Is the PT really all that bad?

I really don't put much stock at all in Lucas's statements about his plans for Star Wars. At various times he said there would be six, nine or even twelve films. He's said that the original Star Wars was a chunk from the middle of his original draft, which is patently false. He's said that certain twists, like the Leia/Luke relationship, were pre-planned, which is patently false. Like many great artists, Lucas is one of the most unreliable commentators on his own work.

The things he says are interesting if you're talking about George Lucas himself. But if you're assessing the films, you need to just look at the films.

 

I really enjoyed the prequels when they first came out, but as I grew older - I couldn't fully get behind them. A lot of it had to do with the acting of Hayden Christensen. I understand he was suppose to capture an emotional Anakin/Vader, but it was just too whiny for me. Everything you named though makes them watchable and more Tolerable than TLJ.

--- Double Post Merged, Mar 28, 2019 ---

Truth. Not a huge fan of Lucas himself, but some of his ideas have been on point (obviously).

 

But this goes to my point in that when Lucas writes something, he tries to have a over-reaching arc to it (even if he is changing the story with each new movie). I don't believe Disney is even trying to go for the over-reaching arc (hence why I like the Standalone movies better than the Saga movies cause they are their own entity). I see this happen in TV shows all of the time, as a new producer/creative team takes over after the 3rd or 4th season and the show is totally different. Homeland comes to mind as the show started off one way, (different writers took over after the first few seasons) and now it's a completely different show. The first few seasons had an over-reaching arc, and now each season is sort of self-contained. That's the way the ST feels to me and I have no faith that JJ will all of the sudden tie everything together in Episode 9. I have always said that my problem with the ST has nothing to do with execution or acting, it has to do with the storylines (ironically the PT has the opposite pros and cons). So if Lucas was going to develop 7,8,9 than I think he would have made it tie into 1-6 a lot better than we see now, because that's just the way he writes his stories.

I would agree with you that 4-6 can be enjoyed as is. I even think the ST will probably be able to stand on it's own and be viewed as it's own entity simply because Rey/Kylo Ren don't necessarily jive with the 1-6 story of Anakin/Luke/The Emperor. I disagree with you that the PT can stand on it's own as it's an incomplete story (purposely written by Lucas to lead into 4-6). Most of the character arcs (Vader, Kenobi, Yoda, The Emperor) don't have a payoff until 4-6.

 

I disagree with you. The ST can barely stand on its own, at least to me. I'd rather stick with the PT/OT, along with the two stand alones.

 

I suppose 1-3 could possibly play by themselves as a Greek tragedy of sorts. You’d pretty much have to shave off the last 10 minutes or so of ROTS to eliminate all the material that really only serves as establishment for ANH though. I could see it. Sometimes the bad guys win. Love doesn’t always conquer all.

 

@eeprom @Jedi77-83

Let me try to whirl this around to the thread's point.

I don't deny that Lucas is a waffle on his thinking, and I'm going to bypass this conversation a bit and jump to the meat and potatoes.

To me, the ST has made the PT better (and I don't mean it makes it better because the ST is poor form in some fashion).

I never felt that 6 was the end as a kid. ROTJ felt to me like ending on the ramp up to the chorus of a song, but not getting to hear the chorus.
I immediately assumed there would be more Star Wars, and then came the silent death.

Then it came about that there were more coming, and there was a moment where I was really excited about that, but then it arose that it was the prequel indeed and not the sequel trilogy and my heart sunk a little.
I'm not big on prequels in general because it's like starting a movie out with the main character getting shot in the head, dying, and then cutting to "48 hours earlier".
Well, I'm bored now. I know what's going to happen ultimately, so there's little point in this for me. Now all I've got left is to see how it got there, but I already know where we're headed.

It's like handing me a present and telling me what it is. Cool. Now I guess I'll just take the time to bother unwrapping this unsurprising gift...
Sure, you stuck some duct tape under the wrapper to make it harder to open, and put a snake spring in the box so that when I open I'm pummeled with a surprise, but that changes nothing about the end result. I know what I'm getting.

