Until this weekend, I had never rewatched Star Wars Episodes I-III. I’ve caught pieces of them here and there on TV, or whatever, but never sat down and actually rewatched them. In fact, although I did have copies of Episodes I & II in the past, for a long time I hadn’t even owned them, but I recently bought the entire hexalogy on blu-ray and figured I’d watch them in order. You know, because.
Here are some thoughts about the rewatch.
General Impressions
The acting and writing is generally as bad as I remember it, though it was less irritating this time. I’m sure that is more a reflection on a change in my own attitude. The first (and only) time I watched the prequels was as they premiered in theaters, which was also about the time when I was at the height of my reading of Star Wars Extended Universe (now “Legends”) novels. At the time, there was a sense that the EU had some sort of canonicity, but that illusion has long since been shredded.
So now, when I see a Kashyyyk in Episode III that looks nothing like the same planet as described in Zahn’s trilogy — or, for that matter, portrayed in the 1978 Holiday Special — I’m sad but able to shrug it off more. Don’t get me wrong: A world in which it’s too dangerous for Wookies to walk on the surface is way cooler than the CGI crap that Lucas and team came up with, the latter of which doesn’t really do much to explain why Wookies went to the trouble of building their society in the sky. But nonetheless, I’ve come to accept that the Star Wars galaxy I want isn’t the one that I get anymore.
Part of my ability to look at the prequels in this way, I think, is because I’ve learned better in recent years to approach texts on their own merit, largely through my studies at Mythgard Institute and in co-hosting a weekly podcast.
The Skywalker Inversion
Perhaps more importantly, because I’ve never watched the prequels back-to-back (I had only seen them with the three-year gaps between theatrical releases), I never really understood Anakin’s tragic decline as an inversion of Luke’s heroic journey in the original trilogy. This may be obvious to everyone else, but it wasn’t really something I had picked up on before. The beats don’t line up exactly, but the broad strokes of each Skywalker’s storyline do seem to fit an inverse pattern. John C. McDowell outlines their “parallels” (although I don’t think that’s the right term to use):
The parallels are many, and among them are the following:
- both Anakin and Luke spend their earliest years on Tatooine;
- both were extremely skilful pilots; there is the parallel between their successes in the Battle of Naboo (TPM) and the Battle of Yavin (ANH) – although Anakin’s victory is portrayed as significantly less deliberate, conscious, and even less galactically significant than Luke’s;
- both were proficient mechanics and owned both the protocol and astromech droids C3PO and R2D2; both became Obi-Wan’s Jedi-students;
- both dream of excitement and adventure; both are whinny [sic], petulant and impatient as young men;
- both become proficient speeder pilots (AOTC and ESB respectively); both lose their right hands in lightsaber combat (AOTC and ESB respectively);
- both are involved in Satanic-like temptation scenes by the same tempter, Palpatine/Sidious, and have to face the same temptations to kill their respective Sith opponent (Dooku [ROTS] and Vader [ROTJ]) and join with Palpatine (on a second and fateful occasion, Anakin is further ordered to kill Jedi Master Mace Windu).
The reason this creates an inversion, rather than a parallel, is that at each step of the journey there’s a different decision and outcome made by the main character. The problem is that from an overall story arc…it doesn’t quite work. It feels like the cinematic equivalent of using an imperial-sized socket on a metric-sized bolt: There’s a lot of slippage, and even though the bolt eventually gets ratcheted in place, it loosens up quite easily.
Politics on Thin Ice
Another overarching thing I noticed — thanks largely to a comment by my friend Dom Nardi, the Poli-Sci Jedi — is how thin the political structures are in the prequels. In the original films, the idea of “Empire Bad, Rebellion Good” is pretty straightforward, and I think that works, since the Empire is pretty universally (or, at least, galactically) oppressive.
However, in the prequels, one would expect the politics of the Republic to be much more nuanced. I think Lucas tries to accomplish a more nuanced view, but his tendency to paint with such broad brush strokes does him a disservice.
For example, we get an odd, generic “Trade Association” that somehow has the power to create military blockades and force a “treaty” with Naboo. Later, we learn that the Trade Association even has an official representative in the Senate, which makes about as much sense as the invasion of Naboo itself, considering that all the other senators appear to represent planets rather than corporate organizations. Without any real explanation, the political situation in the Republic seems like something cobbled together by an eighth-grader who just learned that European parliaments tend to have a different structure than the U.S. Congress.
With the upcoming release of the first sequel film, I’m sure I’ll be thinking about more parallels in the very near future.
