I haven't seen the thing since it came out, but I basically disagree. I could agree with anyone only saying it wasn't as bad as the backlash said it was--but you're claiming much more. I remember quite a few persons thought something along the lines of this at the time: "Well, this and this aspect stinks, the overall feel is flatter than we expected, but there are some amazing parts, and some promising story elements, so let's wait until the next one--Lucas surely has better stuff cookin'." It was the next one--so hollow that I cannot even recall its title--that sunk the rep of the prequels.
My larger judgment--which was basically hostile to the whole franchise idea anyhow, and even before it became evident what the Disney machine would do with its franchises--can be deduced from this, a piece in which I panned the Force Awakens as 'Tired Betrayal.' I was speaking about the fact that even in Empire and Return the magic of the first was waning:
"[Lucas] was trying to create on the fly a literary world that would, in its richness, at least distantly remind one of Tolkien’s, and he just didn’t have it in him. ...the world he could draw out of himself was not a poetically rich one when seen at full unfurling(as the prequel trilogy would make painfully obvious)." https://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/tired-betrayal-force-awakens/
I agree with the comparison with Tolkien. I think I understand what you mean by losing the magic.
For my part, I think Varad gets at the impressive prescience of the prequel trilogy & I'd say, all told, it's more adolescent than kid movies, which I like, & it points to a tragic conflict of loves. Can't love the movies, but the stories are more impressive than most blockbusters. Not quite sure this splitting the difference makes sense, but I'm a few steps beyond your concession. I think our friend Pete Spiliakos is somewhere between you & me on this one (Lucas was indulgent, nonsensical, but much better on screenplay than direction), so there's quite a spectrum all the way to Varad.
As a boy seeing Star Wars, when Kenobi briefly mentions the Clone Wars, it seems a window into a heroic past--and somehow that unseen history becomes sacred. Our super-brief glimpse of it works similarly to the way Tolkien's various mentions or tastes of 1st -Age, or 2nd-Age saga do in Lord of the Rings.
And then, years later, I got to actually see the Clone Wars, and it was just so disappointing.
I think the let-down was there in the story itself, even though I agree with your distinction b/t the prequel as story and as realized cinema, and that there was something stronger the story. It's just that...it wasn't strong enough. Lucas should have said to himself at some point in the development of the scripts, "I don't have it yet--this cannot live up to the promise of that first mention of it. Nothing obliges me to write the equivalent of a Silmarillion--especially if I cannot--and so the power of the original will be more sustained if I leave the Clone Wars as a misty past longed-for, but never fully shown." Had he made that decision, I think he could have still done much in "franchise-healthy-way" with ancilliary stories. Maybe they could have been side stories which gave us slices of the Clone Wars or the Anakin-become-Vader story, but which did not attempt to present the core of them.
Apropos of nothing, the part of Phantom Menace that most sticks in the memory after all these years was the amazing underwater sequence. Over-the-top maybe, but we'd never seen anything like it up to that point, and the idea of a planet with an oceanic core is fun.
I think the nadir of opinion about TPM was the Red Letter Media review. It's often hilarious, though crass, often well observed, though too much on theory -- but above all it made me defend the movie, too much of the trilogy's political & moral depth was mocked.
I haven't seen the thing since it came out, but I basically disagree. I could agree with anyone only saying it wasn't as bad as the backlash said it was--but you're claiming much more. I remember quite a few persons thought something along the lines of this at the time: "Well, this and this aspect stinks, the overall feel is flatter than we expected, but there are some amazing parts, and some promising story elements, so let's wait until the next one--Lucas surely has better stuff cookin'." It was the next one--so hollow that I cannot even recall its title--that sunk the rep of the prequels.
My larger judgment--which was basically hostile to the whole franchise idea anyhow, and even before it became evident what the Disney machine would do with its franchises--can be deduced from this, a piece in which I panned the Force Awakens as 'Tired Betrayal.' I was speaking about the fact that even in Empire and Return the magic of the first was waning:
"[Lucas] was trying to create on the fly a literary world that would, in its richness, at least distantly remind one of Tolkien’s, and he just didn’t have it in him. ...the world he could draw out of himself was not a poetically rich one when seen at full unfurling(as the prequel trilogy would make painfully obvious)." https://www.nationalreview.com/postmodern-conservative/tired-betrayal-force-awakens/
I agree with the comparison with Tolkien. I think I understand what you mean by losing the magic.
For my part, I think Varad gets at the impressive prescience of the prequel trilogy & I'd say, all told, it's more adolescent than kid movies, which I like, & it points to a tragic conflict of loves. Can't love the movies, but the stories are more impressive than most blockbusters. Not quite sure this splitting the difference makes sense, but I'm a few steps beyond your concession. I think our friend Pete Spiliakos is somewhere between you & me on this one (Lucas was indulgent, nonsensical, but much better on screenplay than direction), so there's quite a spectrum all the way to Varad.
I guess my gut reaction here remains this:
As a boy seeing Star Wars, when Kenobi briefly mentions the Clone Wars, it seems a window into a heroic past--and somehow that unseen history becomes sacred. Our super-brief glimpse of it works similarly to the way Tolkien's various mentions or tastes of 1st -Age, or 2nd-Age saga do in Lord of the Rings.
And then, years later, I got to actually see the Clone Wars, and it was just so disappointing.
I think the let-down was there in the story itself, even though I agree with your distinction b/t the prequel as story and as realized cinema, and that there was something stronger the story. It's just that...it wasn't strong enough. Lucas should have said to himself at some point in the development of the scripts, "I don't have it yet--this cannot live up to the promise of that first mention of it. Nothing obliges me to write the equivalent of a Silmarillion--especially if I cannot--and so the power of the original will be more sustained if I leave the Clone Wars as a misty past longed-for, but never fully shown." Had he made that decision, I think he could have still done much in "franchise-healthy-way" with ancilliary stories. Maybe they could have been side stories which gave us slices of the Clone Wars or the Anakin-become-Vader story, but which did not attempt to present the core of them.
Apropos of nothing, the part of Phantom Menace that most sticks in the memory after all these years was the amazing underwater sequence. Over-the-top maybe, but we'd never seen anything like it up to that point, and the idea of a planet with an oceanic core is fun.
I think the nadir of opinion about TPM was the Red Letter Media review. It's often hilarious, though crass, often well observed, though too much on theory -- but above all it made me defend the movie, too much of the trilogy's political & moral depth was mocked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&list=PL5919C8DE6F720A2D