all the hatred, but they really aren't THAT bad. Certainly not horrendous. There are flaws, sure, but I've yet to see a flawless, perfect movie.

 

[Reiper]

I don't care what anyone says, the worst movie by far was Return of the Jedi.

Seriously, screw those ewoks.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

Well, I think it would have made perfect sense to have Luke, well aged, take the place of wise old Jedi Master and welcome the new millenium by just, you know, adding a chapter to what could have been an ever-growing Star Wars universe.

Instead, Lucas opted for prequels, pretty much pissing on his own oeuvre. It's as if the original trilogy was the brainchild of somebody completely different, and Lucas is working hard on ruining everything. Hardly anything makes sense in the prequels, hardly any character is memorable. Whoever came up with the midichlorians nonsense should be hanged, gibbeted and beheaded.

I remember Lucas praising the new tech and promising great fun to be had with the Jar Jar Binks character, and then just about every Jar Jar binks figurine, plush doll or other merchandise related to Binks threatened to drown every Toys'R'Us I've been to... while prices for the little Darth Maul doll pretty much instantly shot up to ninety dollars. I don't have a major in economy, but there's something wrong with that, well beyond the fact that Darth Maul dies in the very same movie he first popped up in - in a well underwhelming ballet fight bordering on the silly and stupid.

Let me spell it out: Even Spaceballs showed more respect for the source material than the prequels did.

None of the 'made-up' characters make any sense, and just about everything is inconsistent - not only in regards to the original trilogy, but even within the bounds of the prequel trilogy. It just feels like an old, filthy rich, well deranged man paid a bunch of typewriter monkeys to come up with random stuff, and he really wanted to play Barbie with Natalie Portman.

From the get-go, Episode 1, the fourth, retconned first movie in a trilogy of six, feels like a commercial peddling stuff. Why do we have a kid race a pod? So we feel an urge to go out and buy Pod Racer, of course!

Apart from raping his own work to bloody lumps and tears, it feels as if George Lucas just plain didn't get why the first, real, genuine, proper trilogy was so successful. In a futile attempt to deconstruct it, take it apart and understand it, he just plain broke it.

 

[Swyftstar]

Wow, I told Guppy this would come to a bad end. As I said in the referenced quotes at the beginning of all this, I found them to be horribly uneven from scene to scene. I actually liked the pod race. It was loud and obnoxious but it was good matinee cinema. I loved Ewan Mcgregor as a young, cocky Obi Wan and Liam Neeson is like bacon, good in everything. I liked the fights at the ends of the movies and the third one was actually a good popcorn movie. So I didn't think everything about them was bad.
It was just that everything that was bad, was really bad. The writing was painful, ok, painful. The delivery of said writing was also painful, I mean literal pain causing, groan inducing bad. I don't even have to explain what is wrong with Jar Jar. I didn't mind the CGI but there was too much of it. There was action and explosions everywhere so that it just felt like a loud mess at times. So much of it was going on in the second one that I actually felt my self tune it out because there was no point of reference to contrast it to and it was just a lot of visual noise.
On the original movie, so much control was taken from Lucas that in his anger and conceit he bet Spielberg that the movie would flop. That right there should tell you how much influence he should have been allowed in the prequels. He was given total dominion and he showed himself to be a visionary in theory but a hack in practice.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Why?

Here's why.

Rose-tinted glasses.

Spoiler

The first trilogy defined a generation's imagination. Kids woke up in the morning eating Star Wars stuff, they watched Star Wars cartoons, they slept in Star Wars merch, read novelizations of the novels and the Expanded Universe's fuckton of added literary content. All of that expansion took a trilogy of movies which are fairly "Meh", if you step away from the textbook Hero's Journey plot, and added reams and reams of depth to the setting.

What people actually like about Star Wars isn't the baseline put in place by Lucas so much as everything else that's come to more or less gravitate around the Luke-Leia-Vader trifecta. The universe is incredibly deep, yes, but very little of that depth is to be credited to Lucas himself. He tends to get the credit for Vader, but the Dark Lord was really just a fluke, if you think about it.

A tall guy in a black suit with a silly mask, James Earl Jones behind the mic, silly plastic swords post-processed into looking like lasers, and people ended up doing what they always do: fixate on the villain. In classic fairy tale and adventure settings, it's the antagonist who gets the most development, the bigger amount of screen time. Vader's no exception, and the sum of his parts create a mixture of charisma and sheer threatening gravitas that most folks find a lot more enticing than Luke Skywalker's everyman routine.

Okay, so Vader's got some basic magnetism going on. Past that, though? Alec Guiness looks like he doesn't give a shit, Mark Hamill himself commented on the weakness of the script on occasion, and Carrie Fisher more or less came to resent her time spent as Leia Organa.

If you drop the Movie Trailer Voice and ignore how everyone keeps telling you that Star Wars is the saga of a generation or some shit like that, you realize it's actually pretty pedestrian. Once you get that, you also realize Lucas had some very obvious personal limitations - boundaries which he tried to shore up with lots of whiz-bang CGI in the second trilogy. All of the world's green-screen antics won't change the fact that ALL of the movies are terribly paced, feature far too many scenes of blatant exposition and really don't benefit from their increasing budgets.

