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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

I'd say this is giving the Anakin trilogy an unfair shake: While I don't enjoy watching the prequels much for being clumsy films, you have to hand it to Lucas for trying to significantly expand his space opera by adding in galactical politics, etc. Any thrust to make Star Wars about ideology and governance (and specifically parliamentary democracy vs. facism) really came from the prequels, and arguably you couldn't have Andor without their template just as much as A New Hope delivers the plot hooks for its premise. In retrospect, while its flowering may be Andor, it's the prequels that gave the franchise a bigger signature and message than just being a family drama. Taken together they now make Star Wars about something, which I think it never really had before. "What's that star war about?" is something you can answer now.

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Yes, the overall narrative of the prequels was good and very promising. It's so unfortunate that they turned out to simply be shockingly bad as movies - "clumsly" really doesn't describe how stodgy and badly put-together they were.

I honestly hope Disney will eventually remake them from scratch, with the excuse that FX have progressed dramatically since then. They could even reuse McEwan, considering he's supposed to be an older character already.

I don't think any of the politics from the prequel trilogy lands. It's too cartoony for that.

Whereas Senator Mothma's story arc had me engrossed from beginning to end. From the complexities of a Senator's social life, to her financial difficulties, to the medieval like politics of marrying off her daughter for the sake of a political and financial alliance, to her risking more and more, to her brave and powerful speech condemning the empire.

There is nothing in the prequels that hits nearly as hard. Because it's all dialog the audience isn't paying attention to because the Jedi stuff is more engaging, and because the political stakes never seem that great.

Sure, the execution was crappy - but he chose to make one of his new main characters a Senator, had the Senate as a set piece, etc.

One of the original movie's main characters was a senator. It's hardly original.

Leia's role as a member of the senate was in one scene in the original movie, and it was not clear if she was a senator or working on behalf of a senator. The senate being dissolved in another scene had just as little impact as her affiliation with the senate as far the movie itself goes.

There is politics in the original trilogy. It’s just more thematic than literal political manoeuvring. The story of a rag tag group of rebels fighting against a massive entrenched empire is a political one by nature. And Lucas has directly stated his inspiration for that dynamic was the Vietnam war. And spoiler alert America isn’t the rebels. I think Andor does a great job of fleshing out the more day to day feelings of being in an era of rebellion against an empire bent on domination

The Simpsons had it right when they parodied Episode 2 as a boring story about redistricting.

    you have to hand it to Lucas for trying to 
    significantly expand his space opera by adding 
    in galactical politics

No, absolutely zero credit.

While "evil guy corrupting a democracy" is certainly a noble and relevant thing to explore, the prequels don't explore that in any useful or fun or insightful way. It's literally just an excuse for pew pew pew lasers and spaceships and laser swords.

(Remarkably, they also make the democracy, and the Jedi who defend it, seem almost universally super boring and dumb and uncool. Making Jedi uncool is some kind of special achievement...)

Even as a real-world allegory, it sucks.

The bad guys in real life aren't even remotely like the Sith, who are physically twisted freaks that are explicitly like "yep! we're evil!"

Real-life bad guys are often good looking and most of them think they're actually doing the right thing.

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