For people who disliked the Prequels, consider this:

Oh no, I mean none of the films as in none of the films in the entire series. Being a little facetious, that's all.

But yeah, I was initially going to start my wife with the prequels, since it had a shallow love story and she loves that crap. Fortunately, we started with the OT instead, and she ended up loving it. Surprisingly, AotC is her least favorite film of the 8 now. I'm proud.

 

You picked a good one.

 

With Han and Leia it is simple, they have actual chemistry. That aside, it's easy to see why a Princess raised in an environment like hers would be attracted to the bad boy who lives freely and does as he pleases. Is that a recipe for a healthy relationship in real life, not necessarily, but then this is a Hollywood movie of what is essentially a space fairy tale. Additionally, I've seen the same kind of attraction to bad boys like Han from women in real life. All of that aside though, it comes back to my first point, there is believable chemistry between the actors.

With Anakin and Padme on the other hand, while their love story works pretty well for the most part on paper, the execution on screen utterly fails. At no point do they ever display believable chemistry. In fact, they have anti chemistry. When actors have chemistry and well written lines, the audience naturally wants to see them get together. With Anakin and Padme though, almost every time that they are on screen together, I just wish that they were in separate rooms altogether. Add to that some truly atrocious dialogue and some unbelievably bad decision making on Padme's part, and you have one of the worst onscreen romances that mainstream audiences have ever had to suffer through.

Like I said, the concept of their romance works pretty well on paper, but it's the execution that fails in pretty much every way that it could possibly fail.

 

Leia & Han work because Leia's strength, independence and force of will as a rebel is exactly the type of man that Han Solo is. Their chemistry makes complete sense. They're both combative, yet professional. They're both capable and sometimes outwardly arrogant. They're a lot alike.

And even then...in the long term, the relationship works but then doesn't, as we now know. It breaks when the circumstances change. Leia could go back to politics, something she was raised in. Han went back to being an outlaw. Its quite poetic then, after they reunite when they both are resisting the powers that be. Its beautiful.

Padme is a pacifist senator.
Anakin confesses to genocide of a tribe.

So....yeah.....Padme's values as a character suffer greatly after that. Anakin's character isn't really strong until you see five seasons of Clone Wars, where the circumstances that really bring them together make more sense. They're on the same side of a war, until.....they're not. But that's not depicted until after Episode III, so it doesn't work on screen between 1999 and 2005.

 

I can’t speak for anyone else, but Anakin’s moodiness an Jar Jar’s prat falls aren’t what sour me on the Prequels. I just don’t think they deliver as quality stories. The characterizations are unauthentic. The narrative is more about things than people.

Lucas had a vision of the story he’d wanted to tell. Personally, at its core, I think that vision was a compelling one. But translating that vision into a story about characters was a touch beyond his ability. He didn’t account for what drew the audience in and it wasn’t just the whiz-bang space antics. The story went from being about relatable people that were in fantastical situations to being about the situations themselves, that only involved people because it was required.

To me it seemed like Lucas had a dozen or so ‘cool things’ he wanted to see realized on the screen and the story was just a means to link them all together. The characters’ assorted motivations were only as crucial as was necessary to get them to be in these situations. But the characters and their story are how the audience relates to what’s happening. If the writer doesn’t seem to care about them then neither do we.

 

Han's relationship with Leia was more likely due to the era it was made in
.

 

When Lucas could still write and direct a good love story?
I jest.

But what exactly do you mean by the era it was made?

 

That's a good point- Star Wars has traditionally been about characters rather than necessarily "things". That's part of the reason why I don't agree with the people who were against the DSII being in ROTJ. Sure, it's a callback to ANH, but who cares? It's just a setting. The story plays out very differently, and what happens to the characters is nothing like ANH. In fact, I don't think that any of the people at the DSII battle (far different than the ANH trench run, by the way) were even in the ANH trench run.

In a prequel, when we already know the ending, it's often best to showcase enough of the plot to connect the dots, but still focus on making the story itself enjoyable (often by making character interactions enjoyable). This, I personally believe, is where Rogue One really succeeded. R1 fits right into the Star Wars timeline, and tells what I found to be an interesting story with enjoyable characters.

 

Yup I've met plenty of women and I'm also happily married that you very much. This isn't about if I understand or not but the fact that I consider it better a romantic relationship than one based on the girl liking a jerk over a good honest person.

