The Star Wars Prequels Are Still Deeply Flawed, But Their Story Might Be a Masterpiece

I still vividly remember sitting in the theater opening night for The Phantom Menace. The reviews had come out a few days earlier and weren't all that good, but I stubbornly refused to believe them, because this was Star Wars. Then the Lucasfilm logo hit the screen, people cheered, the opening crawl rolled, and we all started reading about the taxation of trade routes. I remember thinking, what is this. Almost immediately, one of the most anticipated movies ever made became one of the most disappointing. But then Disney made the sequel trilogy, and something weird happened: people started looking at the prequels very differently.

So did nostalgia simply make everyone forget how bad these movies were, do the sequels just make them look better by comparison, or did audiences miss something about the prequels from the start? That's the question I wanted to dig into: were the Star Wars prequels actual masterpieces all along?

The Phantom Menace's Trade Route Politics Suddenly Sound Like the News

Twenty seven years later, that opening crawl about taxation of trade routes does not seem as ridiculous anymore. Tariffs have become a major weapon in international politics recently, and as I was making this piece, one of the biggest stories in the world involved a trade route being blockaded, just like what happened to Naboo. If Episode One were made today, it would probably open with something like turmoil engulfing the Middle East, the taxation of international trade and control of vital shipping routes in dispute, and the president dispatching two Jedi Knights to settle the conflict after warships blockade Iran's oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

One of the initial criticisms of the prequels was that they were too political. But Star Wars has always been political. Lucas has openly said the original trilogy was a parable for the Vietnam War, with the rebels as a technologically inferior insurgency standing in for the Vietnamese fighting the United States. That trilogy was about what happens after democracy is already gone. The prequels were Lucas trying to answer a harder question: how did the Republic become the Empire in the first place. Twenty seven years later, we're seeing shades of that question play out in the real world.

Lucas Built the Prequels Around How Democracies Give Themselves Away

The genuinely clever thing about the prequels is that Palpatine doesn't conquer the Republic. The Republic gives itself over to him, and that was deliberate. Lucas has said that when he developed the backstory of Star Wars, he became obsessed with how a functioning democracy could turn itself into a dictatorship. What fascinated him is that democracies aren't always destroyed by an invading army or a coup. Sometimes the people and institutions inside willingly surrender their own power because they're frightened, frustrated, or convinced that giving one person more control will solve a crisis.

Palpatine doesn't march into the Senate with stormtroopers and declare himself dictator. He gets elected. Lucas built in the groundwork for how that happens: trade disputes become international crises, governments become paralyzed, people lose faith in institutions, fear makes voters accept things they never would have before, and even the institutions meant to protect the Republic start compromising themselves. The Republic doesn't collapse all at once. Everything inside it slowly stops working the way it was supposed to. Watching The Phantom Menace in 1999 and hearing people argue about trade routes and Senate procedure felt boring. Watching it now, it feels like watching the news, which makes Lucas look like Nostradamus, or maybe history just rhymes.

The Prequels Pushed Visual Effects Further Than Almost Any Blockbuster Before Them

The Phantom Menace pushed digital visual effects further than almost any blockbuster before it, most notably with fully CGI characters like Sebulba, Watto, and Jar Jar Binks, who became the first all digital supporting character in a feature film created using motion capture. Jar Jar paved the way for Andy Serkis's Gollum, King Kong, and Caesar, as well as the Na'vi in Avatar. None of the clone troopers in Attack of the Clones were actors wearing physical armor either. They were all digital.

The prequels also made extensive use of digital environments, combining CGI, miniatures, and live action footage to create alien planets that would have been impossible to build for real. Lucas then decided he wanted to get rid of film altogether, and Attack of the Clones became the first major blockbuster shot entirely digitally, with Lucas partnering with Sony and Panavision to develop a digital camera prototype. The prequels helped push Hollywood toward fully digital cameras and workflows, CGI characters, and digital environments, all of which eventually became standard parts of modern blockbuster filmmaking.

The Prequels Kept Reinventing What Star Wars Looked Like, the Sequels Didn't

When Doug Chiang was hired to head visual development on The Phantom Menace, his first instinct was to design ships and vehicles in the same angular, industrial style as the original trilogy. Lucas immediately stopped him, because the prequels took place decades earlier at the height of the Republic, and he didn't want everything to look like the beat up, mass produced machinery from the Empire era. Chiang later explained they thought of the prequels as the handcrafted 1920s and 1930s, while the original trilogy represented the mass produced industrial world of the 1970s.