It didn't help that by the time that the PT came out, I had already been studying Biblical exegesis for a few years, had already learned the chiastic narrative structure (because it's a common biblical narrative method in many of the texts), and had already noticed the chiastic structure in the OT - that ROTJ is a mirror response narrative to ANH, and that ESB is a near-perfectly symmetrical film where the first half mirrors the second half of the film.

Being a huge nerd of things Star Wars in regards to the making of the films, and a huge nerd on textual anthropology, not only did I know what the PT's ultimate result was going to be since it was a prequel, I also had a pretty decent idea what kinds of things I was going to see in that.

I knew that I would see Luke's father face the same moral challenges that Luke did, but that where Luke chose one way in a moral challenge, his Father would choose the opposite. I knew that I was going to be watching Ben Kenobi training and mentoring Luke's Father because it's said in the OT that this happened.
I knew that I was going to see the Emperor rise to power, and I knew that it would be from within the system of the good guys' government because it's clear that's what had happened in ANH between Leia and the General's talking to Vader; all concerned about the council and the Emperor over-stepping his boundaries.
So it's clear even then that he wasn't fully in control before the OT just yet, but that he had clearly risen to considerable power from within the system, and had gained enough power in doing so that shortly after the beginnings of ANH he has the power to abolish the council entirely and take true unilateral control in every respect, and not need to hide behind a guise of democratic councils. I knew that I was going to see the fall of the Jedi from being bigger and greater, because the OT loosely discusses this.

What I didn't see coming was that ROTS would mirror ANH and that TPM would mirror ROTJ; that was a very cool flip and complication to the chiastic narrative structure.

Now, the PT seemingly resolves the OT (or the other way around, depending on your perspective) because all of the themes are wrapped up with a nice little bow on them in pretty interesting ways, and in a level of artistic control and talent that is far beyond any film story out there - period.
The chiastic structure of the OT and PT is just absolute insanity. It easily beats the Bible's chiastic accomplishments, and that has been pretty much king of the chiastic narrative form through the ages.

But after the PT concluded, I immediately was waiting for the ST because even though the chiastic structure was fully mirrored, the themes of the whole set weren't concluded - they were left dangling, for me.

Lucas stamped a very philosophical question right into the very marrow of Star Wars: can we ever escape our history, or are we doomed to repeat it?

Star Wars, in many ways, is written like a lesson in Hinduism's samsara where the same types of experiences will continue to be experienced until the actual lesson has been learned.
On the surface, this seems like Anakin fails the lessons and Luke learns them, but this is only by thinking that the point is to be good (which; don't get me wrong, Lucas is very big on that idea; very big).

But, it doesn't actually resolve the allegory because it's like a misaligned wheel. If you're drifting left (Anakin), and so you pull right (Luke) to get back to the center, the issue isn't resolved. All you've done is re-centered the direction, but there's still a misalignment in the vehicle. It will still go left again, and you'll have to pull it to the right again, etc... repeat - stuck in samsara.

And it'll stay that way until you actually fix the alignment problem so that it stops drifting back and forth, and stays in the center.

Until then, you can't escape the history - "escape the sins of our Fathers"; we're just bound by them on repeat until we actually address the real issue, and not the momentary issue. The momentary issue is whether what we're doing right now is right or wrong, and which choice to make in that moment.
But the real issue is the bigger one: how to stop having to make these choices that swing us back and forth between right and wrong about these things.

Luke didn't do that. Neither did Anakin.
Luke made a course correction to Anakin's drift, but it doesn't stop the issue.

Luke didn't escape his Father's cycle; he responded to it by going through the same cycle.

And Kylo, Ben, is suffering once again, the cycle of Anakin.

This is where my position comes in, and why the ST has made the PT better for me.
Kylo is picking up the reverberations of Anakin, and Rey is picking up the reverberations of Luke, and so far, both are unraveling the cycles as they go through them. They aren't just pulling left and right; they're shutting the cycle off along the way.

