The Star Wars Prequels.

I just watched them.
Just?
Yes.
Why?
Good question.



When Phantom Menace came out, I was in college and in the middle of a lot of what was probably [looking back on it] a lot of teenage angst. I recall some friends going to check it out. I don't know specifically what I was doing at the time but it was never important for me to go to opening day for any movie. When people returned with horrible feedback, I'd lost a lot of interest. By the time Revenge of the Sith rolled out, I'd lost track of the entire prequel nonsense and was busy with [looking back on it] a lot of mid-20s angst. Over the years I'd been able to avoid most things prequel-related and most/everyone discouraged the heartbreaking evil that George Lucas had done. The plot--turns out there is not much to speak of--had seeped into my mind as pop cultural things do--through merchandising. Obviously the characters did as well. I remember hearing a harsh criticism of the Jarjar character--racist? Oh, this sounds bad. I crawled into a hole with my Trilogy discs (the original cuts on the bonus discs, not the "feature" discs that had also been wrecked by Lucas) and did not emerge until recently.

So why now? Why these self-inflicted screenings? It would appear I was perfectly happy in my ignorant world with A New Hope DVD, Leia Pez dispenser and a Yoda backpack--and my entire relationship with the trilogy still untouched by Qui Gon, Watto, Boss Nass and JarJar. Well, some of it had to do with seeing "Weird Al" Yankovic live. The epic encore I spoke of included a full version of "The Saga Begins." I'd heard the song many many times before--because uh well, I own that DVD too--but something about seeing it performed live, with a stage full of costumed people, and an audience of hundreds (thousands?) singing along, triggered something in my mind. Overall, I was thinking that maybe a decade is long enough to wait; maybe it won't sting as much since so much time has passed. And ultimately, I'm a completist. I guess I knew all along that the day will come. So it did.

Well, I will say this, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. Which doesn't mean it wasn't bad. It certainly didn't age well. Phantom Menace was confusing. I was mainly able to piece it together BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW HOW IT ENDS. That's not good! The dialogue was bad AND SO MUCH WORSE IN ATTACK OF THE CLONES which I believe led to the terrible acting in the three films. Yes, I thought JarJar was a racist figure, but I thought Watto was too. I didn't think young Anakin was as irritating as people made him out to be but Qui Gon Jinn was worse. I was expecting the Darth Maul character to be more prominent. I thought some scenes ran too long like most fight scenes and the pod racing. Overall, terrible terrible art direction. I don't like the padawan costuming. I don't like a lot of Amidala's costuming and makeup. There are too many species of anything in any given scene. My theory is that JarJar character--if we are forced to keep him--could have been made more palatable with different styling and if he just spoke plain English in normal voice; anyway, I was glad to see him phased out.

Attack of the Clones was by far the worst of the lot. Not much of that made sense to me. I was irritated the entire time. Why are droids wearing capes? Why the fuck do they need capes? Good cape weather? How is it that Yoda can fly and kick ass and shit and still need a cane to walk? I still don't get what Padme sees in Anakin! Why did she marry this guy again? She was a Queen and a Senator once upon a time but now she's just a dumb cougar? I thought Natalie Portman, no, I KNOW, is capable of better acting--new Aronofsky Black Swan is looking really great in the trailer. I was really disappointed on all counts. Plus, most of the scenes looked like barf. George Lucas barf. I think it was earlier today I described Palpatine's face as visual barf or that is "Darth Sidious'" face when he's all old and robed and decrepit. A lot of the characters were kind of nauseating to look at and a lot of scenes were too crowded with information unnecessarily which kind of mimicked a motion sickness kind of feeling. That's not what you want in a movie--a barfy feeling.

Finally, Revenge of the Sith. Easily the best of the three but that's not saying much. It's pretty straightforward. He's Vader. We all knew that already! This disappointment is similar to what I felt after watching the Terminator films that followed T2. Maybe it's a little more intense with this franchise. When you know you're going to break a story up into let's say 3 pieces, the middle piece will suffer when you have a shitty storyteller. That's what happened with Terminator 3--it was just a transitional piece to connect Cameron's excellent Terminator 2 (where it should have just ended) with McG's Terminator Salvation (which I did not like at all). T3: Rise of Machines was bad and I'll tell you how I judge these things--does it standalone as a good movie? No. Do any of the Star Wars prequels? No. You have a chance to make the mid-section great since where that's where a lot of the meat should go and it just fails.

I think there's a foundation underneath all that stuff for Vader's backstory. Ok, so he was a slave child. A tinkerer. Skilled racer. Maybe if someone had taken the time to piece some story together, work on some character development and believable dialogue, instead of spending all the time and money on crappy cgi effects (that didn't age well in the end), we could have had something.

It was kind of cool to see Yoda not looking like a puppet a plush doll about as animated as my Yoda backpack, but I really just felt sorry for the big names attached to this project. Especially Sam Jackson. Because he dies. In a really undignified way. After fighting a guy I could barely even look at without wanting to vom.