I can only imagine how good they would have been if Lucas had picked things up during the Clone Wars with an adult Anakin and Obi-Wan who notices Anakin is skilled with the force, tries to train him (like the original movies states he did) and screws up... . The first two prequel movies are almost entirely filler to get us to the third, where Anakin falls to the dark side, of which the only part anyone really wanted to see is the duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan.
And the way Anakin's "fall to the dark side" happens is cheap and intellectually lazy. Anakin doesn't choose the dark side out of hatred or malice - the real definition of a Sith - he chooses it out of love: to save the one person who loves him and whom he really loves. Yoda's "fear is the path to the dark side" bit is a nice setup for a Greek tragedy, but the story could have been much more compelling if Anakin "fell" to the dark side for different reasons.
I'll give you that it's all the more poetic when we see the whole series in context and see that love is both the downfall and redemption of Anakin. Nonetheless having to sit through whiny, petty, angry Anakin as he builds up, coupled with the emotionally stunted Jedi Order leaves you feeling like everyone got what they deserved.
Anyway, to the original point of the post here, George Lucas bring out the original theatrical releases in cleaned up DVD version! And what were you thinking when you wrote the prequel trilogy!
1 comment:
Word. Up.
My feeling is he thought up the idea of 6 movies originally, but never really fleshed-out the first 3 until way later. And if you look at his other work, Mr. Lucas tends to have his hits b/c he's lucky or working with someone brilliant. He seems to have a strong "what will net the most profits" instinct that outweighs good stories. That's why the prequels are such disappointments.
Same goes for the Indiana Jones series. If they'd been less campy and more gritty, they'd have more fanboys than LOTR, but with #4 he went the campy route instead of, say, a "bourne identity" sort of edgy. Stylistically the man is milquetoast. He just plain got lucky with Star Wars.
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