For instance, they both try to turn each other, and neither turns the other. No one budges.
In the PT, Anakin (younger generation) refuses to be compelled by Obi-Wan (older generation), decides to align with the dark, loses his father figure, and the note is sorrowful.
In the OT, Luke (younger generation) refuses to be compelled by Vader (older generation), decides to align with the light, and gains his father figure, and the note is bitter-sweet.
In the ST, Kylo refuses to be compelled by Rey, Rey refuses to be compelled by Kylo (same generation), neither use the light or dark side as the motive or conversation for compelling and are each choosing for their independence while begging for companionship of the other, both lose the only "sibling" figure they have, and the note is tragic chaos with the world around them literally crumbling to pieces and breaking apart.


They are each allegorically destroying every theme they're predecessor has made as they pass through them.
Not inverting the theme to the right because it was left; reversing it so that the theme literally cannot be responded to anymore.

All possible combinations accomplished, and the tug of war destroyed, broken, trashed apart and scattered into ruin; the cycle undone.

That immediately makes the PT WAY more powerful because it is now a part of a very BIG ontological cycle, and one of the two principle pillars that the metaphorical arms of Samson (Rey and Kylo) now have to topple over.

Cheers,
Jayson



Side tangent....
Now, the ST was a complete unknown for me. I had no idea how they were going to do this because the idea of a third part chiastic three volume response to a two part, six volume chiastic mythology has literally NEVER been done in history...ever.

All chiastic responses have been in the terms of PAIRS. No one has attempted to make a nine volume chiastic narrative.
A simple trilogy has been done, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and you can see that in many places, though the most common in the Bible is a 7 part chiastic structure with parts 5, 6, 7 responding to parts, 1, 2, 3, and 4 being a near perfect symmetrical form of itself.

But no one has done a three act, three part, three trilogy, nine volume chiastic narrative structure...ever.

So I was very nervous about the idea of the ST. I wanted it, but I was very worried about it.
Then I heard that Abrams and Kasdan were on board and I was absolutely no longer worried. Kasdan knows how this narrative runs, hell, he's pretty responsible for a lot of it, and Abrams is not egotistical enough to not listen to Kasdan - Abrams is a knowledge leach. He'll just sit there and suck up everything any mentor has to offer.

 

I actually think that Lucas could have written the PT so it wouldn't spoil the OT (and still preserve the twist in ESB). I think if Palpatine never names Anakin (Darth Vader) and he is still Anakin when he supposedly dies on Mustafar, why would a new viewer think that he would be Darth Vader when ANH begins? So if Lucas nixes the last 10 minutes of ROTS (showing Suited Vader, showing Luke/Leia being hidden, etc), than the first time viewer would just think that Anakin died just like Darth Maul, Dooku and Grievous, and this Darth Vader guy was another apprentice of Palpatine. Now I have to watch Obiwan's conversation with Luke when he asks about his father, and how a new viewer would take the context of that? I'm sure there are other details that Lucas would have had to nix to make the 1-3 story jive with 4-6 so nothing is spoiled in terms of a flowing narrative.

 

This was a well-articulated post and deserves a full and ruminated response. It deserves its own thread, really. But above is what I feel is the core of your perspective.

I, myself, have always considered the story complete with ROTJ. Luke’s refusal to follow the traditional wisdom of the old guard and insist on pursuing his own path toward vindication, was all the proof I needed that this vacillation wasn’t tamed necessarily, but on its way to be. Luke and Leia would be the architects of a new era that would correct the mistakes of the past.

Luke would restore belief to a faithless galaxy. Leia would restore justice to an inequitable galaxy. I didn’t need an epilogue for that. Neither would be a rigid tool of the past. They’d both grow and evolve beyond what came before, which is all anyone can ever hope for - the pursuit of a more perfect system - continuous improvement. Inching ever closer to paradise.

