The War in Our Stars

An extremely dumb friend of mine — let’s call him “Grady O’B.” — recently tweeted something extremely dumb, which needed immediate correction. Unfortunately, his Twitter account is locked (whatever that means?), so I can’t link to his tweet here, but the gist of it was, “The prequels are good don’t @me,” which is an obvious invitation to @him. In blog form. (If I hadn’t called him out by name, would this be subblogging?)

His main argument seems to be that the prequels are the movies that Lucas wanted to be able to make, but didn’t have enough money for, when he made the original trilogy. He was able to do a lot visually that he couldn’t do before, and in so doing the movies are more fun and interesting. To which I would counter, “No, the Special Edition releases were the movies Lucas wanted to make but couldn’t due to money, and they were worse in almost every way except film quality and Death Star explodiness than the original versions. The more money Lucas gets, the worse his movies are, starting with Jedi, which begins a downward spiral into wooden acting and dialogue that hits its nadir right around the time Hayden Christiansen declares that from his point of view, the Jedi are evil.”

Anyway, my thoughts on the prequels are well-known and documented, and I won’t rehash them (any more) here except to say that they have only grown stronger and more correct, but to summarize: the storytelling in the orig trig is great; the storytelling in the prequels is a dumpster fire in the trash compactor on the first Death Star’s detention block AA-23.

However, in arguing with Mr. O’B., I was reminded of another great reason why the prequels are hot, stinky monster-garbage: they don’t even seem to be set in the same universe. When we think about the world of the prequels — maybe the Galactic Republic at its height — what do we think about? We think about robed space wizards leading the Republic’s army and serving as its primary police and special forces, all rolled into one. You literally can’t go anywhere in this universe and not have a Jedi around, so much so that when you show up on the outskirts of a tiny town in a Galactic backwater (a water so back, in fact, that money doesn’t work on the entire planet), and you introduce some Jedi to the lowliest of slave kids, his reaction is basically, “Oh, I’ve heard of you, you’re Jedi, I know what Jedi are and you are definitely them on account of the clothes and the beards and the laser swords and the space magic; it’s cool that you’re here or whatever but you certainly must realize that your reputation precedes you, literally everyone knows who and what you are, everywhere in this universe that we’re creating in this movie.”

There then proceed to be three movies and 13 years full of space wizards just unapologetically kicking space ass and taking space names — including fighting and winning an entire war against a robot army, the leader of whom is a robot space wizard!! — and we jump forward about 18 years to whiney Luke and no one has heard of this stuff? Look, I get that the Emperor gets to sort of write away history and push propaganda and stuff, but it’s not like it’s out of living memory; I just don’t see how you go from “The Jedi exist and are legends in their own time” to “hokey religions and ancient weapons” in 18 years. And before you tell me that Han was too young to remember, he grows up in a Republic / Imperial shipyard, which he escapes some 5 or so years after the fall of the Republic, and we know he’s at least 18 when he escapes because he joins the Imperial Navy, eventually washing into the infantry. Which, by the way, why do they even need an infantry? Did they waste their entire victorious clone army in 5 years of peacekeeping missions? Anyway.

I won’t defend the new trilogy (TNT?) in terms of it being set in a completely new and baffling universe, but at least when Han F. Solo appears, the kids are like “Holy cow, you’re the legendary war hero we all grew up reading about!” When Han (again, no younger than 12 when the Empire falls) meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, it isn’t “Holy cow, you’re an avowed enemy of the state with superpowers; we can’t possibly have you on board because the space wizard who famously keeps the Emperor’s peace has been hunting you down for decades and this will cause no end of trouble for me,” it’s “lol lookit that idiot, putting that mask on you and telling you to reach out with your feelings.” Heck, even the adults who were presumably making their bones fighting alongside Jedi in the Clone Wars are all, “Your sad devotion to that ancient religion…”

My point here is that the world set up by the prequels simply isn’t compatible with the world we inhabit in the first three films, or anything we know about the Star Wars universe. Actually, that’s more like a subpoint — the real point is that Grady is wrong. Never forget.