DC comics book review: The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy: Geek Life

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Did George Lucas Really Steal Our Childhood?

It’s time for a new Geek Life, and for this twenty-third episode, I have a topic that is at the very center of the most geeky of all controversies. It’s a story of a humble boy who grows up to become a powerful warrior, only to fall into the abyss of greed and lust to become one of the most fearful villains in the entire galaxy. The story of this little boy maybe doesn’t quite compare to the villainy people feel for his creator. This story’s focus quickly shifted from young Anakin Skywalker to his creator, George Lucas. This is the tale of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy and the ongoing war between those who like the movies and those who not only hate them, but hold a deep resentment for both Lucas and those who liked the movies.

One of the images that has been burned into my brain.

When someone says “Star Wars” to me, I immediately see flashes of some of the most indellible moments from the original trilogy. I see Luke Skywalker gazing out at the double sunset of Tatooine hoping for the day he could leave the barren world. I see his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, being sliced down by the evil Darth Vader. I see Yoda training Luke to become the Jedi he’s destined to become. I see Darth Vader revealing his true familial relationship to Luke. Han Solo being tortured and eventually frozen in carbonite. I even see the Ewoks battling and defeating a whole squadron of Storm Troopers. These are all moments that have been with me all my life.

I was born just a few months prior to the release of the original Star Wars movie. One of my earliest of memories is the day my mom took me to see The Empire Strikes Back. I remember seeing Return of the Jedi several times in the theater. I remember the Christmases that brought many of the toys. I remember having an R2-D2 toy chest that I could clear out, climb in, and roll around like the lovable droid. Hell, I even remember the different flavored cookies that came out for Return of the Jedi. I think there was vanilla cookies shaped like Luke and Leia, chocolate cookies for the Emperor and Vader, and peanut butter cookies for Han and Chewie. These memories are as fresh to me today as they were nearly thirty years ago.

I don’t ever remember honestly wanting more to the Star Wars Saga. Darth Vader was once a great Jedi, became bad, sired a couple children, and Luke grew up to redeem him and defeat the Galactic Empire. All that seemed to be nice and tidy. Luke was left as the only surviving Jedi. Leia and Han live happily ever after. R2 and C3-PO go off and lobby for gay and lesbian robot marriage. The greatest enemy of the galaxy was destroyed. What was left for them to fight against?

By 1993, I realized that maybe there was going to be more Star Wars movies. Locally, the entire original versions of the movies were playing as a triple header at a movie theater. If I’m not mistaken, Indianapolis was not the only city doing this. As the films were released on video in 1995, each one of the video cassettes began with an interview between Leonard Maltin and George Lucas. It was revealed that Lucas had been working on the story of Anakin and how much more complicated that story Obi-Wan told Luke in the first movie really was. Two years later, each of the first three movies would get enhanced special effects (whether we wanted them or not), and new theatrical releases. A new trilogy was on its way and we were rushing headlong into Star Wars Mania just as we did as little kids.

As I watched the trailer for Phantom Menace, all I could say is, "Ooh who's that? Wow, what's that? What's going on here?"

As the days passed, anticipation to see anything from this new movie rose to a fever pitch. The first teaser trailer hit us like a ton of bricks. It was finally true… As a collective, we pissed our pants over the images we were given in that teaser. It’s like we all said, “Holy shit a new Star Wars movie!” at the same time. A couple weeks prior to the release of the movie, the toys came out and Pepsi put the characters from the movie on all their products’ cans in marked 24-packs. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing people scrambling to get Star Wars merchandise. It stood to reason that the movie was already making its worth in products alone.

I went to Toys R Us the night the toys were released. A line of people stood outside on a foggy, dew-covered Spring evening waiting for the clock to strike midnight so they could get their hands on as many of the toys they could grab. While my friends and I weren’t so much interested in being the first people through the door, we were excited to be among the first to get a few of the figures. It was truly midnight madness. Ravenous fans tore through the store to get their hands on literally anything and everything. A friend of mine evoked the classic line from the original Planet of the Apes as he witnessed the mania gripping everyone when he shouted, “It’s a madhouse! A MADHOUSE!!!” in the middle of the store.

It was clear that Star Wars was every bit as popular as it ever had been. I know I made sure to get a figure of Darth Maul, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Each figure came with this cool little base the figures could stand on that, coupled with a seperately sold “translator”, would speak lines from the movie. My mom even stopped by a still opened Toys R Us the following morning before she came home from work and got me that translator and a couple other figures. It was really like all those Christmases I had as a little kid all over again.