And this is exactly what I’m cautiously optimistic for as well. If a continuation of the story is to be done, then this is the most logical direction. We know the problem, now what’s the solution? You can’t just imply that things will be better at this point. We had that already. If the central conflict of this overarching parable is truly to be resolved, then let’s see it. How do we know, twenty years from now, we won’t be right back here, doing this all over again?

I’m also perfectly fine if that’s not how this all goes though. Honestly, the OT is all the Star Wars I’ve ever really needed. Everything beyond those three movies are pure bonus to me. If anything can manage to plus that enjoyment, then I’ll always be open, but it isn’t necessary for me. I’ve been fulfilled.

I guess because Obi-Wan specifically names Vader as a pupil he lost to the Darkside. But the PT storyline only shows him with one apprentice and that was Anakin . . . who he lost to the Darkside. You’d have to modify quite a bit from that pretty essential exposition dump in ANH for that reveal to work.

 

@eeprom

See, to me, Luke couldn't have been the one to fix everything. I never felt that way about Luke. To me, Luke was the one to correct the errors of the past, but not resolve the problems as a whole.

He couldn't, to me, because he, to me, was too trapped by his own paradigm; defined by his lineage and history, unable to become removed from it - to surpass it.
He was able to resolve it, but not surpass it.

Besides, he only answers back to the generational issue. He doesn't have an equal to balance with; he's the most important torch bearer to bring the light back, but he's not the one to collide the light with the dark and break the cycle.

I am as well cautiously optimistic because Kylo and Rey have a LOT of stress riding on them, and I don't care WHO is behind the wheel for writing, finishing this thing off is a HUGE challenge (and one, most likely, that will and would be hated regardless who would have written it).

My only tickle of a concern is that Abrams has a history of not finishing stories. Most of what he's been involved with have been the beginnings and then he walks off and someone else does the ending (usually terribly).

The only one that leaps out as having had an ending in full form was Super 8, and the ST movies kind of have an ending...ish? Not really, though, because they are self-contained stories with an ending, but not a running narrative that is final for the whole thing; slam the trunk, we're done!
The only one I know of for certain of his work that's like that, again, is Super 8. Which was good, but it was also a FAR smaller story than this behemoth.

I'm secretly hoping that he's calling Kasdan and Pegg for help a lot (which isn't unheard of for Abrams; he tends to ask others - even those not on the film - for their advice A LOT...a LOT a LOT. He's really super insecure and pretty open about it).

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Going back to your mentioning of biblical exegesis. That reminds me of Saul who was the error of the past, David who fixes the previous error and Salomon who was the one to prosper and build the temple. Well we know that didn't work well there.

 

Actually, it's quite a lot like that.
There's mountains borrowed in pieces out of the Bible. Makes sense; Lucas defines himself as a Buddhist Methodist.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I guess I view it in the most reduced state with respect to the core moral of the allegory: If we allow our darker selves to define who we are, then we’ll never ascend, we’ll never become more, we’ll stay mired in our own suffering and persist as the cause of our own misery. It’s not enough to simply reject our darkness out of hand. To pretend it doesn’t exist. We have to confront it, acknowledge it as a part of us and then move beyond it. You can certainly argue that Anakin accomplishes this too, but Luke is who I truly perceive as exemplifying this point.

"If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."
"He's more machine now than man - twisted and evil."
"By now you must know your father can never be turned from the dark side. So will it be with you."

Luke, in my observation, defies the gatekeepers of the status quo and surpasses them. He discards their preconceived notions and forges his own path. Attachment, for example, can be an exploitable weakness when selfishly motivated, but it can also be an immeasurable strength when altruistically aligned. You have to find that equilibrium and sheer avoidance/abstinence is ultimately counterproductive to that end.

Viewed from that perspective, we aren’t really dealing with equal but opposite forces ensconced in this cyclical pendulum swing. We instead have a steady state model that was out of kilter on account of corruptive elements that the current system was ill-equipped to handle. Luke, then, represents the remediation of that flawed construct. Luke and Leia are essentially the ‘balance’ that Anakin was prophesized to bring. For me, by itself, that’s a satisfying resolution to what was presented in George’s six part story.

