Star Wars 7 Spoilers Thread: This SPOIL bath is going to feel so good.

I'll put it this way - can anybody summarize what actually happens in Phantom Menace outside of "Palpatine begins his nefarious work to ascend the political ladder, Qui-Gonn is killed, and Anakin is discovered?". because there's a lot of complicated, dull political mess that tbh feels like three filler episodes of Clone Wars before that show got good.

Lucas said the prequel trilogy was meant to be Anakin's character arc, which should have been great, but Lucas went and did it through a really awkward love story that didn't hold together. having Anakin be almost a secondary player in Phantom to time-jumping 10 years to teen Anakin being a lecherous perv who already seems to have demons means we never really understand why he's so borderline psychotic in Attack of the Clones, because all of that development happened off-screen. think it would have been better if they just started in the first film with him already being a teen Padawan and coming in contact with nefarious influences for the first time then going back all the way to childhood.

and as much as I do enjoy Revenge of the Sith, there were so many much more interesting angles Lucas could have taken, such as being brainwashed into thinking the Jedi were trying to take over the Republic, but instead they turned it into an awkward love story where he's so afraid of her dying in childbirth he learns dark powers. his motivation for turning is almost incomprehensible - he desperately needs Palpatine to show him the dark side powers to save Padme, yet first he decides to tell Mace Windau and go with him to apprehend Palpatine, knowing he'll either be killed, or imprisoned and unwilling to help Anakin since he betrayed him anyway. the fuck did he think was going to happen? and then after Windau is killed, he simultaneously in 5 minutes goes from reluctantly killing Windau to believing every anti-Jedi conspiracy theory. It feels like two parts of different films, like two screenplays were merged.

like one minute, he's begging Mace not to make him kill him, the next he's willfully slaughtering a bunch of kids without hesitation.

tbh they should have started the trilogy where Attack of the Clones began and put all three films in a much more compressed time period.

i don't know how sad it is that I just used my afternoon break at work to write this.

i don't necessarily think the complexity of the plot (i will also accept incoherence) is a negative counterpoint to the disjointed, made-up-along-the-way narrative of the sequel trilogy, but obviously the flaws in the prequels run deep. sometimes though i think it's a case of lucas overreaching where he should have simplified it. they at least don't feel like desperation ploys to the fairweather audience.

i'm too old for this shit though.

*breaks away from thinking about the upcoming Ahsoka series* Sorry, did you all say something?

I still wonder how things might have turned out if Lucas hadn’t backed away from the “dark Jar Jar” idea.

As ridiculous as it is I really enjoy the big pulpy space opera nonsense of Rise Of Skywalker the best out of the three sequels.