OMG, thank you for bringing this article to my attention. I feel like I’ve been defending the prequels to deaf ears for years. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the OT. I grew up on the OT. They are comfort movies to the Nth degree… but the prequels were the Star Wars of my early 20s and I got SO attached to them, flaws and all, and honestly never understood why they got so much crap for things that the originals got a pass on. Do they have their flaws? Of course, they do. But so do the originals, and it really bothers me when people pretend that’s not so.
“The uncomfortable truth is that just about everything bad in the
prequels was also bad in the originals. Hayden Christensen is no worse
than Mark Hamill, with his whining about Tosche Station and power
converters. Jar Jar Binks is no more annoying than C-3PO, who tagged
along after R2-D2 like an unwanted dance chaperone. “It’s coarse and
rough and irritating—and it gets everywhere,” was terrible dialogue. And
don’t forget Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back: “How you get so big eating food of this kind?”There’s
one crucial difference between the prequels and their predecessors: the
age at which many moviegoers experienced them. To become apoplectic
over the prequels while still adoring the originals has always struck me
as a strange sort of dissonance. Call it nostalgia gone sour,
petulantly whining, “You ruined my childhood!” when in actuality the Star Wars prequels’ remarkably preserved it—warts and all.”
There it is. THANK YOU.
eirenical17 