The very concept of sequels though necessitates that this interpretation be erroneous. If this story continues beyond that presented resolution, then it can’t truly be resolved. It’s more complicated then. The flaws were far deeper and fundamentally set than previously thought. The New Republic, which should have been built on a corrected foundation, immediately fell. The New Jedi Order did the same. The Empire, as an embodiment of our darkest tendencies, has persisted.

The solution can’t be simple remediation, but reinvention. We have to redefine what the nature of this conflict is: not necessarily ‘good versus evil’, but ‘light opposing dark’. When in contention, they breed chaos, but when balanced bring harmony . . . . . . . or not. Maybe there isn’t a grander motif at work here. Just going through the motions. Time will tell I guess.

I think it was Kristian Harloff I heard take this position, which I found interesting: JJ is a pretty alert individual. He’s well aware of his reputation in this regard. He knows he has a lot to prove with this closing chapter. Not just to Star Wars fans, but to his contemporaries and himself too. I don’t think he would have accepted the gig unless he had a solid concept for a satisfying conclusion and was willing to do whatever was needed to realize it. Will his definition of what that means be the same as ours though? Hard to say.

 

I think this is great.

And...

Not necessarily...to me at least.
Even though I choose to look at the story through the lens of the long view from PT to ST, that's not to say that anyone is stuck that way just by the ST existing.
I don't even hold that the PT changes anyone's views of the OT.

This is because I have an admittedly peculiar way of viewing the Star Wars trilogies. I've talked about it elsewhere lightly around the forums.

I see each trilogy like a textual anthropologist sees the major segments of the texts that comprise the overall body of the Tanakh and Christian Bible.
For simplicity, I'm going to refer to "bible" here as the full textual catalog of the Tanakh and the full textual catalog of the Christian Bible's "New Testament", even though these two religious groups don't actually share the same catalog - the Christians don't have all of the texts of the Tanakh, and obviously Judaism doesn't have the New Testament...but I'm going to simplify this for the point of an anthropological lens for the purposes here.

Basically, for this analogy (and not for the anthropological record), you have four main parts of this body of text, or "textual family", and they are each made by a different culture at a different time. True, some of the cultures are essentially the same culture as one of the others, but one culture being shifted in time from another can make a very big difference; just look at the difference of the USA circa 1800's and now and we will immediately find a need to separate the differences between these two groups as effectively different cultures; though part of the same shared cultural lineage.

So, getting back to the four main groups, you have the Torah (first five books of the "Old Testament"), the Nevi'im and Ketuvim (the "Old Testament" minus the Torah), the Gospels, and then you have the Epilogue of the "New Testament" (Acts of the Apostles, Epistles, and Revelation).

We're going to knee-cap the Ketuvim ("writings", e.g. Job, Proverbs, Psalms, etc...) out and only keep the Nevi'im ("prophets", e.g. Joshua, Kings, Samuel, etc...)
We're also going to knee-cap the Epilogue of the New Testament to just include the Acts of the Apostles and not the Epistles and Revelation.
These extra writings on the side are the Tanakh and Christian Bible equivalent to the stuff outside of the Star Wars saga films - technically canon, but not really part of the same continuum of the narrative story. You don't need them; they're extra bits.
I'm also only going to use Matthew for "The Gospels" because really the "Gospels" are just 4 versions of the same story, and Matthew is the most traditional in following the narrative tradition of the Tanakh that you can find in the likes of the Torah and the Nevi'im. The rest kind of do their own thing...almost like fan-fiction of Star Wars has a noticeably different narrative tradition than the actual films do.