Due to the high demand of people who wanted to see the movie as early and often as possible, movie theaters did something I’ve never seen before and never seen since… They didn’t just do midnight showings which weren’t all that unusual, but they also remained open all night and played the movie continuously. I didn’t go until the morning, but I had friends who camped out all day and night to see the movie back to back at midnight and three in the morning. Never before, and never since, had I seen so much anticipation for a movie. The masses were about to bust through the doors of movie theaters like a raging river through a rickety dam.

As the lights dimmed, the crowd in the auditorium had a buzz about them that can only be called electric. Soon, the 20th Century Fox Fanfare played and the usual silence that comes in between the Fox Fanfare and the blaring beginning of the Star Wars Theme wasn’t silent at all. A thunderous cheer went out as we saw, for the first time in sixteen years, the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” appeared signifying that all our hopes and dreams had come true… Star Wars was finally back.

This looked promising... Attack of the Clones had to be everything we dreamed of, right?

That whole Summer was filled with Star Wars euphoria. We couldn’t wait for Episode II. However, in the months and years that followed, that very euphoria was replaced by a growing disappointment among many fans. About 98% of every adult in the audience hated Jar Jar Binks. As an unfortunate turnabout, the new character everyone loved, Darth Maul, was killed leaving us wondering who the hell the main bad guy at the forefront of everything was going to be in the next two movies. We hoped Vader would be that bad guy by the third film, but we also knew the timeline set by Episode I didn’t really allow for it. Perhaps the worst of the things that came about following the release was the unfortunate use of stereotypical accents for certain characters possessing certain roles which had certain groups very disappointed. From the fans’ perspectives, questions about things said in the original trilogy were getting asked more and more creating debate and a growing fear that the end would lead to too many loose ends and ultimate disappointment from those who were most excited for the saga’s return.

We still lined up for Episode II. Anakin Skywalker was no longer a little boy. Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan was looking older and more like Sir Alec Guinness. A big Jedi fight was on the way. There was a guy who looked an awful lot like Boba Fett running around. And the arrival of the Storm Troppers whetted our appetites for more Star Wars.

Jeez, lady... Can't you just let Anakin have a piece? Seriously!

However, if fans were at all disappointed in The Phantom Menace, it seemed they were twice as disappointed in Attack of the Clones. Despite the flashy, all computer-generated sets and action, the heart of this movie was the love story growing between Anakin and Padme Amidala. The love story was driven by dull and melodramatic dialog between two characters who had little reason to love each other, or not enter into a romantic relationship. On top of that, Anakin was kind of a douchebag. If these prequels were built around the idea that his fall from grace was a sad tale, it was increasingly harder to identify with, or feel sorry for, a brat who kept crying about love and needing to be all powerful.
Just about all the good guys in the second film seemed to have very unlikable traits that made the crowds wonder who they would actually root for. Anakin was a big baby who needed to have his diaper changed in just about every scene. Obi-Wan was a stern jerk. Yoda wasn’t a big fan of creating a clone army to fight these systems that were seceding from the Republic, but what does he do? He leads an assload of clones into battle thereby starting a war that he laments at the end of the movie. Mace Windu chops off a guy’s head when he probably could have just been arrested leaving the guy’s kid to mourn by picking up old Dad’s head! Padme was a giant tease – pulling Anakin toward her only to reject him and giving the poor guy the worst case of galactic blue balls ever.

Episode II had some nice things going on with it, but it suffered in the dialog and pacing. At least we got to see Yoda fight with a lightsaber for the first time. We also knew that Episode III was going to have to be darker because Lucas was simply running out of time to finish the Anakin Skywalker story. So again, we felt the euphoria for a little while, but it disentegrated into yearning for a film that could stand on level ground with any one of the original trilogy.

Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, would redeem the first two to a certain degree. Anakin is still a dick, but despite the horrific dialog between he and Padme, you can tell that he really does care for her. His entire life is devoted to her. Trust me, we have plenty enough scenes that make it painfully obvious he would do anything for her. Obi-Wan even chilled out a bit and McGregor made the line between his performance and Guiness’ blur even more. The action scenes were much sharper and the film was, as a whole, much more interesting. I especially liked the Order 66 sequence, not because I got to see a lot of Jedi die, but because we saw a systematic destruction of the supposed heroes of the galaxy.

