#overall i don't really think the intense the prequels get is really justified

[no-s-estelle]

Final thoughts on the prequel trilogy:

Basically, I don’t hate it. In fact, I think Revenge of the Sith is a good movie. It’s (mostly) well paced, it hits the emotional points, and it does a pretty good job of showing Anakin’s descent into Vader. 

Putting the rest of the post behind a cut, because it got loooong

The Phantom Menace is pretty ubiquitously terrible though. Like, except for the podracing sequence and the last maybe 20 minutes, which were actually interesting (exclusively due to the action sequences) it was just so. badly. paced. I had to watch in 10 to 20 minute increments, taking breaks, because otherwise it just was incredibly boring. And I don’t want to rag on a kid who was most likely just doing his best, but the kid’s performance was kind of awful. Except for the moment where he ran back to Shmi when he was supposed to leave with Qui-Gon, I did not believe a minute of his acting. I don’t expect too much from child actors, because they’re kids, but I can’t help but think that they could have found a better kid to play child Anakin. And then, of course, most egregiously, there’s the veritable list of racist, antisemitic, and especially orientalist stereotypes this movie is rife with. It’s like George Lucas took every negative racial and ethnic stereotype he could find to create the aliens. I almost turned the movie off within the first 15 minutes, when it became apparent that only human characters (and droids) would get to speak without American and English accents, while all the alien characters got vaguely Middle Eastern/South and East Asian/South American accents. Watto was such an antisemitic stereotype and was incredibly uncomfortable to watch. Jar Jar Binks was just... I have no words for how annoying I found Jar Jar Binks. I could go on, but this is not an essay on racism in Star Wars, so I won’t. And I have to mention the CGI. Mostly, I get it, it was a new and exciting technology and they wanted to use it, but it was also 90s CGI and it was fucking terrible and obvious. It was really jarring to see what looked like video game sequences in a live action film.

TBH at this point I don’t remember all the details of Attack of the Clones; I just powered through it without writing anything down or stopping to think about it too much, and right now my brain is mostly full of Revenge of the Sith. Mostly what I remember about AotC is that while the pacing was still kinda bad, I appreciated the way the story unfolded. Going into this watchthrough, I knew only the basic shapes of the Star Wars storylines. I vaguely knew that Palpatine was bad and there would be war at some point, but I had no idea of the specifics. For me, at least, AotC did a really good job of muddling up the motivations for war on both sides, and keeping the truth of the extent of Palpatine’s manipulations until the very end. Throughout the movie there was this increasing sense that both sides had only a very vague idea of what they were afraid of and why they were going to war. It wasn’t exactly clear who the separatists were or why they wanted to separate, or even why that would be a bad thing, except that it would lead to war. Maybe this will become clearer if I ever rewatch this movie, but I like that I was left with the impression that the entire Clone War is absolutely pointless in that both sides really just want peace and the only reason they don’t just sit down and talk it out is that Palpatine is being a manipulative evil fuck.

I also have a lot of muddied feelings (a running theme with this post) about the introduction of the Padme/Anakin romance. Honestly, mostly to me it felt creepy and forced, but I have a tendency to see romance as forced so I’m not sure I trust my feelings in that regard. I do feel I’m justified in being creeped out by Anakin’s fixation on Padme, but that’s coherent as I can get about it right now. I don’t think they’re some kind of epic destined love, except for the part where Anakin is unhealthily fixated on Padme and needs all the therapy in the world.

RotS was definitely the best movie of the bunch, and like I said up top, I (mostly) really enjoyed it. I spent the first half being incredibly frustrated with the way the Jedi Council was treating Anakin and giving him absolutely contradictory and unfollowable advice about how to deal with his feelings, which I already wrote a post about, and then I spent the second half of the movie being progressively more horrified, interspersed with eye-rolling at the unnecessary drama of the big final fight. Like, really guys? you’re swinging on cables over a literal lava pit, and you can’t put down your giant lightning swords for a minute just so you can get to safety? And then that all went away very quickly at the conclusion to that fight. I obviously knew where things were going, but I wasn’t prepared for Anakin/Vader being burned alive. I just wasn’t. 

Probably the worst part of RotS is the wrap-up. It just went on for so. freaking. long. There were about five points where they could have cut it off and it would have been appropriately dramatic.

I think if I ever do rewatch these movies, it will be so I can listen to the music more carefully. I tried, but at the really important parts I was mostly too busy actually watching the movie to think about what the music was doing. There was definitely some interesting development of the main musical themes, though, and I would like to eventually go back and analyze them.