Did we need a Prequel Trilogy?

Agreed, Mike.

One of the wonderful things about the galaxy far, far away is its villains. In A New Hope Vader tells the Death Star command team not to be too proud of their technological terror, and that "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant compared to the power of the Force."

Really? Levitating some rocks and fighting with a light saber make the ability to destroy a planet INSIGNIFICANT? Isn't it the other way around? What significance is levitating some stuff if your entire freakin' planet is exploding? I thought Vader was exaggerating. There wasn't anything in the OT to make me think the Force was THAT strong.

Then the prequals get made, and it turns out Vader wasn't exaggerating. Palpatine uses the Force to manipulate Queen Amidala to call for a vote of no confidence in her strongest supporter. Palpatine gets Yoda to take possession of the clone army that will eventually destroy the Jedi. Palpatine gets the Chosen One to attack his friends and Jedi masters. Palpatine convinces the Galactic Senate to make him Emperor and give him emergency powers. That, my friends, is the power of the Force.

And Ian McDurmand acted the part brilliantly. That story justified the prequals.

 

BRAVO! It's unfortunate how people can be so jaded about the telling of a story because they find themselves to be so disappointed, and thus, in disapproval of it due to what they thought should have or would have happened. Love it or hate it- but ya gotta admit that GL aimed very high in his attempt to flesh out the back-story to what was delivered in the OT- and, to me, that's a helluva consideration to give to your fans and the story itself. Sure, he caught people off-guard with things like "taxation of trade routes" and galactic politics and "votes of no confidence", but it seemed that he merely wanted to deliver more than just an a-typical "magic" and swashbuckling affair. GL wanted people to see that the "star wars" weren't just rooted in cliched notions of "bad guys versus good guys". He gave that universe a larger scale with much more context; he gave it depth. Now...his execution can easily be called into question- and it should, but, I think that only 1 movie alone wouldn't have fully supported the scale that he, rightfully, believed that SW should have. I personally don't feel that only 1 film alone would've been suffice to properly and fully tell the story of Anakin (while explaining a few other significant elements as well).

 

I voted yes. I just wish it would've been better. But hindsite is 20/20 and all...I guess we didn't NEED it. But we all WANTED it. I think that we actually need the Sequel Trilogy more now because of the PT. But everyone needs to get prepared to be dissapointed.

 

The phantom menace is the best of ask the star wars movie. Liam Nelson is my favorite actor, jar jar is hilarious, and Darth maul is a total b a

 

We needed the PT. Even if episodes ! and II could have been BETTER, we all wanted the story told. Episode III is great, and even the things about I and II that piss me off don't bother me enough to wish they'd never been made.

Someday I'll watch all nine films in a row and I'm looking forward to it.

 

The problem with the PT is not the overall story arc. I think the slow takeover by Palpatine is cool. The problems are in the little things. Padme dying for no reason, Anakin not being a likable character, "yippie!", Anakin's insta-Darkside turn. The OTs story was pretty basic, it was the little things that made it great: Han saying cool stuff, alluding to a rich history and large galaxy, Artoo and Threepio bickering. Those little magical things. I guess I'm talking about character development.
That being said, the PT had some cool stuff: Podracers were cool (if unessescary) Maul, cool ships, Ewan's Obiwan, nice saber battles, the Gungan underwater city was pretty awesome.

 

Unquestionably the PT had cool stuff in it. I'm a huge critic of the PT but love certain elements:

1) Maul
2) The evolution of all the ships toward the OT design
3) Dooku and his fencing style light saber
4) Ewan McGreggor as Obi Wan, I think he did the best job given the poor writing
5) Palpatine
6) the final moments of the Obi-Wan / Vader duel, and Anakin getting the Vader suit
7) i liked CGI Yoda even though there was a huge overuse of CGI in the PT

The presence of these elements still doesn't change my opinion that about needing the PT. The term "need" implies something more than having some cool elements. It means that the movies are providing indispensable plot points about the overall story arc. From where I sit I don't see anything from TPM that was indispensable, and the few elements from Clone Wars that were essential could have been rolled into Revenge of the Sith quite easily.

 

Try working out who was the better actor - Hayden Christensen, with his monotone wooden performance as Anakin or Tobey Maguire playing Emo-Spidey Spiderman 3. It's tough.

 

In theory, the PT should be a better trilogy then the OT for many reasons. The overall scope is more indepth then the much more micro story of the OT. The characters are more in the grey area compared to the OT characters that are pretty much black and white. The tragic story of Anakin is much more Shakespearean story then the coming of age story of Luke.

Where I think Lucas went wrong is the PT story he was trying to tell is in a sense a much more adult story. It is very hard to show these political events that are going on behind the scenes, this tragic story of this great jedi, this love story of 2 people that will change the course of history, and cater to ALL audiences. Because Lucas wanted to maximize his audience, he made the PT for kids, and in reality that story doesn't work for that demographic. Think of movies like Platoon, Schindlers List, Saving Private Ryan, these are all serious drama's of tragic events and can you imagine if they were told so young kids can watch them? Why they work well is they lose a segment of the audience because they cater more to older teenagers and adults. No one argues the PT is a much more serious story then the OT, the problem is the dramatic parts comes off as very awkward because they are made in the serial type/fun movies that Lucas wrote the OT for.