The Torah is complete on its own. You can read it and be done. People did for a long time. Heck, for a long time, that's all there were.
Then came more a while later, around about the 7th through 5th c BCE; this is around when you get more that would eventually make up a chunk of the Tanakh (by the 1st c CE) with the important additions of the timeline narrative of the Nevi'im. Now people could know what happened after Moses through to their current time.
This was also perfectly wrapped up and you didn't need anything else. You had the Torah and the Nevi'im and everything you needed to know about this mythical story was right there - no loose ends. You could, if you wanted to, even ignore the Torah (not very common) and just take in mind the Nevi'im.
Then later, you get the Gospels, which reach back and link across both the Torah and the Nevi'im and like the Nevi'im made efforts to narratively mirror the Torah in motifs and counter answer events in a mirror like reflection of sorts in its characters. You can read the Gospels entirely on their own and ignore the Torah and Nevi'im like hundreds of millions of people currently today, or you can pay mind to either of these other two; up to you!

There's no damage in only looking at one or the other in any of this. There's just more stuff going on, the more you look at things.
The Torah mostly is a falling of man, rinse and repeat in multiple fashions. The Nevi'im is mostly the righting of man, while still screwing up a lot along the way.
And the Gospels are an eradication of the requirements of the Torah and the Nevi'im's outlines of needs to balance man via a reversal of sacrifice.
Previous sacrifice was from the people in one respect or another, and this new addition wipes that sacrificial pattern which regularly caused a bouncing back and forth between earnest sacrificing (right) and sacrificing becoming the focus itself (wrong) by having the character mirror through the same motif of events as both of the previous narratives, and in each case wiping them out in some fashion or another (e.g. the Sabbath story, touching lepers, exiled to Egypt so to come out from Egypt, etc...)....

Now, the point is this, and this is how I see Star Wars on the whole.
The Torah is like the PT, the Nevi'im is like the OT, the Gospels are like the ST, and Epilogue is whatever the heck comes after the ST (in theory, anyway).

And I mean this anthropologically. The PT, to me, was written by a people at a different point in time and culture in the Star Wars universe than the OT.
A different, but related group of people in the Star Wars universe wrote the OT.
And a different, but somewhat related (though less so) group of people in the Star Wars universe wrote the ST.

It's just in the Star Wars universe, the Navi'im was written first, and the Torah second, followed by the Gospels third.

This is why it's perfectly OK to have inconsistencies between these Star Wars "texts".
What we're looking at are the things that were of value to those people who wrote them at that time.

So, for example, your view about Luke isn't invalidated by the ST because the people who wrote the OT texts were saying that message; that was the point they were making, and that was their belief.

Later on, another culture in the Star Wars universe wrote about how things came to become the OT, and made a message out of that statement, and linked it to the OT's motifs and messages in their own way; altering a few things here and there to fit their beliefs. (This view of Luke is basically punched up even more with the PT, but also slightly altered from the OT's message, because now it's definitely about correcting the wrong and making it right; before it was just about choosing the right and resisting the wrong).

Later still, another culture wrote the ST, and the ST links back to both the PT and OT and out of the two of the three texts so far recovered from archaeological findings, it appears that this group saw a need for an eradication of the right and wrong paradigm and was discussing how to hit the master reset button on the entire approach to achieving a balanced galaxy.


I think this is a really cool way to look at Star Wars, and it's not even all that off from reality because the Lucas who wrote the PT had very different ideas than the Lucas/Kasdan/Arndt who wrote the OT, and made some changes to fit his new ideas and beliefs, and Kasdan/Abrams/Johnson also have a different set of ideas

I have a lot of faith in Abrams, honestly. I've never once been let down by him, personally. I've loved every film that he's made so far.
Also; he's had the experience of pissing off a huge score of fans with Star Trek Into Darkness and has openly talked about lessened learned from that about how far you can go, and what's just too far. (Me, personally, I loved Into Darkness and thought it was one of the best damn Star Trek films ever made, but I'm at odds with the majority share of Star Trek fans on that.) And Star Trek Beyond was well received by the overwhelming majority of Trek fans, so he seems quite capable of pulling an asset into a 180 direction from fandom unrest to fandom appeasement.

