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Twitter Ponders Some Genuinely Nice Things to Say About the 'Star Wars' Prequels

By Petr Knava | Social Media | June 30, 2020 |

By Petr Knava | Social Media | June 30, 2020 |

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Absolutely brimming with clumsy dialogue, illogical plotting, poor character choices, odd pacing, and a plethora of strange Lucasian choices all around—I don’t think anyone could really claim that the Star Wars prequel movies are great cinema. Yet the trilogy, wildly reviled and mocked at the time, now seems to be undergoing a periodic sort of public reappraisal on social media. Some people take it too far, and claim that the movies were misunderstood masterpieces, which is obviously not true. Looking back on them now, though, they do provide an interesting sort of contrast for where the industry has gotten to nigh-on two decades later. Or at least where the big budget Hollywood end of that industry has ended up. It’s perhaps more of an indictment of what is, rather than a celebration of what was, that thinking about the prequels—and all their weird, mostly-failing-sometimes-semi-succeeding, idiosyncrasies—highlights just how boring and anodyne the modern tentpole moviescape has become, with the all-conquering MCU assembly line approach dramatically sanding down risk and out-of-the-box thinking. Maybe the best lens to look through at it all is the Disney one: The Lucas prequels were the last ones to be made before he sold the rights off to Disney, and they came out before Disney started ramping up its campaign to have control over every single item of creative media out there. If we wanna talk about individual flights of creator fancy being replaced by a filmmaking-by-corporate-focus-group approach—as messy and obviously not entirely accurate in all cases as it is—then ‘Disney’ does work as a fine enough demarcation. Because, I mean, The Last Jedi aside, it’s basically a case of a trilogy of interesting Lucasian failures transitioning to a series of bland, uninspired, sometimes competent, sometimes awful filmmaking-by-algorithm. That’s not to say the prequels were some bastions of heartfelt, searingly insightful cinema. No, for fu**’s sake. No. Two Days, One Night they ain’t. Just that contrasts are always interesting. Anyway, Twitter pondered the Star Wars prequels recently, when writer Scott Malthouse asked if people could say some genuinely nice things about the trilogy:

Even the director responsible for the best Star Wars film since the original trilogy chimed in:

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Petr is a staff contributor. You can follow him on Twitter.


Header Image Source: 20th Century Fox