That constant desire to show us something new mattered a lot to Lucas. After seeing The Force Awakens, one of his biggest criticisms was simply that there's nothing new in it: another desert planet, another giant spherical super weapon, another group of stormtroopers, another rebellion fighting another empire. The Last Jedi feels like more of the same too, with another old Jedi master training an apprentice on a desolate planet, and a finale on a planet that looks like snow but is actually salt. The third movie brings back the same overarching villain as the previous six movies, electrocuting himself to death again.

The prequels, by contrast, constantly gave us something new: pod racing on Tatooine, an underwater Gungan city beneath the swamps of Naboo, a journey through a planet's core, a massive city covered planet with traffic screaming between skyscrapers, and a gigantic galactic senate. Attack of the Clones took us to Kamino, an eerie white, sterile water world populated by ten foot tall slender aliens, then to Geonosis with its giant insect like aliens, a brutal arena battle, and an all out war between a droid army and newly created clone troopers. By Revenge of the Sith, Lucas was jumping from the volcanic hellscape of Mustafar to dozens of exotic planets during the Order 66 montage. The sequels never really did that.

Why the Prequels Are Being Reevaluated Now

I think there are two big reasons people are calling the prequels masterpieces online. First, the sequel trilogy left a lot of fans disappointed, and the things it did poorly, the prequels did really well, like having a clear story, a consistent vision, and fantastic world building. Second, many of the kids who grew up with the prequels are now adults viewing them through nostalgic, rose colored glasses since they were such a big part of their childhood.

I want to say for the record, if you love the prequels, there is nothing wrong with that. Film is subjective, and if these movies mean something to you, I'm not here to tell you they shouldn't. But liking a movie and thinking it's well made are two totally different things, and this is where some of the prequels' modern reappraisal goes a little too far.

The Story Is Genuinely Brilliant, Even If the Sequel Trilogy's Isn't

The story Lucas was trying to tell is genuinely brilliant: a democracy slowly destroys itself from within, a politician manufactures a war to consolidate power, the institutions meant to protect that democracy gradually compromise themselves, and at the center is a gifted young man whose fear of losing the people he loves turns him into what I'd call a galactic tyrant. That is quite a story. Compare that to the sequel trilogy's overarching plot: the Empire returns, rebrands, the rebels have to defeat them again, and then Palpatine somehow returns so they can defeat him again too. That sounds like a convoluted mess, and it's frankly not saying a whole lot.

The Scripts and Dialogue Are Where the Prequels Fall Apart

The problem with the prequels was never the story. It was the scripts. The dialogue can be painfully clunky, and the romance between Anakin and Padme feels incredibly forced, making it hard to believe these two people are actually in love, especially after Anakin admits to slaughtering an entire village of Tusken Raiders. Obi-Wan tells Anakin he loved him like a brother, but throughout the trilogy we see surprisingly little evidence these two men even remotely like each other.

Anakin's heel turn in Revenge of the Sith happens so quickly that he goes from conflicted Jedi to murdering children in what feels like ten minutes. The destination works, but the road to getting there often doesn't.

Lucas's Direction, Not the Actors, Is the Real Problem

Lucas's uninspired direction doesn't help either. Scenes are often staged with two people standing or sitting across from each other on sofas while the camera simply cuts back and forth between them. Even incredibly talented actors like Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Ewan McGregor can come across strangely stiff, which is why blaming Hayden Christensen for being a poor actor never really made much sense to me. When this many good actors give performances that feel slightly wooden, maybe the problem isn't the actors, it's the director.

The sad thing about the prequels is that they really could have been masterpieces. The story was there, the world building was there, the visual effects technology was there, even the actors were there. The problem is that Lucas, by his own admission, has never considered himself a particularly strong screenwriter, and he's also said he doesn't really enjoy directing that much either. Had he done what he did on The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, overseeing the trilogy while handing the reins to writers and directors better suited to executing his ideas, we might be talking about a prequel trilogy that surpassed the original.

But that isn't what happened. Twenty seven years later, I don't think the prequels have suddenly become great movies. But buried inside three deeply flawed films is a masterpiece of a story that Lucas never quite managed to put on the screen, and maybe that's why people keep going back to them.

Do you think Lucas should have handed the directing reins to someone else on the prequels?