 

It's two oppositely raised people who should not expect, nor should they want to, be together.
Han is a scoundrel. Leia is a Princess.
He's a Montague and she's a Capulet.
He's a pirate. She's royalty.
He's a autoshop bully. She's a clean preppy girl.
He's the forgotten step-child. She's the princess.

It's really every great love story ever told.
Opposites attracting.

Luke and Leia is actually boring. And also, gross.

Some women, like to be challenged. They don't all want a perfect man. They want to see growth and change.
Luke, as a romantic partner for Leia (before the incest) would have been boring. It's like on TV shows when the long time romantic teases finally get together in a will they or won't they set up, the shows usually take a pooper. It removes the tension. Luke and Leia have no romantic tension.

Anakin/Padme is set up the same way as Solo/Leia.

It's just not done nearly as well and the actors lack any semblance of on screen chemistry

 

I don’t think the debate between the two is which you’d personally prefer, but which is more believable with respect to human nature. The ‘good girl’ falling for the ‘bad boy’ is a cliché for a reason. We’ve all probably seen it in action in our own lives.

But what exactly is it that draws Padme to Anakin? He’s a tortured soul that she, as a kind person, wants to nurture and comfort? This just doesn’t come across very realistically in Ep2. It just sort of happens and we’re asked to simply go with it.

Personally, I’ve always liked the idea that Anakin is subtly 'Jedi mind tricking' her into falling for him. It has way darker overtones of course, but this dude IS Darth Vader after all.

 

Oh man if they would have done that, even if it was a bit of a subconscious thing on Anakin's part...that would have been WILD.

Very Purple Man ish.
Would give a whole new aspect of evil to Vader and the ethical and moral dilemma of rape and such to his evilness.

 

Idk it means that that's probably just how relationships and all were written back then with a bunch of fun wit and humor and all and by the time the prequels came, character dynamics were different than back in the 70s and even the 80s...maybe Lucas could have written them better but it wasn't entirely bad .

 

You think they didn't use any of Lucas' ideas for episode VII? Why does your plea for a new or improved understanding of the prequels include a critique of episode VII? There is no infighting over episode VII. A near absolute majority of Star Wars fans loves The Force Awakens, even more so than Rogue One. A tiny but radical minority of prequel fans with the unlikely assistance of right wing extremists and small audience click bait youtubers are fighting a useless rearguard action against people who probably understood the movies and the general concept of Star Wars better than they do.

Indeed, things couldn't be more different compared to prequel times. The sequel trilogy already is an amalgam of the best ideas from the originals and the prequels with some new and exciting ideas never seen before in any Star Wars movie. The main cause for the prequels failure is Lucas' overconfidence in himself as a screenwriter and director, his disrespect for his general audience and his overconfidence in modern digital technology. He also failed in terms of his narrative structuring of the prequels. It is quite frankly a mess full of irrelevant character development and decision making. Demystification, a problem of all 'prequel' stories, made things even worse. The premises for a good story were there, but all these things combined caused Lucas to fail. The only episode Lucas did think out thoroughly was episode I, and it shows, it was a far more coherent narrative than any of the other prequel episodes. It set up some beautiful themes and plot possibilities from which Lucas' uncomprehensibly deviated in episodes II and III.

 

I don't think I agree much with that at all.
I mean he the basic blueprint for Han/Leia and applied it to Anakin/Padme. Low caste male character smitten with the royal female castes above him.

Seems fairly similar. Just one was executed much better than the other.

 

My good friend, how can you say it doesn’t come across very realistically? Our reality is filled with tragic stories of women who fell in love with these lowlife pieces of garbage that only led them to their deaths. Why this happens could be for tons of reasons but maybe for you and me it doesn't have any logic that a girl would fall for an abusive and posesive drug dealer that beats her up for any possible reason but sadly this happens WAY to much. Worst still is the fact that after all that abuse, when the girl finally manages to get away from the dork with the help of friends and family, the abusive dweeb crawl to the girl, cries, says he will never do it again, and the girl falls for it two or three times! It is because of this that I said what I said.

Believe me, I too have argued about Padme's reasons for falling for Anakin and even more so after he told her that he had murdered women and children. That was the moment that Padme should have split and run to the Jedi Council and report Anakin's crazy behavior but just like many girls these days it was like Anakin- ''I killed the mothers and the kids because I hate them!'' Padme- ''Oh Annie is so sad and in need of someone to help him. I just have to stay by his side and love him even if he's a maniac.''

