Recently, my grade school-aged daughter asked if we could watch the first six episodes of Star Wars in the weeks leading up to the Blu-ray / DVD release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. She’s already seen Episodes IV through VI, as well as VII, but has not seen the prequels, so we decided to loop back to those chronologically earlier films.
Although Episode I is largely throwaway from a narrative standpoint — there is fairly little that you learn in Episode I that isn’t recapped sufficiently later on — Episode II is a little more important. Things in Episode III just don’t make a lot of sense if you don’t see Episode II first. But therein lies part of the rub: Episode II is not very good. So it is a hurdle to be crossed in order to get to Episode III and the fall of the Jedi.
For a long time it was my belief that as mediocre as Episode I was, Episode II was worse. Having now re-watched Episodes I, II, and III, I’ve concluded that the truth is somewhat more complicated. Episode I is still pretty mediocre (and, as I said before, surprisingly throwaway).
As for Episode II? My observation is that it isn’t terrible, per say. It’s simply, maddeningly uneven.
And it all comes down to romance.
There are parts of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones that work pretty well. The scenes where Anakin and Obi-Wan are investigating on Coruscant are decent, and Anakin’s scenes in the Jedi Temple and later on various far-flung worlds are pretty good. The arena scene on Geonosis is also fun to watch. And although the scene rankles a few old-school fans, I think the showdown with Count Dooku at the end is pretty awesome, especially with Yoda’s unexpected appearance. In short, a good portion of Attack of the Clones is pretty good … and, dare I say, even better than the consistently middling Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
But the romance. Oh my … it’s even worse than I remember! The lines are just horrible. Horrible. And they’re delivered so badly. The whole chemistry between Padmé and Anakin just hurts. I don’t think I can think of a more unconvincing love story in all of modern cinema; there is no sane reason why she has any remote interest in him. Even the “bad boy” school of romance doesn’t hold, since Anakin is too flaky during the movie to even qualify as a bad boy, and when he does — such as when he slaughters the raiders who captured and killed his mother — he is more terrifying than bad.
Worse still, I only now realized how the decisions in Episode II actually do collateral damage to Episode III, which is mostly regarded as the best of the prequels. In addition to a few cringe-worthy quotes in Episode III (“Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo”), Episode III begins to send Padmé down this sinister path of becoming less and less of a force all her own and more of a docile character simply existing in Anakin’s shadow. In Episode I she was a political force, and in Episode II she had some action chops. In Episode III she manages to do neither: her political contribution consists of lamenting the death of liberty in the Republic, while the only action she gets is being on the receiving end of Anakin’s Force choke in the movie’s final act. It looks even worse when you look at the major female leads she’s sandwiched between — Leia, who shoots stormtroopers and single-handedly kills Jabba the Hutt in the original trilogy, and Rey, who is essentially the main character in The Force Awakens.
That, I think, encapsulates just how frustrating the prequel trilogy is as a whole. Consider the context; Episode I premiered in 1999, over a decade after the original trilogy ended. The expectation was sky-high; fans had been clamoring to know what happened before Episode IV — about the Jedi order, about the clones, about Anakin Skywalker — and Lucas was ready to deliver, armed with vastly improved special effects technology. There was almost no advertising for Episode I; the word-of-mouth hype was so great that he didn’t need to.
And the end product — the prequel trilogy — was worse than bad: it was, overall, merely meh. Maybe the hype was unrealistic. Maybe no director could have lived up to that kind of expectation. It didn’t matter; the prequels just didn’t come close to Episodes IV, V, and VI. Even re-watching them now, all these years later, it’s clear to me that they’re just not at the same level as their more primitive predecessors. Han and Leia will always be more fun to watch than Anakin and Padmé.
And if The Force Awakens is any indication, the Disney-run future installments will also be superior. That, sadly, is the legacy of the prequel trilogy — and Episode II.