... What. No seriously, why does this exist? There's an intuitively obvious reason they were deemed so bad.
[HEADING=1]They are terrible films.[/HEADING]
The only people who would even ask this question are those with objectively terrible taste in films and small children...
*checks to see how old the OP was when they saw it* ah, okay - I suppose that makes sense then.
The original trilogy was hardly an example of high art and masterful writing, but the villains were at least convincing, the actors
were and thus portrayed something other than blocks of wood we couldn't relate to, and the narrative was both easy to grasp as well as
interesting. The prequels treated us to shoddy performances, flagrant and frankly quite offensive stereotypes courtesy of the Trade Federation (seriously, what the hell was Lucas thinking?!), annoying characters added at the behest of small children (anyone with any sense knows why that's a bad idea), and contrived and not particularly interesting plots that were also confusing enough that I had to
explain what had just happened to my parents after we saw Episode 1.
Imagine having to sit down and explain A New Hope to someone who had literally just watched it with you. The mind boggles.
The dialog though... oh man, all the people who slag off the first two prequels but try to sell you on how the third one was so much better, those people are utterly dead wrong. You have no idea how painfully bad the writing in that film is until you've heard the dialog, in a loop, for 8 hours at a stretch over the course of weeks. Divorced of any of the special effects that aren't actually special anymore because they're in literally every shot, and stripped of any lingering residual cool that watching people who are not the actors dance around in saber duels might bring you, the sheer mind-numbing terriblosity of the dialog really starts to unshine. It's not even that they all deliver their lines with the emotionality of Keanu Reeves at the top of his form, it's that the things they're saying are also
really stupid.
All three of those films honestly feel like somebody was making a Star Wars parody, or perhaps represent the concentrated efforts of Lucas to make everyone who used to like Star Wars turn around and hate it - the alternative (to a conscious effort to alienate his fanbase) is that Lucas is either genuinely crazy or never understood why anyone enjoyed Star Wars in the first place. Either way, there's simply no excuse for those cinematic abortions - they're bad movies by any metric to be certain, but at their core there was so much
potential. I mean, lightsabers! Jedi! Space! There's no way somebody
couldn't have made a good film out of those things - it just obviously wasn't going to be Lucas, not after his return to the director's chair produced The Phantom Menace. That's what makes the prequel trilogy so painful - they absolutely could have been good films, and probably would be had Lucas not insisted on directing them all himself (seriously, he hadn't directed
anything for longer than most people on these forums have actually been alive). It says a lot that, out of the original trilogy, the one widely considered by Star Wars fans to be the best was the one Lucas had the least control over (he didn't direct Empire or Jedi, but the director of Empire didn't let Lucas tell him what to do - that's how we get things like Ewoks).
Don't even get me started on midichlorians.