Let's see... Helps kill Sam Jackson, kills children, and chokes pregnant wife. Nope, don't feel so sorry for you guy.

However, there is one scene that always bothered me – Anakin’s implied murder of little children Jedi. It’s not because I’m some bleeding heart or anything like that. It’s because we were force fed the idea that Anakin is a tragic character. He is supposed to be a good man beneath all the bad he’s done. At the end of Return of the Jedi, he dies a hero and is finally redeemed through his son’s compassion for him. If all that is true, methinks it’s a bit hard to be redeemed after slaughtering babies. It’s too much for me to believe that just because he didn’t want Natalie Portman to die that he would go so far as to fall so fast into the grips of the Dark Side of the Force to wipe out a temple full of children. That’s not even bringing up the fact that he even choked his pregnant wife. Either way, it puts too much of a damper on the kind things that Obi-Wan said about Anakin in the original Star Wars and his eventual redemption at the end of Jedi, and it completely obliterates any idea of a “tragic” fall from grace.

With Revenge of the Sith, the cycle was complete. Anakin, a boy who was conceived purely of the Force, goes on a big adventure, becomes a powerful Jedi, falls to evil desire and greed, becomes the most feared man in the galaxy, chases after his son, and through Luke, passes away a hero once again. George Lucas finally got to tell an entire story in six acts. What do people my age take away from this?

It’s no secret that it’s pretty damn sexy to bash on the Prequel Trilogy. Everyone has taken their shot at it over the years. Maybe the most popular bashing of the films come in the form of the hilarious reviews done by the Mr. Plinkett character from Red Letter Media on YouTube. For many, Star Wars, and its creator, has lost the luster and invincibility it once had. People like me will stand by the idea that Star Trek, for all its ups and downs over the years, surpassed Star Wars as the true sci-fi masterpiece because of these three movies.

As a whole, I don’t hate these movies. There is an entertainment value to them that I can’t deny. So, I’m going to evaluate a few things from these movies that are the most common problems. In some ways I’ll defend the movies, and in others, I’ll spot the problems and offer better suggestions. Let’s start, shall we?

Poor Jar Jar... I'm not sure any character in any movie ever has been the focus of so much hate.

I figured I’d start right off with possibly the most tired of all the arguments against all three movies, with The Phantom Menace being the installment getting the brunt of the bashing. Yeah, I’m going to actually defend Jar Jar Binks. Okay, I don’t like the character, nor do I think he was even well conceived, but I will always say that his placement in the movies was for one part of the demographic and one alone… Children. Little kids had zero comprehension of what’s going on in The Phantom Menace. Hell, if we all turned on our brains and took a real critical look at the story, most of us would have serious problems with what was going on. I’ll get to the story problems soon enough, but Jar Jar offered an in for the kids watching the movie.

Much like R2-D2 and C3PO’s roles in the original trilogy, Jar Jar represented the audience within the story. Things we didn’t fully comprehend were going on all around us. Like Jar Jar, we were fairly uneducated on the importance of any of it. So, George Lucas relied upon the things he knows about storytelling (yes, he knows a LOT about classic storytelling) and created a character that had two purposes – one for children to watch and another representing the audience as a whole. It’s poorly conceived because, in a way, the older crowd didn’t really feel uneducated or lost in a sea of action that was a little beyond our comprehension, but Lucas wanted all of his films to have that element, so he stuck with it for better or worse. As for the children, their faces lit up just as ours did when we saw Ewoks. Don’t fool yourselves, jaded Star Wars fans… You loved them as a kid too.

But did Jar Jar really ruin anything? No, he didn’t. Here’s how I can prove it. Completely remove the character from the movies. Now, did anything change? Nope. His presence in the movies, to a very important exception, mattered not to how things played out in the end. The Empire was still going to form, Jedi were still going to be killed, and Anakin was still going to become Darth Vader. The only thing he did that made any difference was pushing for a vote to give Palpatine more emergency powers. By that time, it didn’t matter that that was his one main contribution to the fall of the Republic. Lucas already knew the fans as a whole hated him so, what difference does it make if he’s the one who allowed Palpatine to remain in power a little longer?

Like I said, I don’t have to like him to understand Jar Jar Binks’ importance for being there. He was the cutesy character that could hold kids’ attention. It didn’t matter if a really good character with a completely not-stereotypical accent was used because if he was cute in the least, the jaded as a majority audience would have despised him. In a way, I guess you could say I’m sorry for Jar Jar because he never had a chance with the fans the moment Lucas dreamt him up.

