Dec 24, 2015

Posted by in Movies, Opinion, Review | 17 Comments

The prequels were better than The Force Awakens [review]

The prequels were better than The Force Awakens [review]

First, my The Force Awakens review

Initially, I had intended to just write a ‘The Force Awakens review’ but as the internet is already bursting with those, I’ll do it from my very specific viewpoint as a fan of the prequels.
When it comes to The Force Awakens, I am of two minds. My inner 13-year old says “that was awesome” while my older, wiser, but unfortunately more cynical self says “ooooh dear, they really messed it up”. In short, I enjoyed the experience, but I also disliked a lot of it.

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What I liked: I thought it was a thoroughly enjoyable movie. In terms of pure popcorn entertainment, it certainly delivered. I also want to express my admiration of the new protagonists, Rey and Finn, both of whom turned out to be awesome, relatable and fun characters.

What I didn’t like: all of the concerns I expressed in the article I wrote in May have not only been realized, but surpassed. Visually, the film’s appeal is almost entirely based on nostalgia rather than imagination. Even the new creatures felt like inferior versions of old ones. For example, the new Stormtroopers look less intimidating than the originals and Kylo Ren looks like an early rejected draft of Darth Vader. Nothing was specifically improved upon in the design department. It felt like the designers were so insecure about what exactly a Star Wars movie should look like that they just stuck with what they already knew. In fact, this is CONFIRMED by art designer Doug Chiang’s earlier remark that, quote, “the terrifying part is we don’t have George”.

I also didn’t like the much-ballyhooed return to ‘practical effects’. The puppets and rubber masks were frankly embarrassing in this day and age, when CGI can bring creatures on screen that are so much more believable than Admiral Ackbar. In fact, even this movie itself contains some CGI creatures that obviously looked better. But, hey, most of my friends keep telling me that the 1980 rubber Yoda puppet was more expressive and realistic than the 2005 CGI version. Clouded their judgment, the Dark Side has, if you ask me.

But in particular, the plot of the movie is more derivative than I had even thoug2554663369761914ht possible. The story is so blatantly unoriginal my jaw dropped at times. Every element was a direct copy of something from the original trilogy. The worst offense was Abrams’ insistence to return to the Death Star plot device for a third time! People complained when that concept was rehashed in Return of the Jedi, over 30 years ago. They even complained how the droid control ship in The Phantom Menace echoed that story thread too much. Now they’re doing it again?
Even the one ‘shocking’ event that everyone is talking about (I won’t spoil it here) is really just a spin on an event that occurred in the original Star Wars film.

J.J. Abrams is a genius at making movies that make you go “wow, awesome!” while you’re in your theatre seat, but as soon as you start thinking about it afterwards, you find all kinds of things wrong with them. The Force Awakens is definitely in that category.

I’m not going to be cynical, I’m not going to be cynical, I’m not going to be cynical…

Ohhhww… Okay, it’s pure nostalgia-pandering. The story doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have anything to say, it doesn’t have anything to add to the Star Wars universe, it’s just a fun thrill-ride in which nostalgia plays the same role that over-the-top CGI effects play in Michael Bay’s Transformer movies: a straightforward way to make your movie cool and get bums in seats. In itself, that doesn’t offend me, because it’s harmless and it is fun.
But while it’s a fun movie and I had a great time with it, at the same time, there is something about the whole event that really annoys me. It’s not so much the film itself, but the fans’ reception of it.


What I miss about the prequels

The ubiquitous bashing of the Star Wars prequels has become practically unavoidable. You just can’t have a conversation about these movies without someone bringing up the same old talking points that I’m not even going to repeat here because if you are the kind of person to read this blog, you know what they are. So don’t expect me to go into Jar Jar or the acting style of the prequels, because frankly I’m done with those topics.

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I will only briefly state that I find nothing wrong with Jar Jar, and if there is one character that is both pointless and annoying that tags along with the heroes, let me just say it’s Chewbacca in the original trilogy. Seriously, he just roars and complains and doesn’t do much more than that.

Anyway, while this universal prequel-hating is all the rage, The Force Awakens is getting rave reviews across the board. People are hailing it as some sort of masterpiece and, frankly, it shocks me. Are people that easily manipulated? I understand that if you’re a fan of the original trilogy and you don’t care for the style of the prequels, you’ll prefer this one. I get that. But the sheer lack of criticism here is frankly hypocritical when you take into account how these same people picked apart every little detail of the prequels.

Well, I prefer the prequels over The Force Awakens. In fact, seeing this movie has cemented in my mind that I generally prefer the prequels over all the others. That is because The Force Awakens delivers an updated remake of the original trilogy and does it so well that it makes it painfully clear how the prequels differ from the other Star Wars movies. And in doing so, it is brought home to me why I miss the whole tone and feel of those films.
So what is it that I love so much about the prequels that this new movie doesn’t have?


