I mean, this is exactly why Clone Wars is good and rebels ranges tolerable to good. The prequel era's ambitions, regardless of failings, made it interesting. It added a ton of new stuff to the setting and had plenty of material to work with. Heck, trying to fix some of the movie failings get us some of the best storylines.FrankTrollman wrote:The Republic Trilogy was really bad. I mean, like really bad. The mind kind of rebels at how shitty Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones actually were. One forgets how little actual dialog is given to Darth Maul, or how fucking creepy it is when Amidala claims to have feelings for someone she last met as an autistic 8 year old. But those movies are not bad due to unambitious world building. Quite the opposite. Everything about the Republic Trilogy is too ambitious.
The Republic Trilogy doesn't shy away from having messages. And those messages are actually poignant and deep. Lucas' prediction that democratic norms would fall apart into authoritarianism and human rights abuse because of demagoguery over minutiae around minor trade disputes was amazingly prescient. the use of heavy handed Jesus metaphors for the villain is actually a deep meditation on how religious certainty can send you down the wrong path. It's just that the movies are extremely cluttered with pointless crap that undermines those messages, breaks the flow of the movie, and crowds out important exposition.
The climax of Phantom Menace is actually four separate events: the CGI fight between the frogs and the rabbit droids, the spaceship battle where the kid blows up the enemy control ship through supposedly humorous happenstance, and the palace fight where all the actual main characters are - itself split into the sword fight between the Jedi and the Sith who doesn't have any fucking lines and the rest of the palace battle where the rest of the cast fight droids in the throne room. Basically there's two events there that anyone fucking cares about, and it's intercut and undercut by extraneous special effects extravaganzas that are played for laughs and therefore ruin the tension of the adjoining scenes. It's a mess. Lucas attempted to go bigger than the previous movies by weaving together more climax threads, but it ends up being a gibberish lightshow. Less would have been more.
Now from a Star Wars fan's perspective, the obvious sins of The Phantom Menace were that it threw a lot of the worldbuilding from the original trilogy into the dumpster. And indeed, changes like making Anakin not be a pilot when Obi Wan met him and making Anakin not have a brother and making Anakin come from the place that Anakin's brother was supposedly hiding thus making that a very questionable choice for where to hide were all changes that have a real storytelling cost and thus required payoffs to be worth doing. They did not have payoffs, and they were not worth doing.
But I could imagine a version of The Phantom Menace that actually went somewhere with the revelation that Luke Skywalker wasn't blood related to Owen. There isn't any obvious benefit for that reveal, and the actual movies that got made didn't justify wasting screen time on that reveal at all. But the movies could have gone somewhere with that choice. Like all the other deviations from established worldbuilding statements from the original trilogy, it's only wrong if it doesn't go anywhere. But of course, none of them ended up going anywhere from Midichlorians to C3PO being owned by Darth Vader as a child. Those reveals take up a substantial amount of mind caulk to keep things working. Like, we go through an elaborate deal about mind wiping C3PO so we excuse why he doesn't recognize Darth Vader, but Darth Vader not recognizing C3PO in the original trilogy is just left as a plot hole.
These choices were wrong because there was no pay off. If there had been an elaborate Usual Suspects style reveal at some point that C3PO knew perfectly well what was going down the whole time and was in it with Darth Vader from the beginning or something, that would have been unexpected, but it wouldn't have been wrong. The fact that the whole plotline of C3PO being assembled by Anakin while he's a child slave prodigy in a junkyard goes literally nowhere and explains absolutely nothing is what makes it wrong.
For all that, the Republic era is still interesting. The main movies have problems with pacing, plotting, and character development. There are script problems, acting problems, and major issues with both the structural and scene to scene edits. Also the jokes aren't funny and a lot of the humor is supposed to come from racial stereotypes which wasn't acceptable when these movies came out and is even less acceptable today. But I have certainly played games set during the Republic era. There is stuff happening that I can imagine wanting to play a character who interacts with it.
The New Order era is not interesting. I don't fucking care. None of it makes sense and the idea of spending enough mental effort to try to make sense out of it just sounds exhausting. They've managed to make something that fails harder than Attack of the Clones.
-Username17
Due to the time skips, we don't see much of Anakin as a jedi and his willingness to just murder all of them is kinda out of nowhere. In the Clone Wars, we see several actions by the council (faking Obi-Wan's death and not telling him, not standing by ashoka when she's falsely accused of a crime leading to her quitting the order) that steadily erode his trust in the jedi.
Felt the clones were just more faceless goons? There's several clone focused arcs that in my opinion were the best parts of the show.
Annoyed that Darth Maul had no lines? He's brought back and given a lot of characterization throughout clone wars and rebels. This also give more development to obi-wan as well.
On the other hand, what even is there to do in Resistance? The First Order more or less comes out of nowhere, and anything the show tries to introduce will seriously just be made up wholecloth, since Abrams and Jhonson explicitly didn't do any worldbuilding.
