Sigh... Avatar 2 won't be released in 2018

[Eltu]

The production of the Star Wars prequels is quite an interesting topic in its own right, and a surprisingly nuanced one. It's easy to proclaim "the prequels were only made for money-grabbing purposes!" but looking at a lot of the behind-the-scenes footage (this in particular) you get the impression that George Lucas genuinely wanted to make something amazing but a lot of different factors sadly reduced the movies much below his original vision.

The RLM reviews of the prequels (here) are often referred to when discussing EP1-3, and while they're definitely interesting and do point out a lot of flaws with the films, I think it's important to remember that the majority of people involved in creating the SW prequels genuinely wanted them to turn out great.

Hayden Christensen being a good example, is not really a terrible actor (in my opinion, at least), but he was given a script to work with that vastly reduced his ability to portrait Anakin. George Lucas definitely failed to delegate much of the dialogue writing to someone more capable at that aspect of writing, which resulted in stilted, unnatural dialogue (especially noticeable in all the Anakin/Padme dialogues). Lucas hardly wanted this to happen, he simply overestimated his personal ability to write dialogue specifically.

Does these things make the prequels worse? Absolutely - but still worth noting that few of these issues were a result of intentional neglect, but rather a series of unfortunate events. At their core there's still a hint of a greater vision and ambition, and while I agree the prequels are vastly inferior, I think this has to be recognized to avoid a one-dimensional portrayal of EP1-3.

These days when I watch through the Star Wars films, I try to view the prequels from the perspective of the core story they want to tell (the fall of the Republic) and not focus so much at their individual storytelling and cinematic flaws, and they are a much more enjoyable experience because of it.