Politics

Well, let’s start at the beginning. This movie opens and you find out that there is a New Republic, there is a First Order and there is a Resistance. The First Order are the remnants of the Empire and the Resistance are the good guys who fight them. That is all the politics we ever get in The Force Awakens.saucer1

I’m absolutely no fan of political messages in movies (especially since they tend to be crappy messages), but I loved how the Star Wars prequels handled politics because it was done with style and dignity and it added an enormous amount of depth to the plot and to the universe itself. In Episodes 1-3, I get a real feel of the galaxy, its culture, its customs, its inhabitants. We see how people live, how they form societies. We see how the Jedi Knights interact with the Republic, we learn about the way the Force works and we see enormous amounts of new creatures, locations, vehicles in every single scene. These films are bursting with clues about the universe.

Not only that, but the way the politics worked in the plotline was brilliant. The galactic senate was a beautifully condensed version of an entire civilization that had become decadent and corrupt. The way Darth Sidious played into that was executed with careful intellect, nuance, subtlety and interesting historical echoes. When the Sith’s plan finally comes together in Revenge of the Sith, there’s a real sense of payoff to years and years of evil planning and scheming. That makes it powerful and heartbreaking and I think it speaks to our times as well.

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World-building

Politics are really just one facet of world-building. The prequels are a brilliant exercise at that. It goes beyond the workings of the Republic. Sprinkled throughout the trilogy are little hints at a vast and epic timeline of history, full of grand deeds and terrible betrayals. In the original trilogy, the word Sith wasn’t even really used outside of the novelizations. Darth Vader and the emperor were just bad guys with Force powers. The prequels gave rise to the whole concept of the Sith. heir history, their philosophy, their modus operandi… Sure, many of those things were really fleshed out in the Old Republic games and books, but the prequel trilogy planted the seed and gave those ideas a legitimacy within the Star Wars canon. This created the feeling of the Star Wars galaxy being a story on a truly epic scale, with much more going on behind the scenes.

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I remember when I visited the Star Wars exhibition in Brussels some years ago. Near the entrance to the exhibition, there was this giant timetable chronicling the history of the Star Wars galaxy: the discovery of hyperspace, the founding of the Republic, the wars between the Jedi and the Sith, etc. It saddens me to think that Disney has really just thrown all of that out of the window. Sure, there was crap in the Expanded Universe, but I think most people will agree that the real crap mostly came from the stories set after the movies. The Old Republic era is beloved by prequel fans and OT purists alike. The reason for that is that these stories provide a backbone to the Star Wars universe. They’re like The Silmarillion of a galaxy far, far away. To me, that’s important and exciting. Far, far more so than whether or not Han shot first.

The Force Awakens seems averse to the very concept of world-building, making it more of an adventure movie, but less of a fantasy movie. The movie feels very small-scaled, even more so than the original trilogy did. It felt like the universe really only consists of little groups of good guys fighting little groups of bad guys, but none of it has a sense of grandeur. By contrast, the prequels felt like history and prophecy unfolding before our eyes. There was a grand, epic scale to the Clone Wars and the fall of the Republic and a larger-than-life, operatic feel to Anakin’s fall in the midst of all this. All of that is completely lost in the new movie.


Technology

The prequels get a lot of hate for their perceived over-reliance on CGI. Other people than I have pointed out with empirical evidence that there were tons and tons of practical effects in the prequels, but I think that’s beside the point I want to make. I’m opposed to this idea that practical effects are inherently better, and I say that as a huge fan of eighties fantasy films. In fact, I think The Dark Crystal, Legend and The Neverending Story are all better films than the original Star Wars, at least when looked at purely from a present-day standpoint.

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My point is that George Lucas was always about pushing the technological envelope. In the original trilogy, he did things with special effects that nobody had ever seen before. That is part of the reason why people were so impressed with these movies. When he made the prequels, George didn’t decide to sit on his laurels and simply continue on in the same vein. Instead, he went out to push the envelope even more with the greatest tool that was available to him at that time: digital technology. It only makes sense that he would do that: he’s a risk-taker, a visionary and an experimenter. The prequel trilogy did wonders with pixels. They were among the very first movies shot on digital cameras. That in itself was a bold move.
What does JJ Abrams do in The Force Awakens? He deliberately decides to shoot it on 35mm film. In this day and age, the only reason why a director would do that is because he’s a technophobe who can’t stand the fact that the technology of the medium is moving on (sorry, Christopher Nolan, but it’s true). Digital cinema today simply looks better than 35mm does. That’s a self-evident and objective statement. Maybe in 2002 it didn’t, but surely today it does. As soon as The Force Awakens opened, I noticed the slight grain in the picture. It wasn’t bothersome, but it was so unnecessary. Why would you move back in progress when you’re making a Star Wars movie, of all things?


