Writing has always been an important outlet for me, and when I do write, it is usually about teaching, but I’m finding that as much as I would like to, I simply do not have the bandwidth in this chapter of my life to blog regularly about education. But I do have both the desire and bandwidth to “nerd out” in writing, so that is what I hope to do from time to time moving forward.
Like most millennials, the original Star Wars trilogy was an important part of my childhood. Having been born in 1986, I was about a generation too young to have watched the films in theater when they first came out, so aside from a couple of bad 80’s Ewok movies and the novels, the VHS cassettes of those three films were all we young Star Wars fans had to go on. And oh, did we watch those movies–over and over and over. The lightsabers and blasters, the light side vs. the dark side, the dogfights in space, the swashbuckling “boring conversation anyway” Han Solo, the terrifying and mysterious Darth Vader–all of it captured our young imaginations with an overwhelming sense of fun.
For us mid-80’s-born millennials, our coming of age coincided with the advent of the Worldwide Web and the very first online movie trailers. So I remember watching the first trailer for the first movie in the long-rumored prequel trilogy on a school computer when I was in 6th or 7th grade. For my group of friends, it’s safe to say that the long wait for Episode One: The Phantom Menace meant that we had built our expectations sky high.
I remember going to see The Phantom Menace with a large group when we were in 8th grade. My sense was that we all came away having enjoyed the pod-racing and the lightsaber duels, but beyond that, we were trying very hard to like the rest of the movie. Even at the time, Jar-Jar Binks’ comic relief fell flat for us, and the ham-fisted attempt at political commentary with the trade federation’s blockade (right down to Viceroy Nute Gunray as a thinly-veiled stand-in for then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich) went over our heads, and wouldn’t have interested us much, even if it hadn’t.
A somewhat smaller group of us drove to the theater to watch Episode Two: Attack of the Clones in 2002, and while we were old enough by this point to have crushes on Natalie Portman, we were also clear-headed enough to notice that the dialogue was clunky and the performances, not great.
When Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005–just after my first year of college–I watched the movie with my brother and one other friend. It felt better than Attack of the Clones, but by then, it had become fashionable for millennials to hate on the prequels, so I was predisposed to dislike Revenge of the Sith going in.
As I finished college, started my teaching career, and got married, I was too busy to notice the animated show “The Clone Wars”, which ran from 2008-2014, or “Rebels”, which ran from 2014-2018. I got my hopes up after watching Episode Seven: The Force Awakens in theaters with my wife–though the plot was little more than a retread of the original, it had that sense of fun that the prequels had been missing for me. But due to bad press about Episode Eight, I didn’t watch it until a year or two after it had come out, on Netflix by myself (I wasn’t a fan), and I have never bothered to watch Episode Nine.
All this to say, I have been a jaded Star Wars fan for a lot of years. In my early years of teaching, I could score easy laughs from my students by trashing on the Star Wars prequels in class. After all, my earliest students were also millennials who had set impossible expectations for the prequels. Then, something changed. I cannot say exactly when, but certainly by 2016, a number of my students would push back when I would criticize the prequels. In fact, many of them connected to the prequels more than they did to the originals!
Then in 2019, The Mandalorian came out and immediately won over my wife and I, becoming appointment viewing when the new episode would drop each week. It had that classic Star Wars sense of swashbuckling and fun, and unlike the sequel trilogy, each new episode kept delivering on that promise. I did get the sense that there were references I was missing, and lore that had been explained elsewhere that I had to piece together myself. This did not ruin my viewing experience, but rather piqued my curiosity. My students who so adamantly defended the prequels would also insist that I “needed to watch Clone Wars” to really understand The Mandalorian. In 2022, one 11th grader asked me when I had last watched the prequels. I admitted that it had been at least ten years, if not more. The time had come to watch them again.
Since then, I have rewatched the prequels and watched three seasons of The Clone Wars. Here are my thoughts:
The prequels marked a milestone in filmmaking that I had not fully appreciated at the time, namely a more thorough and successful use of green-screen and CGI than any movie had attempted up until that point. Even in the 70s, George Lucas had been on the cutting edge of special effects, and the use of computer animation was simply the logical extension. Of course, using CGI heavily comes at a cost–it is harder to deliver masterpiece performances against a green screen, and acting opposite tennis balls that represent a character who will be animated in later. And now, with two decades worth of really bad CGI-heavy action movies clogging up our streaming platforms, the breakthrough represented by the prequel trilogy is harder to appreciate than it ought to be. They served as a proof-of-concept for what is possible with CGI.
