Picture the scene. You might not have to. You might have been there. It’s 1999 and you’re gearing up for a new film from your favourite science fiction franchise, nearly two decades after the last instalment. It will tell you how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, what happened before the construction of the death star, and will feature many battles with cool creatures unfamiliar to our human imaginations. C-3PO and R2D2 and Yoda are back, and a whole lot of other characters are joining them! Then, it turns out to be awful. You leave the cinema with a desperation to burn the priceless Star Wars figurines you got as a kid, and vow to never succumb to the name Star Wars again, just like, after Nope, I vow to never touch anything Jordan Peele has worked on.
Then it’s 2002. You succumb to the name Star Wars because the original films were so iconic that you end up watching Attack of the Clones. It’s terrible, arguably even worse than the last one, and those toys that you resisted setting on fire the last time actually fall victim to the flame. This is merely hyperbolic to construct a mildly humorous and lyrical introduction, since I expect – and sincerely hope – that the reader is not an arsonist.
Among the parodies have been Carl and Lenny’s lightsaber fight with aluminium rods in The Simpsons over which is worse: The Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones. Like the hypothetical arsonist in the depiction above, Tim also sets fire to his collection in Spaced, and badmouths a child for liking Jar Jar Binks. Many years later, Simon Pegg had a role as Unkar Plutt in The Force Awakens. This trilogy has been known as unapologetically bad, mainly because of Jar Jar, to such an extent that the actor, Ahmed Best, faced mental turmoil over the personal abuse he received because of his role as the franchise’s most controversial character. Sure, Jar Jar is annoying, but it’s not the guy’s fault for earning a pay check, and it’s only a dispensable science fiction franchise. Luckily, he’s more recently been given a second chance in the much more successful The Mandalorian‘s third series, which I still haven’t watched. More on that later.
When the Disney era of Star Wars arrived, I realised that we perhaps have long since misunderstood the prequels. By no means is that justification of their poor quality, since they are objectively bad Star Wars films, with dodgier CGI than the 1977 original, flat characters, flatter dialogue, and a nonsensical obsession with politics, but at least they were trying to do their own thing. That’s not only including the third act of Revenge of the Sith, which is actually decent, and triumphs as Star Wars‘s darkest hour, as it will perhaps always remain while Disney refuse to do anything experimental with the franchise, but also the first two films. Sure, it didn’t need a whole trilogy to tell the story of how Anakin became Vader, but it told a story that was tonally and logistically separate from the originals, created new characters, worlds and storylines, while being faithful to the originals. It was a story George Lucas had always intended to tell and you feel that when you watch the originals.
In 2015, when The Force Awakens came along, it was a huge success. The bar must have been set so low, because it by no means deserves the acclaim. It was fun enough on a first-watch, but it plays everything too safe. This is arguably a flaw of blockbusters in general, since every James Bond film or Mission Impossible instalment is exactly the same, just with a different continent as the backdrop, but Star Wars doesn’t even shake up the planets anymore. It’s always Tatooine! The first time Disney tried doing anything remotely experimental, in The Last Jedi, audiences hated it, while critics loved it, because those audiences had become so used to being in a comfort zone with these films. Those in the franchise’s defence argue that these are intended to be fun, disposable action flicks, and that is true, to an extent. These aren’t meant to be award worthy, unless we’re talking about VFX, or emotionally profound, but when you repeat the same gimmick over and over without experimenting whatsoever, like its peers Star Trek and Doctor Who have done, for better or worse, time after time, it stops being fun, and then becomes a chore to watch. It’s meant to unlock Star Wars for a new generation, they say, but that generation are best off watching the better version of the same film, from the 70s and 80s, which haven’t yet dated.
Every Disney release since has done what the prequels did not, and that means playing it safe. I stopped watching the shows long ago. Marvel have become tedious enough, but at least they’re progressing a story and they’re daring to explore new areas of their wider universe, even if the structure of these projects itself often feels formulaic. Star Wars, meanwhile, feels obsessed with plugging every gap in its gaping sinkhole. Obi Wan has a series where he’s released from Tatooine and just ends up there again in the final episode, rendering it completely pointless, and ruining the fantastic concept of his exile. The Emperor returned in Rise of Skywalker, even though he’d already died two times before and he ended up overshadowing Kylo Ren and the much cooler Count Dooku, just because they felt they needed to link everything together too much. It’s the same problem as Marvel in that respect, but in a very different, less linear way. The Mandalorian suffers from the same problem, relying too heavily on fan service rather than developing Din Djarin, a better version of Boba Fett, so much so that they gave up trying to develop Boba in his own show and brought in Pedro Pascal instead. Not even Jack Black, and especially not Lizzo, were enough to entice me to check into the latest season, which lost my attention after CGI Luke stole the show from the incredible Giancarlo Esposito.
Look at Attack of the Clones. It’s awful tripe that delivers woeful lines like “I don’t like sand”, and absolutely perplexing moments like the lightsaber fight between Christopher Lee and Yoda, which is a sentence we never thought we would hear previously. At least it does its own thing though, and people are starting to realise that. It was George Lucas’s vision continued. It didn’t go well, but it was a product of effort and hard work and innovation, and a trilogy that had a complete vision, unlike the sequels, which were made up as they were going along. Sure, the sequels are more enjoyable, and the originals are still supreme, but it might be about time that we stopped hailing down insults on the prequel trilogy and learned to let them be.
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