Now, personally, I don't think TLJ needs course correction, but what I'm getting at is that Abrams seems really conscientious and has the prior experience of being almost in this kind of situation before with the other main sci-fi title of the industry.

He's also seemingly able to work under mountains of pressure and stress like it's nothing.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I can honestly say I haven’t thought about it in those terms before. That’s a unique and intriguing perspective.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that it was made invalid by the ST, but more that it’s incompatible as a conclusion now when strictly treated as a bridgehead. Then it becomes a step on the way to the destination rather than the destination itself. Which I feel is perfectly acceptable provided where we end up isn’t essentially where we left off.

I definitely agree. Each series of films is a reflection of the time and by who they were made. They each have distinct flavors and really should - they’re set generations apart. The stories take place in the same universe, but at different eras with separate cultural attitudes, beliefs and values.

One of the popular criticisms about the PT I could never get onboard with (to try to veer back on topic) was that they looked so different than the OT. That they weren’t familiar enough. Such an odd complaint to me. I mean, shouldn’t they be? Why would you expect to go 30 years in the past and have everything be the same? Weird.

Anyway, this has been a fun little back and forth. Much obliged

 

The prequel trilogy is my favourite of the Star Wars films!

MOD EDIT

 

Not at all (even if it’s not as great as the OT). The SW Saga 1-6 is really about Palpatine’s plan as he rises to power and is essentially undone by the Skywalkers. The OT is a great Trilogy but the PT really gives rounds it out and gives the whole a depth that very few franchises can match.

 

PT isn't my favorite for various reasons, but they are certainly watchable despite what many claim. Then again, Rogue One is my current favorite of all the films so....

 

I dislike the PT as much as most who dislike the PT do.

That said, I did watch the CW series and that helped with a lot of issues I had. Still, some issues linger.

The dialogue, especially between Padme and Anakin is torture. The effects are overdone and don't hold up over time. Jar Jar, midichlorians, virgin pregnancy/birth, inaccuracies like Padme dying at birth vs Leia recollecting her, child acting mary sue, ect... there's lots to criticize.

For some people, it only takes one of those elements to ruin a series, the PT has several.

However, it did some things extremely right.

Sidious was done amazingly well. The lightsaber choreography was awesome. The battles were great. These movies are watchable as long as you have a remote in hand to FF the slow and cringy parts. The CW's elevates the PT to decent. I think it deserves the criticism. I think it's also fair for people to love it, flaws and all. I have nephews who swear by the PT because they grew up with that as being SW.

 

I don't know why anyone think they can answer this question, when it all depends upon personal tastes. If the person who had posted this thread thought a genuine, overall answer could be reached, he or she was wallowing in an illusion.

As you had pointed out, the PT is a different type of story than the OT. It's about the downfall of Anakin Skywalker, the downfall of the Jedi Order, the downfall of the Galactic Senate and the downfall of the Galactic Republic. It's also about the rise of Palpatine and the Empire. Also, this downfall was not solely caused by the actions of Palpatine or Anakin. Other characters - including those from the Jedi and the Senate - participated in these downfalls, due to their actions and reactions. Due to their flaws. Nearly all of the major characters are guilty.

 

Personally I really do not like the prequels for the following reasons:

1) Way too much CGI takes away any suggestion of realism.

2) Way too much slapstick comedy, with JJB typifying this.

3) Way too much politics and political manoevering that just becomes boring!

4) The fact their seemed to be advances in technology despite the fact it being set before the OT was odd.

5) The Annakin / Padme scenes in TPM and AOTC are just nauseating imho.

6) Too many left field / head scratching moments i.e R2's rockets, midichlorians, force dash, Roger Roger etc.

7) Young Ani, oooops and yipeee!

8) Just didn't feel like Star Wars, it felt like a completely different franchise. (The ST and anthologies do a far better job at capturing the SW feel imo).

I totally respect the fact that many people love the PT and that is perfectly fine, heck these boards would be so boring if we all liked the same stuff.

Bit for me it's a no go with the Prequels.