 

I think that the problem wasn't so much that we didn't need a prequel trilogy as much as it was that Lucas just didn't really have enough story in mind to fill out three movies.

Because yeah, you really can watch ROTS and get just about all of the vital backstory for the OT. What always struck me as odd was how much Lucas talked about "rhyming" the PT with the OT, and how little the PT actually "rhymes" with the OT. It seems to me that in order for that to have truly worked, the overall story should have been set up so that Anakin made his initial turn to the dark side at the climax of Episode 2 (to "rhyme" with Luke's initial decision to reject the dark side in ESB) and then have that play out over the course of Episode 3 with him fully embracing the dark side once and for all in Episode 3, as Luke made his final rejection of the dark side at the climax of ROTJ.

IMHO, what would have helped immensely would have been if Lucas had actually plotted out the entire PT at once before writing the individual scripts. Writing a prequel to any established story is a very different process from writing sequels, after all. Sequels you can just sort of make up as you go along, and it all ends up wherever it ends up. With prequels, though, there is a defined stopping point that you have to write your way toward, and it's really easy to waste time along the way and end up with all of the important stuff all piled up at the very end, rather than building effectively throughout the entire story.

Also, things end up getting dropped if you aren't careful. There were things in Episode I like Anakin's dream of coming back and freeing the slaves that just got forgotten somewhere along the way. There was the whole matter of Anakin deciding (or being conned into thinking) that the Jedi were evil and in need of being wiped out... that was something that was obviously intended to be established, but was all but eliminated from the story when Lucas decided to focus almost entirely on the "save Padme" angle with regard to Anakin's turn to the dark side.

I guess what I'm getting at is, while I don't necessarily agree that we didn't need a prequel trilogy, I do tend to feel that Lucas didn't use the three movies worth of screen time as effectively as he could have.

(As always, your mileage may vary...)

 

^^^THIS, Sir
I know that I've said, at least, once or twice by now, that introducing Anakin as some kinda precocious 8 yr-old wonder-kid was a big mistake in the telling of this side of the story . I would've much preferred for him to have been introduced as a 14 - 16 yr old that was already in the Order; observably more gifted than his peers, and arrogant because of it. He should've been the likable @sshole that we end up despising but yet feeling sorry for.

Lucas got caught up with being overly focused on the visual wow factor of the trilogy, and the overall story suffered because of it, but it's still quite entertaining for me.

 

I think a good plot point of Episode 3 would have been that the Jedi are secretly getting killed (By Anakin who turned to the darkside in Episode 2), and then they would start to wonder who is doing this? Having Anakin start stalking and killing Jedi in different worlds during the movie, and he is finally confronted by Padme and Kenobi at the end of the movie when they know it is him.

 

YES WE DID! Of course we needed to know how the good man that was Anakin became the evil Vader. we needed to know how Luke and Leia became seperated. We needed to know how the Jedi lost control and how the empire was formed. What we didnt need were Jar Jar, an annoying 8 year old, pod racing, midiclorians, endless padme and anakin lovey dovey scenes, general grevious, nemoidions. CGI evrything that could be CGIed and oh yeah darth vader made c3po????? C'mon!
George Lucas I love you. You gave me a wonderful universe to escape to, but boy did you get lazy with these films. A call needs to go out to remake these films in their entirety. Bring on the hate!

 

Well, I think we all wanted a prequel trilogy and nobody said "no thank you" when it was announced, but I also happen to think that what we got was so far from what we needed/wanted I would rather turn back time so I could avoid seeing them.
Now, if we got a trilogy where in "Episode I" Obi-Wan and Anakin become good friends and the movie ends with Obi-Wan deciding to train Anakin as a Jedi Knight; then in "Episode II" we would have Anakin seduced to the Dark Side of the Force by the Emperor; and in "Episode III" we would have Darth Vader hunting down the Jedi and Obi-Wan barely escaping to hide the twins...then I'd say we needed a trilogy.
As they are, we don't really need "Ep I" and "Ep II". Yes, Darth Maul is fricking cool but also totally unnecessary for "Episode III"'s resolution.

 

The prequels should have never been made in the first place. It would have been so much better to keep that story completely shrouded in mystery.

 

I agree with Aufman, I'd rather undo the prequel trilogy than have it around. It's that bad. Its existence is grating.
But it looks like Episode VII is going to blow them away.

 

NO! The PT should have never been made in the first place! They are better left shrouded in mystery left to our imaginations. Lucas has committed SACRILEGE for creating those god awful EPIC FAIL movies.

 

I think it would have been inevitable. Did we needed the Prequels in that form? Some say just yes and some people say yes arguing for how it was showing other people how persons like George fail in those One-Man operation attempts to captain everything.

The only movie that gives me a satisfiable Star Wars feeling was Episode I, even with all its problems. But before there is no time machine with a dedicated Fan that would travell back in time, help George write and film the Prequels, we have to live with those mistakes, from which we should learn.

But thanks George for the try.