Now I got Jar Jar out of my system, let’s talk about the next most complained about aspect of the Prequel Trilogy – the dialog. Trust me, I’ll rip through this pretty fast. It stinks. It really does. A lot of people were giggling during parts of the three movies that weren’t funny at all. Why? Well, it’s because George Lucas has a really hard time writing dialog. It’s no secret. It’s always been a problem of his. Going as far back as the original Star Wars, actors had a terrible time speaking the lines. Not only that, but Lucas isn’t a particularly actor-friendly director. He’s not sure how to tell actors how to emote. He knows how to get what he wants visually, but the rest of it has always been a problem of his.

Lawrence Kasdan... Lucas' savior in the script writing department.

Probably knowing this already, he had help with The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in the form of Lawrence Kasdan, a particularly sharp writer. Because Lucas is much more of a grand scale thinker, he also has problems with directing actors and cameramen. For Empire and Jedi, he got help there too from Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand. For some reason, Lucas decided to take on the writing and directing solo for the Prequels. This was the biggest downfall for them because it immediately could not ever step up to the expectations of the fans because Lucas was rusty and already not particularly talented in either role.

The dialog is sluggish and unromantic. I’m not talking about romance as in kissy, smoochy stuff. I just mean the idea of falling in love with what was being said and getting an emotional impact from the dialog. Important things needed to be said and done between characters to make things work, but it was almost as if Lucas wanted to show us that Jedi were really boring religious jerks and that Padme and Anakin were real deep in some serious puppy love instead of getting some real impact and cool things said between characters. So we get some really dry and boring dialog between Jedi and laughable romantic gobbledy gook between Padme and Anakin. It gets so bad to the point that you almost are so sick of the two starcrossed lovers that you hope Sam Jackson would just do us all a favor by cutting their heads off.

Finally, and most importantly, the biggest problem has always been story. You almost get to the point where you wonder why you were even wanting to see how Darth Vader became the way he was in the original trilogy. You also begin to wonder how important it was to really see what drove Darth Vader over the edge. In the original trilogy, he was not much more than a henchman. He did the Emperor’s bidding. He was Luke Skywalker’s dad, and he betrayed the Jedi Order. Other than what we knew, we weren’t given any other clues that he was more important than anyone else in the saga. He was just the guy in black. Anything that was more than we saw came from our imaginations and the supplemental material published outside the canon of the movies. In other words, Vader maybe wasn’t all that important to anyone outside of Luke, Obi-Wan, and Yoda, but somewhere along the way with extra stories, the coolness of his image, and our own attraction to those who are outlaws or lived outside and above the law, Darth Vader’s importance grew.

Public Enemy #1 - Darth Vader. But exactly how important was he in the grand scheme of things?

So, did Lucas intend on this happening? Did he always know that Vader was this important? Did he know exactly how important when he penned the first Star Wars? Or did he kind of wondered about all that, but let the wave of the fans opinion of Vader pull him into believing these things too? The one thing he could say while looking at the fans’ reactions to Vader was that he had the power to do whatever he wanted with the character. Maybe, just maybe, Vader’s grand importance and grand story was a subconscience shift inside Lucas.

I’m not sure I ever needed this part of the story. Well, on second thought, I should say I’m not sure I needed Vader to be this important. He can have a sad story because a lot of us do and a lot of us like a story that ends up being kinda tragic. However, it really seems that everything in the Prequel Trilogy rested on the idea that Anakin Skywalker was super important to how everything plays out. On top of that, it was necessary, if Anakin was going to be this important, to make up a scientific and biological reason for how people can use the Force, and the Jedi Order would have to have some pretty tough rules to enforce.

Oh, midichlorians. Damn that’s a bad idea. The Force is supposed to be a religious/magical sort of thing. Giving into this more biological reason why some are special makes them not so special at all. Lucas needed Anakin to be special, so he gave him a bad case of midichlorians – even to the point that these little buggers created him from nothing. Hmmm… Jesus much anyone? Anyway, so now with this in place, you can build a story around how important Anakin is, which should drive the Prequel’s stories.

Who needs anger, or love, or sex, or laughter if you've got this gang of hip cats to hang with?