On the other hand I also tell you to not mind me much cause I'm really old fashioned and maybe that's why I don't dig the Leia falling for Han because he's the typical bad dude. I come from a time where you had to woo a girl you liked and where you had to be polite, charming and romantic. A girl could be falling head over heels for you and unless you made the first move the girl would never be the one to start a relationship. In my times you weren't awesome because you had a neat car or you were ''bad''. Girls found it so romantic to walk in the beach, pick up seashells and received love letters that you wrote from the heart and the most romantic thing ever was for you to tell a girl you wanted to stay pure till marrige. Now days that doesn't matter and as long as you are a jerk, have a nice car and are in with most things that are messed up, girls will be the ones to literally go to you and say ''Hi I'm Dunga, you're hot! Wanna go to bed? '' and woe to you if you ever come and say the ''I want to remain pure'' line cause that instantly turns you into a dorky loser!

But that's how things were in a more civilized day. Before the dark times, before the Empire.

 

ANAKIN: A character that we were told in the OT was a great man and friend who tragically turned to the dark side and betrayed the Jedi.
The prequel reality: A whiny ass who constantly defies his master, complains endlessly and by sheer stupidity, is tricked into turning to the dark side based on a promise that cannot even be fulfilled in the time he needs it to. And this is your idea of a great character? Um, no. In order for a tragedy to really work, the audience needs to actually feel something for the tragic character, and be able to feel sorry for him when he falls into tragedy. The adult Anakin Skywalker, who is basically a whole new person from the boy in The Phantom Menace, has absolutely nothing about him that is appealing or endearing to the audience, nor does he live up to the characterization given to him in the OT. And so his fall to the dark side is not tragic, it's the story of a unlikable jerk becoming an even bigger jerk.

JAR JAR BINKS: An infantile character created as George Lucas' idea of comic relief. Except nothing about him was funny. If he was there as simply an appeal to children, then why the hell did he need to be so goddamned annoying to everyone else? Children had no problem loving Chewbacca, the droids or Yoda without those characters needing to act like over-the-top, insane cartoonish goofballs stepping in poop and being farted on. Why couldn't the character simply have been designed as a more tolerable alien charcater, instead of the personification of nails on a chalkboard?

THE PREQUELS are heavily criticized because they are critically flawed films that fail on the very basics of quality filmmaking. This is not about the films failing to meet personal expectations, it's about failing to meet the fundamentals of what makes a film good. When audiences fail to connect with flat and unappealing characters, they have no reason to care what happens to them. The dialogue and acting is, at times, laughably bad. The films are bogged down with boring scenes of political discourse, endless scenes of people sitting around talking in front of fake backgrounds. The action scenes are completely free of any tension or genuine excitement. The CGI is overused to the point of absurdity that everything looks so artificial and video-gamey.

So, yes, it is a good thing that none of Lucas' ideas were used on Episode 7, because we had three films that thoroughly demonstrated that whatever skills he and his highly-talented team of collaborators had back in the 70s-80s vanished when he tried to do everything by himself. And the idea that some brilliant plan for 7-9 was thrown out because it was so good is simply bogus.

 

I definitely see them as separate archetypes.

Leia, like Luke, has an adventurous spirit and would love nothing more than to roam the galaxy, but is saddled with the responsibility to her father’s legacy and the Rebellion. Han represents a type of existence she envies and secretly wishes she could experience. No rules, no expectations, just boundless possibilities. It’s a recipe for passion, not longevity. Which is why the on-again-off-again aspects introduced in TFA make perfect sense.

Padme though, in my observation, is more of a compassionate soul. She’s a natural care giver and revels in onus. She sees in Anakin a broken person in need of minding. It’s more of a maternal dynamic. He, desperately needing that type of figure, and she gladly providing it. Considering how they met (babysitter crush), it also makes perfect sense. It's just not very well executed IMO.

 

Sorry, I’m not saying the premise is unrealistic, but its onscreen portrayal. I don’t feel it was ultimately earned. The ingredients were all there, they simply weren’t mixed right. How she got from “you’ll always be that little kid to me” to “I truly . . . deeply . . . etc“ wasn’t believable in the slightest to me.