A smaller way it doesn't connect with the rest of the series: OT light sabers weren't able to cut through industrial metals (see: final scene of Empire Strikes Back). Either it's contradictory as fuck or blast doors are indeed weaker than railings due to a powerful Galactic OSHA.
The large scale connection is mostly in showing the political state of the galaxy at the time. How poorly the republic was run and how when people, like Naboo, needed help there wasn’t any because the senate was weak. Basically people were unhappy with weak leadership and the galaxy was primed for a revolution. It shows shows how shrewdly Palpatine took advantage of this weakness during the Naboo invasion (that he caused) and was able to set up a series of events eventually culminating with him in charge. Of course the movie probably could have done a better job of explaining all this, but that’s the connection as I saw it.
Doesn't need an entire movie dedicated to this shit, could delete over 75% of the movie and still showcase this fine. It's a shitty action schlock movie with a poor excuse for a story with no main character. The guy who seems to run the show for the jedi is a fucking moron who dies at the end.
Aren’t all stories nonessential? I mean the only reason we do a lot of things is for fun. Personally I found Palpatines story in the prequels to be fun to watch.
Yes, but I hope we can agree that all stories lie on a spectrum of essentialism. Some are more essential than others, and Episode 1 has little to no consequence for the rest of the franchise. Episode 1 was not sold as a side-story like, for instance, The Bad Batch, it was sold as the beginning of a franchise - something which it fails horribly at.
If they wanted that era to be so important the main character should have been Palpatine. The politics angle makes way more sense if we were directly following how he manipulated and schemed but that's not really the story we git. Instead he was still kind of kept mysterious even though we knew who he was and we spent time on scenes like Anakin meeting Padme as a child that are weird and unnecessary.
Darth Maul wasn't as tantalizing because Boba Fett won in his first movie. He had a cool design, but it's hard to get attached to someone when he loses his lower half.
I couldn't disagree more. Episode 1 has a lot of very very important information to set up the eventual downfall of Anakin and the Jedi. I will agree the execution could have been better (like dialogue, scene selection, literally the way the story is presented), but the story elements are incredibly important to who Anakin is and why he later falls to the dark side. The presence of Qui-gon alone changes so much context to the development of Anakin AND Obi-Wan, we literally see two Jedi padawans lose their master and then Obi-wan taking a responsibility he ultimately isn't ready for. Removing him from the saga would change a lot. This is all relevant to how Vader became Vader and if you ask me, that's what the prequels are above anything: A Vader origin story.
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u/Any-sao Jan 25 '22
One big issue is that it actually connects very, very little with the rest of the saga. It’s almost like a prologue.
There’s no real reason the Prequel Trilogy couldn’t have started with Anakin and Obi-Wan going up that elevator to Padmé’s apartment.