There’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
There’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
A long time ago — 1977, to be exact — in our own galaxy, George Lucas released Star Wars. In many ways it was an ersatz combination of things that already existed — Campbell’s monomyth, Flash Gordon serials, Westerns, Akira Kurosawa and World War II films, already-written sci-fi novels — but bringing all of these things together, combined with breathtaking special effects that have aged remarkably well, quickly ensured the movie’s immortality.
Many have attempted to recapture the magic of what is now called A New Hope, both inside the Star Wars franchise and outside of it. Chief among them is Lucas himself, who was the primary creative force behind its original two sequels (even though he was credited neither as their director nor their screenwriter). Lucas took the complete reins for an entire “new” prequel trilogy, starting with 1999’s The Phantom Menace, continuing with 2002’s Attack of the Clones, and concluding with 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. Though widely anticipated, the movies ultimately became mostly disappointments, full of what one critic described as “terrible screenwriting and wooden acting.”
That critic was National Review’s Ross Douthat. But despite this admission, Douthat seems increasingly open to a kind of revisionism about these movies. Disappointed by yet another trilogy, the Disney-branded, J. J. Abrams–spearheaded sequels that concluded with last year’s The Rise of Skywalker, Douthat has come to regard the prequels as a worthwhile misfire, a good-in-theory enterprise thwarted merely in the execution. As he puts it, “the Lucas prequels were at least trying to extend the original trilogy, to expand its story and its universe, to tell a new story that meshed organically with the old one. They had an artistic purpose, even if their artist’s capacities fell woefully short of what his plan required.” A nostalgic cohort who were children when the prequels came out joins him in this revisionism.
But from my point of view, the prequels are terrible. Their claim to novelty is misleading at best, their story is nonsensical, and their effects and characters are ridiculous. They actively defile the movies they are supposed to precede.
To a person concerned with decadence — a kind of comfortable yet staid cultural holding pattern in which an already-existing civilization circles endlessly around its past achievements without generating anything new — novelty is high praise. To bestow upon the prequels this honor, even if they failed to achieve it properly, is a bold claim. It is also an incorrect one. It is wrong on its face, belied, in the first place, by the very idea of a prequel, which is to elaborate upon things we already know. And it is further confounded by the evidence of repetition that abounds in the stories themselves. Oh, look: A Skywalker destroys the enemy’s command ship! That’s new! Oh, look: A Skywalker loses a limb! Unprecedented. Oh, look: a younger Jedi loses his mentor! Haven’t seen that before. The whole enterprise exists in conscious, deliberate, rote relation to what came before, relying on allusion and reference and what one could charitably call “symmetry” to fill in the gaps left by vacuous storytelling. It is worth remembering, in this regard, what Lucas was content with doing in the years before the prequels came out (and what he continued to do after they were released): endlessly tinkering around the edges of what he had already made, throwing in splashes (or splotches) of CGI, making concrete changes that were often controversial and sometimes indisputably degradations of his prior work. He applied the same spirit to the prequels. It is hard to conceive of a better example of decadence.
The most frequently invoked example of the prequel trilogy’s innovation is the political narrative that forms its backdrop. Say what you will about the prequels, this contention goes, at least they tried to tell an interesting political story. Political theory is pretty far down on the list of what got people crowding into theaters in 1977; the “politics” of the original trilogy as it actually turned out were simplistic, owing more to Ming the Merciless and pulp sci-fi than any serious study of world affairs. But in Lucas’s bizarre conception, this somehow evolved both from and into a critique of the Vietnam War (American involvement, not Communist perfidy, naturally). What eventually became Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now started as a Lucas project that existed in a kind of thematic relationship with what Star Wars ultimately became. Though these two properties would evolve away from each other, the Vietnam War protest element became even more apparent by Return of the Jedi, when the mighty, tech-savvy, and numerically superior Empire was laid low by a technologically primitive, jungle-residing force — yes, that’s right, the Ewoks are the Vietcong. Lucas, then, was no stranger to injecting his superficial politics into his story and thinking this somehow profound when it was actually at best a distraction in something most enjoyed by children. Thus, when by Revenge of the Sith, an evil Anakin Skywalker is paraphrasing George W. Bush’s Iraq War declaration that “you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” we see not novelty but the decadence of a Baby Boomer wanting to have himself another Vietnam War counterculture moment.
