Maybe the author simply confused Bill Clinton with George Bush?

That was my first thought. Part two was either in the can or in post production when the Iraq war started too. I just don't see the correlation, myself.

The prequels could have been great. The 'mythology' of Darth Vadar was already set in IV, V, and VI. The back story could have been great, but to me the biggest killer of the prequels was Lucas' inability to tone down the action and CGI. The opening scene in Part TWO where Annikan and Obi-Wan went to protect Amadala from assasination was too drown out and so beyond belief that it took me out of the movie. It felt immature and amaturish. Yippee for the pod racing scene. Another dragged on scene that shouldn't have been a show case for CGI, but a vehicle for the movie. It was boring. The final battle between Obi-Wan and Annikin seemed like it was trying to be exciting for exciting's sake. The probability of them landing on those floating pod robots insulted me. Did every scene need to be filled with the impossible and improbable?

I felt like I had a gourmet dinner from the world's worst cook. What should have been fantastic and memorable was atrocious and memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Episode 2 came out in 2002, one year before the Iraq invasion.

The lone change made to Ep II was originally a ship crashed into a building on Coruscant causing the building to collapse. Post 9/11 that was seen as too familiar an image, so IIRC it was never finished (although I suppose at that time, just 8 months prior to release, that early versions of it must still exist).



The Jedi Master

I consider Star Wars A New Hope the weakest of the original in retrospect; however, when that first came out there was nothing else like it. Sure there was Sci Fi fantasy before it, but the blend of story and action sequences were still unlike anything prior, so much that all kinds of new films and TV sagas started popping up trying to reproduce the formula. There was never really quite the same response from rival production studios to Star Trek or Buck Rogers or Doctor Who in the same way as Star Wars. In the order that I rate the first 3 films:

Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi (Ewoks and all)
Star Wars

Phantom Menace had no characters you could like or identify with. Audiences seemed to have their preference in the first 3- they either identified with Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, if not both. Darth Vader was a great nemesis. When Lucas permitted re-releases of Star Wars in theatres, I recall audiences cheering when Darth Vader when first arrived on screen.

The next 3 films had no Darth Vader. Darth Maul could have been a terrific villain, he looked quite cool. This character was never really introduced to the audience with much screen time and he just got aced at the end of the first film. That's it. In contrast, the audience was forced to endure Jar Jar, a character you would probably just hand over to the Emperor to kill if you had to go on adventures with him. You had Palpatine, who was probably the most interesting character in my view, but because of his role more in the background pulling the strings most of the time, you don't really get much sense of his evil or powers just yet- at least not until the final curtain.

The nonsensical politics that Lucas tried to craft with some kind of deep background was actually rather shallow, too bad the films were so engrossed in it. De-mystifying the Force and making the Jedi more or less into a defacto investigative police force given free reign kind of just seemed to miss the mark. Once you see them driving around in cars, fighting in the cockpits of space ships, or using submersible water craft, it doesn't really make sense they would need to later hire a mercenary space captain to ferry them around, they already seemed more than capable of doing everything. Less a removed, Eastern like sect of monks or whatever when you see them interacting with technology so much with digital libraries and whatnot.

One could look at them either way: do the newer films stand on their own if you forget nostalgia or don't compared them to the original 3? As said before, perhaps if you're younger without that background. To tell the truth, as standalone films I think they are even worse, it's only any sense of history that even brought me into the theatre in the first place, even knowing ahead of the time of mediocre reviews. In time, the films won't be remembered as bad as we thought they were though.

The Phantom Menace was definitely a plot-driven movie and not so much a character-driven movie. Plot-driven stories have worked well in other films but it was a mistake to do that in Phantom Menace IMHO. The film also suffered from not having a Han Solo-type character.

That's probably a very succinct point, I never really could compress everything down to that summary. I think you have it wrapped up in three sentences.

It's a tweet!



The Jedi Master

plot/plät/
Noun:
A plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful.

I have to agree...