It also retroactively made pretty much every space fight in the series make no sense. It was very pretty, but it immediately raises questions like "Why did Luke need to run down the Death Star trench when R2 could have taken the X-Wing and jumped to light speed at it and kill it with no unrecoverable losses?". It very much didn't serve the series well at all.

The prequels weren't particularly good, but you can't really argue that they ruined Star Wars. Each prequel movie had a significantly larger box office than the previous, and people were still excited about Star Wars after each one. There was never a significant trend of "Fuck it, I'm not gonna go see Revenge of the Sith because of how bad Attack of the Clones was".

Whereas there's a very valid argument that the sequel trilogy ruined Star Wars as a blockbuster franchise. We'll have to see what the ROS box office take looks like, but TFA -> TLJ saw an almost billion dollar drop in total box office, and there's a prevailing sentiment of disengagement from the franchise because of the sequel trilogy.

 

The prequels had their issues, namely the major issue that Lucas wrote some horrible dialogue for them, but fundamentally I still unironically enjoy all three of them to this day quite a bit, and they also have some pretty damn high highs mixed in with the weird Padme/Anakin dynamics and all.

Also, it might be just me, but I loved the prequels for the "politics" in them. Made Palpatine/Sidious much more interesting character than he was in the OT.


Of course some of this might be because I was way younger when those movies first came out, but I think that doesn't really cover it, as I also found Rogue One to be a great fun romp of a movie, while I despise the sequel trilogy.

 

I think if you're going to argue the (de-)merits of the prequels, you have to argue it as if The Clone Wars series never happened. There is a HUGE difference in opinion on the prequels these days versus what people thought of them before TCW was a thing. People's view of them softened considerably after that - let me tell you, after Ep. 1 especially it was straight-up armageddon for fans.

 

@kira and light The prequels weren't great movies, but they added to the star wars mythos. They furthered the world and the universe. They, for what they were, respected the previous trilogy.

THe new trilogy broke shit.

 

At the very least, prequels added interesting worldbuilding and fueled the fandom. Sequels have had Not-Tatooine, Not-Rebels, Not-Empire, Not-Vader, Not-Palpatine, and now they even have Palpatine.

 

So, question for the panel: would it have been better or worse to embrace TLJ rather and clumsily try to overwrite it?

 

Disney should just ignore last three movies and reset the canon once more.

 

TLJ was garbage. Even if this ends up being a shitty corporate checklist of fanservice film, overwriting TLJ is a point in the merits column.

 

I suppose, but my point is more this kind of thing:

Episode VI opening weekend: $23,019,618 (Corrected for inflation to 2005: $45,137,865.42)

Epsiode I opening weekend: $64,810,970 (Corrected for inflation to 2005: $75,975,885.00)
Episode II opening weekend: $80,027,814 (Corrected for inflation to 2005: $93,814,118.09)
Episode III opening weekend: $108,435,841

Episode VII opening weekend: $247,966,675 (Corrected for inflation to 2005: $204,322,439.43)
Episode VIII opening weekend: $220,009,584 (Corrected for inflation to 2005: $175,293,210.49)

I'm very interested in seeing how Ep. IX does, because TLJ was the first Star Wars movie ever to have a lower opening weekend than the previous movie. I'm all kinds of interested on whether or not the sequel trilogy set a trend or if TLJ was an anomaly.

 

At this point, knowing what I know, even if I hate to say it, they should have embraced the TLJ direction. It might have been a coherent, if bad, story in the end, instead of this incoherent mess we got. The stupid but cool looking things like the hyperdrive collision were a lot more palatable than some things in this movie anyways, and TROS really suffered for spending effort to undo TLJ decisions.

 

Saw it a few hours ago. I didn't hate the Last Jedi, even enjoyed it (at least my first viewing of it).

Sadly, I didn't enjoy this one. I'm glad I didn't have any expectations, cause I'm not really disappointed, just a bit sad.

Now I don't want to say that the movie is garbage. But it is the only Star Wars movie I didn't enjoy at least a little bit.

 

As someone who spent a significant portion of my childhood living and breathing everything to do with Star Wars, I remember laughing at people who complained that the prequels had ruined Star Wars for them - why not just ignore the prequels and keep enjoying the originals and expanded universe?

But honestly, something about these movies has given me a sour feeling on the whole franchise.

I think it's the way they go to so much trouble to recreate the most nostalgic elements of the earlier movies, just to trample all over them.

 

Being a good fan means more than just throwing your money at someone.

 

The EU died for this.

 

Ros and GoT season 8 in the same year. Godbless.

 

Pretty much this. Lucas still captured the essence of everything that made Star Wars good and unique in the prequels, but it's no secret that he's bad at dialogue. Not to mention that at the time he did Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones there wasn't really anyone in a position to shoot down his bad ideas (and seriously, everyone has those).

Ultimately, a lot of the issues with the prequels were surface-level. Over-reliance on early CGI, dialogue being clunky and not always well directed, performances being a bit off in general, and Lucas sometimes spending so much time on cool visuals/effects that it dragged down the story. But ... well underneath all those surface-level issues I think they're still fundamentally good stories. Just imagine the prequels, except a writer tightened up all the dialogue and an acting coach fixed the performances. Not saying the movies would be perfect, but they'd be a lot better without any really massive structural changes.

Compare that to the sequel trilogy, where a lot of the surface-level stuff is far better, but there are far more fundamental problems. The prequels are a house with busted windows, a hole in the roof, and in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. The sequels are a house with an utterly rotten foundation.

 

I haven't read this thread or anything about the moviet yet (just came from it), but the entire thing was basically fanservice and admitting that they were wrong in the previous movies and trying to fix those things. Sidious, his introduction line, Leia's Jedi training, Luke admitting he was wrong, force ghosts everywhere, Luke's old X-Wing and uniform, and so on. I also thought that this movie didn't have a single good lightsaber duel.

 

I saw the film yesterday, I‘ll go again on Saturday. My preliminary thought is that it is a better ending to the current trilogy than it is a film on its own merits, which, weirdly, is the exact opposite of how I feel about TLJ in the context of the sequel trilogy. I think the main issue facing TROS is that it has to, in essence, pack two films’ worth of story development into one, which makes the final result feel a little bit undercooked.

FWIW, there were some things I loved, some things I thought were okay, some that I didn‘t like, and one where I thought… well, let‘s just say one thing I didn‘t think was needed. At all.

Most importantly, in my personal opinion, they stuck the landing. I avoided the leaks, so I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw in the last couple of minutes.

Overall, I do believe that, with time, it‘ll be an easier entry to rewatch for me that TLJ (which was a movie I liked, and then grew significantly more ambivalent towards over the last couple of years).

 

For people who already saw it, answer me this: do you get the impression that Palpatine is only there because there needed to be a Big Bad in the third film of the trilogy and Rian shanked Snoke so Jajabrams did the thing worthy of someone struggling for an original idea and just borrowed Palpy from the OT?

 

It seems so to me at least. But the movie is full of decisions that seem to stem from trying to "fix" something from the Last Jedi.