Star Wars Prequels: Were they "Almost Universally Panned?"

[Kurgan]

Good point about the Episode name & number in the crawl. He planned to make more movies (and left it open for a sequel by having one of the villains escape), they just weren't written yet beyond a few vague ideas that never made it to the screen (ie: Splinter of the Mind's Eye). Some things that made it into ROTJ were recycled from earlier ideas, but most of it was developed after ESB, and we can see from the early Revenge drafts that it changed quite a bit before it came to the screen. Some of the mythology about Star Wars being all planned out in advance is holding SW to a different standard than the usual creative process behind films and their sequels. Not to sound like a broken record, but it's that "Lucas bashing" that annoys everyone so much to point out that for a time he deliberately fed into that mythology about his own writing, then seemed to forget what he said and act like it was other people's fault for thinking that.

ESB had "there is another" but it didn't say it was Luke's sister. It was admitted that this was put in to add to the tension, that Luke might not make it, not that they were holding Leia in reserve to be force sensitive, never mind his sister.

People look back on the scene of Luke "contacting" Leia telepathically to show us that Lucas intended all along for her to be his sister (I guess there's a rule that states people who are related to each other have a force link or something). But I think this is just convenience much like interpreting Obi-Wan's "momentary pause and head movement" in the hut in the previous film to indicate he's preparing to tell Luke the lie that his father was killed by Darth Vader, or Owen saying "that's what I'm afraid of" (meaning he knows that Luke is in danger of becoming a Dark Lord of the Sith just like his dad!).

If he had it planned out in advance, hey that's cool, but it doesn't seem like there's any evidence for that being the case behind the scenes and some against it being true.

So he obviously didn't have the Prequels planned out in advance, anymore than he had ESB and ROTJ. It's just that unlike the two sequels, for the prequels, he told us he was filming the backstory of the OT and he already had some well known public backstory in the original films and other prominent sources like the novelizations, which he went out of his way to keep in public view (republishing them every few years in that long stretch between the first movie through the time of the DVD box set releases). So there was reasonable audience expectation of this stuff, even if we discount fanon or the EU. It seems he wanted to create new stories and characters and keep people guessing about stuff, and committed himself to three movies (and directing them all himself instead of just the first one as he originally said). Hence much of it ended up irrelevant to the supposed central plot of Anakin's turn to the Dark Side.

[jollyreaper]

The only reason people care about whether Lucas made it up as he went or had the whole thing mapped out before he started is because he said he had it mapped out. Nobody really sees it as anything other than academic with the original trilogy because the whole thing worked out rather nicely. But the prequel trilogy was awful and the fan rage is in response to that. It's actually very similar to the fan rage concerning the Galactica remake. The intro tells you the Cylons have a plan, the writers were smug about being the best-written show on television, and they were making it up as they went. They could have gotten away with that if the story held together but it didn't. People were upset about basically being taken for a ride.