The best Star Wars is "A New Hope". Lucas was young, motivated, wasn't scared of working within the constraints he had at the time, and was at least passionate about what still looked like something that had come out of some college frosh's Creative Writing classes. By the time he got to the prequels, his fame got him a serious case of the inflated head and convinced him of the strength of his writing chops.

As far as Sci Fi and Fantasy settings go, Lucas just isn't a terribly good world-builder.

Spoiler'd myself for the sake of length-

TL;DR: Star Wars is fun because of the things Lucas didn't have any part in. His own contribution is relatively lacklustre.

At least, in my very humble opinion.

 

[Yopaz]

Now Phantom Menace was OK, I got no huge complaints about it. It had some cool scenes and it gave us a little backstory. Then came Episode 2 which just dragged on and on and had some of the most awkward dialogues I have seen. I have watched awful movies that I have watched through because I wanted to see the end of it. If a movie can at least make you interested enough to see how it ends that's something. With Episode 2 I didn't bother. I was interrupted after watching it for what felt like two hours or more by someone coming to visit me. After that I turned it off and I never felt the need to watch the end. I haven't watched the third because of what I felt about the second so I can't say if it was bad or not.

 

[crazyarms33]

....because they're bad movies? I mean...I'm not sure how else to say it. They were just...bad.

 

[Gennadios]

EP. 1 was by no means "mediocre." It's right up there with AVP2 and Green Lantern in the very small list of movies I just couldn't be bothered to finish watching. Maybe I just have a lower tolerance for mediocrity but it just felt like it was bumbling from scene to scene trying to make a point set by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

EP. 2 probably was mediocre, as I don't remember anything about it.

EP. 3 was aiight. The death scene was indeed utterly stupid for the same reason as the Dr. Ball video pointed out, all that hypothermia and blaster burn curing space medicine and it was powerless against personal inner strength. Once again, I only remember that one, stupid part of the movie, but I remember enjoying it overall.

 

[N3squ1ck]

Hmm, I was too young for seeing both the new and the old trilogy when they came out, so I watched them "in order". So yeah, I can safely say that I hate them, even without nostalgia goggles. (I absolute hate that thing, Jar Jar plus kids in film )
Else than that, the characters are bad. At least the costumes were good. That's about it.

 

[AnotherAvatar]

I hadn't watched the Plinkett reviews until I saw this tread. Watched all three last night, it was a better trilogy than the prequels.

I know you said not to use a video, but watch that if you have the time, each one covers why each movie is absolutely fucking terrible very thoroughly and using a good knowledge of the medium of film to show it. Plus at times they are hilarious.

To break it all down: They're VERY poorly written, and like we're talking kids shows would be ashamed of the dialogue, and every shoot is more boring than the last with either too much pointless shit that we don't care about on screen (and we don't care about it because the actor's don't care, and they don't care because half the shit they can't see) or with characters just sitting down and FUCKING TALKING IN A TWO SHOT.

Seriously, I always knew they were bad, couldn't quite put my finger on it, now I can thanks to those very long but very enjoyable reviews. Also using the footage from behind the scenes it paints this interesting picture of everyone around George Lucas, I already had this image of him being a Vader/Citizen Kane archetype, but I hadn't really thought about all the yes men he had surrounded himself with, and in the footage you can clearly see some of their sour facial expressions as he explains his 'ideas' to them.

It all becomes so clear now looking back. I had as a boy wondered why the people in those meetings weren't more excited, "I mean it's STAR WARS!" Young me thought. Now all this time later it's clear why they weren't excited, "It's fucking Star Wars..." an older more educated me says.



So I've got a question for OP: Have you been persuaded yet or do you still think the Prequels are getting a bad rap?

 

[Treblaine]

Well they are monumentally mediocre and stale, really.

I mean they are objectively WORSE films out there, it is relatively easy to sit through the Prequel Trilogy much like how you could watch the latest season of The Simpsons. It's not offensive to the eyes but there is so little to them, so soulless, so creatively bankrupt. The spark is gone, all the intellectual property is there but none of the talent.

But the problem is the attention they do get... rather than a direct-to-DVD-to-bargin-bin treatment is the problem. The problem is they are adding to such loved character and lore.

Red Letter Media's infamous review made this clear, they are not horrible movies, but they are horrible prequels. They are a horrible missed opportunity, they are a masterclass in how to be a good film-maker by comparing and contrasting the Original to the Prequel trilogy.


Now Indy 4, THAT was a horrible movie, It's painful to watch Shia Le Bouf tarzan swing with monkeys, to see Harrison Ford forced to go through this crap. I can't bear to watch that again. At least the prequel trilogy is almost enduringly naff and predictably stale and contradictory. Commentary tracks of the prequel trilogies is somewhat fun as it reminds you in so many ways of how The Original tilogy did it right while Prequel Trilogy didn't do anything.

 

[DioWallachia]

Lets count the ways:

1)Its badly written regardless if they have a Star Wars continuity to mantain, you may name it "Generic SCI-FI Movie Nº3532" and still suck.
2)It overuses special effects to the point that is all there is. And even contradicts what Young Lucas said a long time ago "Special Effects are just tools, a mean to tell a story. People tend to confuse them as the whole point of making a movie. Special effects without a story is a pretty boring thing"
3)George had full control over the production of the prequels, and one would think that such power will allow him to make a superior movie without the constrains that made the first 3 original movies. People were wrong.

PS: You watched Movie Bob? people still listen to him after failing all gamers in a time of need?