Next, you have to build an entire code around the Jedi Order. This is another pretty bad idea. Granted, we didn’t know much about the Jedi Order in the original movies. We assumed they probably had some rules, but we never knew they were basically completely emotionless. You can’t feel anger or fear for that will lead to the Dark Side. You can’t feel love, or even happiness, for the danger of losing that will lead you to the Dark Side. Basically, everything can lead you to the Dark Side. If you do the wrong thing right after getting out of bed, or eat too many Lucky Charms in the course of a day, it will lead you down a very dark path. It’s really an impossible lifestyle.

You might say, “Geoff, this is no different than what Catholic priests must deal with.” To that I would have to disagree a great deal. Priests can at least love. Maybe they can’t have sex, but they don’t go off to priest school and immediately can no longer have an emotional connection to their mothers. It’s almost a designed set up for Anakin to fail and become Darth Vader. It’s not even a design that can be called intricate or universal. It’s a plain as day, in your face, you, sir, are going to fail so bad you won’t even believe it kind of set up. It’s like saying you’re going to drive from California to China without seeing or driving into the Pacific OR Atlantic Oceans. It’s impossible to avoid failure. This might just be the biggest plothole in the entire Prequel Trilogy.

Next, the timeline is really funky. In a way it makes sense, but you have to spend so much time setting up the story of, and going to get, Anakin, that you pretty much immediately waste a movie. Now you have to tell the tale of a fairly bad galactic war in just two movies when everything in the first Star Wars led you to believe the Clone Wars were both horrific for those who fought in it and romantic for those who didn’t.

This was supposed to be a big deal, right... Right?

Attack of the Clones was wasted by having to set up the love affair between Anakin and Padme. So, a very important part (or at least imporant to those of us who actually thought these Clone Wars were important) of the story was reduced to a secondary story for Obi-Wan and the Deus Ex Machina for how our heroes get out of a bind. That’s not even taking into account that Anakin has to be re-introduced again since he’s now grown up a bit. So you have to see what kind of a guy he’s becoming. You have to get to know the relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan. You have to get to know a new bad guy in the form of Dracula. There’s a lot going on here. With a lot already happening in Episode I, now a lot of stuff happening in Episode II, things are stacking up. There’s a lot that needs to be told and the timeline is getting so very short.

Episode III actually redeems a lot of the first two. It’s the best of the trilogy, but it’s still not without its problems story wise and in timeline. Dialog is still the biggest of problems, but everything seems a lot more fun. However, it bothers the hell out of me that if you didn’t watch these little five minute cartoons on Cartoon Network, you weren’t going to know anything about the Chancellor getting kidnapped or who General Grevious is or anything. It fails out of the gate. Thankfully, the action and the raw emotion (even in clumsy lines) of the fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan comes through.

As a whole, the trilogy kinda didn’t work out. I enjoy the films still. I will still say that Episode I is the most like the original trilogy than the others, but a lot of that is because it actually used locations to shoot in and not some enclosed, green screened, imaginary dream land. The technological advancements from the prequels is astonishing and, just like Star Wars did in 1977, it has pushed the industry forward even if the environment was so perfectly created, it was sterile.

Maybe the biggest mistake was to kill off Darth Maul. The prequels really needed a standard bad guy.

In my mind, I always felt the prequels would have played out more smoothly than this. There was no need to explain where Anakin came from and he was certainly not a little kid. Jedi didn’t live by such a strict code that even make Vulcans stop, look, and say, “Damn those guys are sheltered…” They could have families and teach the ways of the force to their children and so on. Anakin is married to a girl and they love each other very much. She’s carrying their offspring and there’s much to be excited about even in a time of war. The war isn’t so murky in the sense of who the bad guys are and what they want. These bad guys just want to take over the galaxy. They could either be led by Palpatine, or by Darth Maul, or just some other dude. That part doesn’t matter, the end result is Palpatine is in charge in the end. Either way, if this Clone Wars thing was so bad, maybe they should show exactly how bad it was. I mean, it’s WAR, right? It’s always pretty bad.

The Jedi are are trying to do the best they can to keep things from spinning out of control, but the war is costing them heavily and there just aren’t enough of them, so they get cloned. This goes even worse for them as a group because the clones have their abilities but not all their training. They are particularly susceptible to the Dark Side. Jedi are being wiped out. In fact, these clones are a problem to both the Republic and the original bad guys because they are so incredibly nutty. Anakin realizes that his very own clone has returned home after falling to the dark side and slaughtered his wife and, what he believes to be the case as well, his twin children. This sends him over the edge in a rage that eventually lands him in the Vader suit.