The lightsaber choreography really is brilliant. The fact that the actors learned and executed much of this swordplay themselves is nothing short of remarkable.
The story, in broad brush-strokes, is really compelling: prequels run the risk of lacking suspense since we as the viewers know how everything will turn out, so the drama needs to come instead from the feeling of dread and inevitability. In The Godfather, Part II, knowing who Don Corleone becomes–and what his family becomes–is part of what makes watching his backstory so magnetic. Likewise, knowing Darth Vader’s story makes watching Anakin Skywalker’s descent into the dark side all the more engaging and tragic.
I still do not think the performances are very good, but I firmly believe that this had little to do with the actors and actresses, and almost everything to do with George Lucas’ direction and writing. One only needs to watch other films with Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, and Samuel L. Jackson to recognize that each of these actors can turn in a powerhouse performance. The Obi-Wan series and the Ahsoka series provide more than ample proof that Hayden Christensen is a fine actor, too. The issue, then, was with George Lucas’ dialogue and direction. I don’t think it’s any accident that Empire Strikes Back–widely regarded as the best of the original trilogy, and one of the best films of all time–was the only one for which George Lucas neither wrote nor directed.
George Lucas also took some shortcuts in his storytelling in Revenge of the Sith: as viewers, we’re supposed to believe that Anakin Skywalker has become a respected general and jedi knight in the three years since Attack of the Clones, and yet this is only ever told, but not shown. Much of what we see is Anakin sulking when he is not granted the rank of “master” on the jedi council, fretting about how to protect Padmé after his visions show her dying, and then ultimately giving into the dark side. But because we have not been privy to his character’s growth since Attack of the Clones (in which he was written as whiny, brash, petulant, and immature), we as the viewers simply cannot buy that Anakin deserves to be taken seriously. When he is denied the rank of master, we side with the jedi council for what looks to be a reasonable decision.
This is where The Clone Wars comes in. The Clone Wars is not cinematic prestige TV–it is an animated show geared towards children. But it is a very good animated show geared towards children. And it does the legwork of character and story development that George Lucas failed to provide in the prequels themselves. In The Clone Wars, we meet an Anakin who has been forced to stop being a padawan and start being a jedi knight–and teacher and general–too soon due to the outbreak of the Clone War. But Anakin, whom Obi Wan and others believe to be the “Chosen One” who will bring balance to the force, rises to meet his circumstances more often than he fails. We see him take foolish risks and learn from his mistakes. He doesn’t become cautious or timid as the series goes on, but his boldness becomes tempered with wisdom. Time and again, he proves himself to be a preternaturally skilled pilot and a thoughtful, caring commander whose compassion puts him directly at odds with the legalistic, often suffocating rules of the jedi order who disavow attachment of any kind. This compassion is most clear in Anakin’s friendship with Obi-Wan, his mentorship of Ahsoka Tano, his loyalty to R2-D2, and his secret marriage to Padmé.
As the series goes on, it becomes obvious that Anakin is heading in a different direction than the jedi order, and that he’s not wrong! Due to the dismal writing in Attack of the Clones, which made Anakin and Padme’s relationship feel forced (no pun intended), rushed, and based largely on infatuation, that tension between Anakin and “the jedi code” never felt earned or believable in the prequels themselves. But The Clone Wars earns that tension beautifully, organically, and gradually, as the story unfolds. Moreover, by showing Anakin fight shoulder to shoulder with Yoda, Mace Windu, and other jedi, demonstrating his valor and skill time and again, I finally can appreciate Anakin’s shock and betrayal when the council refuses him the rank of master in Revenge of the Sith. After Anakin’s heroism and compassion save entire planets, it is all the more heart-wrenching to watch him slaughter the younglings in the jedi temple. After all that he and Obi Wan had been through–only hinted at in throwaway references in Revenge of the Sith–the emotional weight of their duel on Mustafar hits like a wrecking ball.
The prequels will never replace the spot in my heart occupied by the original trilogy, but I have a newfound appreciation for them. They are not perfect films by any means, and it is clearer to me now more than ever that George Lucas needed to have Star Wars wrenched from his hands and placed in the abler hands of creative minds like Jon Favreau and David Filoni, but the prequels laid the groundwork for the brilliant and tragic story of Anakin Skywalker which unfolded in the original trilogies and continues to unfold in unexpected ways in some of the more recent Star Wars series. From the hope and idealism of my Star Wars fandom as a child to the cynicism and despair of my Star Wars fandom as a young adult, watching the Clone Wars and revisiting the prequels have only increased my appreciation for each new series that comes out. Anakin brought balance to the force after all, it would seem.
