Title.
I feel bad for the actors of little Anakin and Jar Jar and all the shit they had to deal with
I love the prequels.
The prequels are the only Star Wars trilogy with sophisticated story and characters. Both the original trilogy and the sequel trash are shallow "good guys puch bad guys" movies. The prequels involve a greedy politician starting a fake war to grab more power for himself, with a corrupt jedi order unable to stop him. It's elaborate, sophisticated and fun.
It's funny how in todays world real life immitates art.
The overall theme of the first trilogy was that it was a fun children's adventure story, a cross between a buck rogers sci fi serial, and the comparative mythology of joseph campbell, trying to find these powerful character archetypes that resonate across all cultures .
The prequels move away from those fun, character-driven stories, and focus on a larger political story that ends up as a depressing tragedy.
It tried to use CGI and and quirky characters like jar jar to cover up the awful plotlines and dialogue.
Heroes and villains: Anakin was the main character, and for two movies he was an unlikeable whiny brat who murders children: the target audience of Star wars. Padme is just kinda along for the ride, and doesn't do anything that memorable.
General grievous, count dooku, and the other minor villains are decent, but only interesting because of surface level things about them... oooh he can hold 4 lightsabers at once, or he trained qui gonn!.
Obi wan and Qui gonn are bright spots, Ewan Macgregor carries the whole thing. He's the only one you really wanteto spend time with and see on screen. But they killed Obi Wan's main nemesis, darth maul, in the very first movie, so he spends the rest of the trilogy playing space detective and babysitting anakin.
The political storyline is somewhat interesting, and there's some critiques of Bush-era imperialism in there ( just as star wars had a critique of the us war on vietnam ), but it becomes the entire focus.
In star wars, every single character, han, luke, leah, and even vader, goes through changes brought on by their trials and grow as people. In the prequels, there is no character development apart from anakin, who becomes more childish, whiny, and unlikeable as the story goes on.
General grievous, count dooku, and the other minor villains are decent, but only interesting because of surface level things about them… oooh he can hold 4 lightsabers at once, or he trained qui gonn!.
Count Dooku is actually one of the more interesting villains in the entire SW. Or at least would be if they focused on his original ideas instead of the classical "i met a suspicious figure in cloak, and wololo i'm now on the dark side" which is so depressingly common in SW.