To the extent the political narrative of the prequels makes any sense at all, it reflects a childish understanding of history, a picture-book mashup of the Roman Republic’s transformation into an Empire and Weimar Germany’s transformation into Nazi Germany. Without a true claim of novelty, this aspect of the movies, looked at with any kind of seriousness, quickly falls apart, and hardly represents what Douthat quite generously describes as an attempt to depict “political decay.” As for seeing the Jedi as “arrogant New Age snobs,” the Force has been an inherently New Age, nebulous concept since 1977, as Douthat himself once observed when describing pantheism as Hollywood’s “religion of choice.” It has also always been arbitrary; Star Wars, particularly the inexplicable narrative of the prequels, makes a lot more sense when you replace every instance of “the Force” in the movies with the phrase “the plot.”
Other failures of the prequels are more obvious. One of them proceeds from a profound irony. Lucas, through his special-effects company Industrial Light & Magic, was on set with his old friend Steven Spielberg when the latter finalized the groundbreaking special effects for Jurassic Park; upon seeing the CGI-rendered dinosaurs, Lucas reportedly wept. So taken with the supposedly limitless possibilities of computer-generated imagery, Lucas not only began to tinker with the ostensibly hidebound effects that he thought had limited the potential of his earlier movies, but also decided to make fullest possible use of them from the very start of his new trilogy, making these movies, in some respects, more machine than man. The result at the time was often to place actors almost alone in front of green screens, to force them to imagine entirely antagonists they were supposed to be in life-and-death fights with. The effect now is to date them instantly to that very moment, in the early 2000s, when, thanks in part to Lucas’s enthusiasm, filmmakers everywhere became convinced that CGI was the way of the future, even though now it looks shockingly primitive — more like a video game than a movie. As effects have gotten better, audiences have tolerated this more. But Douthat, who complains often about the soullessness of modern blockbuster spectacle, should know where to point a finger of blame. Lucas thought his ’70s and ’80s technology constrained him; it turns out that his constrained imagination was superior to his unconstrained imagination.
To say nothing of his unedited imagination. It has been lost in the mythology of the original movie, but what actually ended up in theaters was the result of years of drafting and editing, much of it forced on Lucas by skeptics around him. By the time he got around to making the prequel trilogy, his success permitted him to indulge all of his instincts, many of which turned out to be wrong — in actor selection, in direction, in screenwriting, in storytelling. Some actors managed to emerge from the films with their careers intact, but virtually no one’s careers wound up improved by them, except perhaps via paycheck. Most of the time, they are romping about in a nonsensical story (as in the many moments when Obi-Wan Kenobi miraculously survives whatever ordeal he has landed in because we know he has to live into the movies we’ve already seen, or when Anakin suddenly falls under the main villain’s sway and decides at a key moment, essentially for no reason, to stay there, because . . . he has to be evil). At times, Lucas outright forgets or ignores aspects of the movies he himself created (as when the climactic confrontation between Obi-Wan and Anakin in Revenge of the Sith simply does not line up with their final confrontation in A New Hope), to shoehorn in origin stories that defy logic (Boba Fett was a clone, whose father antagonized Obi-Wan, yet Obi-Wan did not seem to mind that the Republic’s entire army was made up of similar clones?), and to introduce developments (e.g., midichlorians) that actively weaken what made Star Wars great. It turns out that indulging in his instincts was the last thing Lucas should have been allowed to do.
Douthat’s hatred of the sequel trilogy is threatening to lead him to the dark side of embracing the prequel trilogy, whose faults are legion. Worse, he does so in a kind of would-be unfalsifiable fashion that imagines the movies he wanted to have seen, not the movies that are, and casts failure into a kind of success. (To say nothing of the “Darth Jar Jar” fan theory, which Douthat embraces without realizing that it would imply Lucas lacked the courage to go through with it.) There is a simpler answer: George Lucas captured lightning in a bottle in 1977, yet both he and others have failed, to varying degrees, to capture it since. The prequels failed similarly. One can enjoy them, I suppose, just as one can enjoy many bad movies. But in relying on their own form of cultural inheritance to the point of exhaustion and turning endlessly upon themselves, they represent a form of decadence all their own.