Ten Years of Suck

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Which makes today the 10th anniversary of the first time some lunatic fanboy posted the phrase “George Lucas raped my childhood” on an internet message board.

Overall, I like the prequels a fair bit more than most 30-something Star Wars fans. I’m not offended by their mere existence, for example. The Phantom Menace is probably the most reviled of the bunch, largely thanks to the presence of Jar Jar Binks. Despite this, Attack of the Clones is probably actually the worse movie: it’s all over the map, structurally, trying to be a love story, a compelling mystery and an action movie all at once, and failing at all of them. Revenge of the Sith is probably the best-liked of the three, because it’s mostly just balls-out nonsensical action, and action is something Lucas has always handled well. This is presumably because action doesn’t require him to give any thought to dialogue or emotion, things he handles much less well.

But just what is it about the prequels that they inspire such intense hatred in so many people who grew up on Star Wars? Some thoughts:

1. The Insane Expectations People had been waiting for Episode I for sixteen years. To call it eagerly anticipated is, of course, an understatement. It was the Holy Grail of nerdmovies. Especially for those of us who had been somewhere between 6 and 12 in 1983, when Return of the Jedi came out, it wasn’t just a movie we’d been waiting a long time to see, it was a movie we had been imagining for sixteen years. And no matter what Lucas had made, there’s just no way it was going to match the movie that had been running through our heads, on and off, for sixteen years. The closest comparison I can think of is the Lord of the Rings movies, which we had all been imagining since we first read the books ten, twenty, thirty years before the movies came out. The difference, of course, is that in that case our imaginations were all working off of the same source material, so when the movie came out, it was more a matter of, “How does Peter Jackson’s Balrog compare to mine?”* In the case of Episode I, we had no source material, no starting point except the vague hints about the past dropped in the original trilogy, so we were inventing the entire movie from whole cloth in our heads.

2. It’s Still Not Good Enough Even if our expectations about what we would see had been lower…well, it’s still not that good of a movie, is it? It has good parts – the two-on-one lightsaber duel between Qui-Gonn, Obi-Wan and Darth Maul remains pretty awesome, for example. But even the good parts aren’t put together in a very interesting or cohesive way. The podrace sequence is shoehorned in, there clearly because Lucas loves drag racing and car stuff. If you take the podrace out and look at it solely as a little mini-movie of its own, it’s a pretty well-constructed and exciting scene…and even then, it’s dragged down by the distracting and pointless presence of the two-headed announcer. There are examples of this throughout all three movies, spots where Lucas hamstrings himself by being too interested in bad humor or shiny toys. The final duel in Attack of the Clones, for example. At the point where Obi-Wan is taken out of the action, the duel should take a darker turn, with Dooku tempting Anakin in a way similar to how Vader tries to turn Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, creating the parellel structure of the father and son stories that Lucas seems to be going for. Instead, Dookua and Anakin duel alone for a few seconds, and then Lucas can’t resist his shiny digital toys, and brings in Yoda, bouncing around nonsensically and shattering the image of Yoda as a Jedi so powerful that he is beyond the need for lightsaber combat. The best example of this in Revenge of the Sith is the pointless battle on the Wookiee planet, which is neither long enough to be interesting on its own, or important enough to truly merit inclusion.

3. The Problem of Jar Jar I don’t really mind the idea of a comic relief character, a buffoon who tags along with the heroes. C3PO and R2-D2 often served this role in the original trilogy. What does bother me is the fact that Jar Jar talks like Stepin Fetchit. It’s pointless, it takes you right out of the movie, and it makes you wonder why the hell Lucas made that choice. Even with the massively reduced presence of Jar Jar in the second and third movies, Jar-Jarism spreads across all three. Why does Obi-Wan go to a what appears to be a Galaxy-Far-Far-Away version of a pseudo-’50s diner to talk to the mustachioed dinosaur who runs it? A mustachioed dinosaur named, by the way, Dexter Jettster?

4. Backstory Isn’t Interesting Look at the two climactic battles that are intercut as the finale of Revenge of the Sith. Yoda – still bouncing around like a monkey on speed rather than acting like a dignified and incredibly powerful Jedi Master – battles the Emperor. Obi-Wan battles Anakin. First off, intercutting the two completely undermines the emotional impact of the Obi-Wan/Anakin duel, which should be the most difficult and emotional moment of the entire series. Beyond that…we know for a fact that each of these four characters is going to survive. There’s absolutely no tension or excitement. I’ll admit that the Obi-Wan/Anakin duel was pretty much everything I’d been hoping for since the first time I heard Darth Vader say, “When last we met, I was but the learner; now I am the master!” But still, it exemplifies the biggest problem of all. Do we really even need to know how and why Vader turned to the Dark Side? Maybe. Do we need to have the story related over the course of three movies? Probably not. The complete superfluity of the prequels is their biggest problem, and one that ties directly to problem #1 above. Stories in which the outcome is never in doubt are rarely particularly interesting. The original trilogy feels complete with the prequel trilogies merely as spoken exposition and alluded-to backstory.

In spite of all of this, I don’t believe that George Lucas raped my childhood. I wish he had made better movies than he did. But the existence of the prequels has had no effect whatsoever on my enjoyment of the originals, nor on my memories of many happy hours as a kid that revolved around Star Wars. So there.

* Wow, that sounds really dirty, doesn’t it?