Lightsaber duels

The prequels had lots of imagination and creativity on display in their designs of creatures and ships. By the way, people complain that the whole “used future” ethos was lost, but that is not true. It is absolutely there on Tatooine and Mustafar, whereas Coruscant and Naboo look appropriately clean and pretty, and so do the designs of royal ships and senator’s apartments. That only makes sense.

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In the same way the designs became more ambitious, so too did the whole take on lightsaber combat. The lightsaber fight in A New Hope was downright pathetic and even the most ardent fan will have to admit that. I love the duels in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but mostly because of the emotion of what’s going on. In terms of the actual fight, I think the duels in the old trilogy looked pretty clumsy because they were wielding the lightsabers like they were heavy medieval swords. I think that’s wrong. Lightsabers are energy weapons. They’re supposed to be incredibly lithe and quick.

In the prequels, lightsaber combat was taken to a level nobody could even anticipate. The three-way fight between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan and Darth Maul was a magnificent setpiece that combined impressive acrobatics and choreography with interesting set design and the most exciting music track of the entire saga. Then the confrontation between Yoda and Dooku surprised us again in Attack of the Clones, and the duel in Revenge of the Sith is probably one of the great visual masterpieces of our time. Famous art historian and critic Camille Paglia — an actual intellectual — has said as much.

Watch that little video, it’s not long. I agree completely with Paglia in this regard. By contrast, I hardly even noticed there was a lightsaber fight in The Force Awakens. There was one, but it was pedestrian and boring and even clumsier than the ones we used to get in the older films. It didn’t bother me, but boy, do I miss Mustafar.


Something to say

As I wrote in my article back in May, one of the reasons I love the prequels was the fact that Lucas didn’t fall into the trap of superficial nostalgia, but took risks. He did this with all the unique characters, creatures and locations ILM conjured upon the screen, but he definitely did it with the story.
You can go and nitpick every little detail about the plot and complain how this doesn’t make sense or that is contrived, but when it comes down to it, the truth is that every one of the Star Wars prequels had a unique and original story to tell within the framework of the larger saga, and when taken as a whole (as the haters are wont to do), the prequel trilogy actually tells an incredibly ambitious and fascinating tale. It’s mythology, mystery and tragedy in a space fantasy setting. If you feel it wasn’t executed well, I think that’s fine (although I would obviously disagree) but anyone has to admit that at least it was different and personal.
rotj-endThe stories in those movies were part of a mythological project, just like they were in the original trilogy. When you put all six of them together, you get a grand arc: the story of how one generation goes through life and screws up, and the next generation faces the same challenges and finds a way to repair it. All of this is expressed on both the intimate scale of the Skywalker family, and the galaxy-spanning epic scale of the fall of the Republic and the war with the Empire.
What does The Force Awakens do? It doesn’t continue that grand arc. It doesn’t take it to a new place or comment on it. Instead, it just repeats the most popular part of it. That’s why I say this film has nothing to say except that Star Wars is cool.

It’s strange. Everyone complains about Hollywood’s sequel/remake mentality, but when an auteur like Lucas comes out and actually does something personal and different with his intellectual property, everyone rushes out to bash him long and hard enough until he retires. Then when an obviously corporate remake of their beloved original is released, suddenly that’s a masterpiece. I guess it makes sense that if you revere A New Hope in a religious way, you’ll see The Force Awakens as the second coming, because that’s exactly what it is: the second coming of A New Hope.

  1. Outstanding article and I’m glad I found your blog. You’re very well spoken and respectful and make some damn good points.

  2. Thank you very much for your kind words. I’m surprised I haven’t been shouted down by anyone yet 🙂

  3. Finally, someone that say what the fans don´t want to say out loud, this movie is what it is, a advertising stunt for grabbing as much of our money.
    At least the prequels had soul.

  4. Thanks Dugradigdo! Join the Rebellion — I mean the Resistance!

  5. J.J. Abrams is a genius at making movies that make you go “wow, awesome!” while you’re in your theatre seat, but as soon as you start thinking about it afterwards, you find all kinds of things wrong with them.

    I had similar feelings about his two “STAR TREK” movies . . . especially the 2009 film. However, I saw the problems with “THE FORCE AWAKENS” while watching it.

  6. I guess you were onto Abram’s schtick by that point. Personally, I know I’ll be wary about all of his creations from this point on.

    Funny thing is, when I wrote this article I was still relatively positive. Afterwards, I started realizing that THE FORCE AWAKENS has more problems than just superficial nostalgia, contempt for world-building and a general lack of soul. Its plot is also filled with Death Star-sized holes, the characterization is very wonky and even the pacing is off.

    It’s about as bad as it could have possibly been, I think now.

    Anyway, thank you for your comment!