Wow, I just threw out a better story in a few minutes. It’s concise, it’s not complete, but it gets to the point and it already has natural emotion within it. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good jumping off point. It certainly doesn’t contain a really confusing plot to set up the war between the Republic and the Separatists. It’s not weighed down by an overuse of parallel with boring government stuff. Most importantly, Anakin is not so important that any minor character or story flaw tears apart the legitimacy and fabric of the whole story, or more accurately, causes us as viewers to stop and question things to the point of not being able to move beyond whatever the problem was. Much like the first three, there is an even flow from one incident to the next. The end result is already known, but the zombie-like lifelessness of what we got isn’t there.

George Lucas directing the action in Episode III.

Yeah, it sure is fun to hark on the Prequel Trilogy. I have times when I sit back and watch it for entertainment and I have times when I will analyze it with a critical mind. To the exception of The Empire Strikes Back, I could do the same with the older movies too. I guess it’s important to remember that these movies were never really perfect. It took a lot of suspension of disbelief, and some faith in magic to make the movies entertaining to begin with. The original trilogy came in a time that we, as a species, needed it most. It came when we needed the most hope and excitement to tear us away from the negative times. The prequels didn’t have that luxury. Instead, the prequels had a built in audience. Unfortunately, that built in audience expected a set of films that each individual fan played out in his own mind and honestly thought they’d see something more along those lines than what Lucas did. Damn that pissed off a lot of Star Wars fans.

So, who’s to blame? I can already hear the deafening wave of “LUCAS” raining down on my eardrums. Maybe he tinkered with those original movies a few times too many. Maybe he was the hand that wrote the prequels. But guess what boys and girls? That’s his business. He made Star Wars and as much as he appreciates the fans and loves us for making him one of the most powerful filmmakers of all time, he’s going to tell the stories he wants to. If he wants to play with his toys and tinker with his movies, he certainly can. Before you say that he shouldn’t because once it’s out it belongs to the world, what if he said he wanted to tinker a bit with the prequels? What if he said he was removing Jar Jar Binks from everything? Yeah, that’s what I thought… You don’t seem so willing to complain anymore. My point is, he told the story HE wanted to tell.

If Lucas got to tell the story he wanted to tell, who are we to be so negative? We have every right to say it wasn’t good if we felt that way. We have every bit the choice and freedom to not watch them ever again or not go see any subsequent movies in the series. Did we? Hell no. We lined up every three years to see a new Star Wars movie. We could have stopped. It wouldn’t have stopped Lucas from doing what he planned on anyway, but we still had the choice and still put ourselves in the movie theater when the new ones came out. All this talk about Lucas raping our childhood or ruining the original movies his total horseshit. You can’t ruin the original trilogy. If you liked Episode I but didn’t like Episode II or whatever, the ones you liked can never be ruined for you. If you cannot get past the disappointment to the point where those previous movies are ruined, maybe you should stop treating Star Wars like the girlfriend that cheated on you. It’s probably time to put away the toys and step away from the movies for a while. Go see some friends. Have a beer at a bar. Go meet some new friends. You’ve more than earned that break from Star Wars.

With scores of fans, the number of people who would dislike the prequels was bound to be staggering.

If you haven’t noticed by now, I don’t blame George Lucas much at all. I blame the rest of us. Yup, I often blame fans for the things that get so blown out of proportion like this very topic. It happens in comics too, my friends. We all have such high expectations and get so worked up in the hope we see something we’ve always wanted to see that what we get has absolutely no hope of satisfying us. We’ve had such a long love affair with Star Wars. The most loyal of fans are the ones that grew up on the original trilogy. The very thought of Star Wars takes us back to when we were kids. We feel the sense of wonderment and happiness each time we hear the theme song. It’s as much a part of our generation as World War II was for my grandparents. What hope did these prequels have, even if they were brilliantly made, that would have compared in the slightest with the feelings we had for the originals? Agree with me or not, but I don’t think Lucas is much to blame. Yes, he made the movies, and he shouldn’t have written them and directed tham all on his own, but we wouldn’t have been happy no matter what.

That’s the end of this edition of Geek Life! In two weeks I get a bit cerebral with you. That’s because I’m going to talk about what really began with Marvel’s Civil War, the continued use of real life debate, and what place politics have in comics. You might think it’s a bit strange to talk about, and it will be, but I’m looking for a good old fashioned debate! See you then!

To find out more about what this series of articles are all about check out What is Geek Life? To see what other topics I’ve written about, check out the Geek Life tag!

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Saturday, May 21, 2011

The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy: Geek Life

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