  7. The prequels are vastly superior to The Force Awakens. Yes, some of the dialogue in the prequels was pretty bad (“It’s only because I’m so in love”, “No, it’s because I’m so in love with you”) and Jar Jar Binks was stupid and irritating (in his defence though, he had a good heart, despite George Lucas’ original plan for him to be a Sith Lord) but the heart and soul of Star Wars was still there.

    The Force Awakens ripped out Star Wars’ heart and soul and replaced it with an empty, unoriginal film that had virtually no intelligence or imagination. The only hint of originality was Finn but John Boyega was mediocre in the role. His screaming and mouth breathing made him look like an idiot, a pansy or both, although to be fair, the writing really let Boyega down because Finn’s character development was so rushed and unconvincing. In his first scene, he’s mourning a Storm Trooper, then just a few scenes later, he’s blasting away at them whilst whooping with glee. And before anyone accuses me of racism, I’ll inform you that I think James Earl Jones was and still is fantastic as the voice of Darth Vader (listen to Vader’s line “The apprentice lives” in The Siege of Lothal; that scene could have easily failed due to Ezra yapping in the background but James saved it with just three words) and Samuel L Jackson was the perfect choice to play Mace Windu.

    I also think the hatred for Hayden Christiansen is really unfair and it makes me feel a bit sorry for the guy. He can convey emotions with his expressions and body language, so I have to give him credit for that. Yes, his monotone is a bit annoying but to be fair, he was playing a guy who was trained to let go of his emotions. The trouble is that Anakin doesn’t know the difference between letting go of his emotions and supressing them. I think the monotone voice was done deliberately to show him trying to hold back his feelings. In my opinion, Hayden Christiansen is actually a decent actor. He wasn’t great but he could have become great if the prequel haters hadn’t ruined his career. At least he didn’t mouth breath in scenes that had no dialogue like John Boyega.

    The prequels are also far more creative and complex. They leave intelligent viewers with a lot to think about and aren’t as black and white as The Force Awakens or the Original Trilogy. In those four movies, it’s just good vs evil, nothing particularly complicated. The only really big twist in all four of those films is Darth Vader being Luke’s father. Kylo Ren being Han Solo’s son is revealed far too early. As Nostalgia Critic once said “You just revealed your twist in the first half of the movie! I don’t know if that even makes it a twist!” The prequels are more interesting because the Jedi are partially responsible for their own destruction. Their arrogance and blind devotion to a Republic that was drowning in corruption is what sealed their fate. Mace Windu in particular represents everything wrong with the Jedi Order.

  8. Hi Tom,

    thanks for your response to the article. I agree that the idea of Finn was one original element but they turned him into a goofball. I still enjoyed the character, though. I just wonder what the point of him was. Let’s hope episode 8 makes some amends.

  9. I completely agree! Great article. Reading some of your other articles about The Hobbit or the “meaning of being critical” , I realized that I have a similar viewpoint.

  10. Great to read that! Thanks for your comment!

  11. Fully agree. I wrote a similar post to this end and I agree with you on all these points. Everyone is currently praising Rogue One for reasons that they say they didn’t enjoy the prequels, it’s just the hate coolade. Good post!

  12. Thanks! I took a look at your blog and I really like it!

  13. The fact that Leia was not a Jedi was the biggest disappointment for me

  14. You’re right, it made the scenes from the Original trilogy completely pointless: “there is another Skywalker”, etc.

  15. Thank you for the wonderful and concise article. You could have taken words out of my mouth. I agree with everything you wrote here. Coincidentally, my son and I also watch The Clone Wars animation series at the moment, and it amazes me how a cartoon series can be so much more imaginative and fun to watch than a big budget movie like The Force Awakens. Or Rogue One, for that matter. I also can not get over the ridiculousness of Kylo Ren character. A voice modifying helmet that serves no other practical purpose. Crossguard lighsaber – seriously? That’s probably the only attempt at originality here, and how pathetic.
    I want to add, though, that I am a big fan of John Williams and one redeeming quality of TFA to me is the music score. Without the new Williams’ score, it would be almost unwatchable, in my opinion.

  16. Thanks Olga! I have to agree that Kylo Ren was probably the worst offense, and that John Williams indeed never disappoints. I grew up listening to his music. We had an LP record of Return of the Jedi and one of E.T. at home and I spent hours listening to those. I was always really into movie scores and John Williams is one of my favourites, alongside James Horner.

  17. Dan Shrim says:

    Hey I know its been a while since someone commented on this but I am afraid all of our fears are confirmed. The Last Jedi trailer made me want to throw up. Luke talking about ENDING THE JEDI!!!!!! It completely ruins the story ending that ROTJ was and it has basically said “Hey George you know your amazing groundbreaking story that you worked so hard on in creating? Well we are removing it and adding a ‘better’ ending so fuck you!

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