10 Movie Scenes That Should Have Happened Off-Screen
4. Midi-chlorians - Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
Though some fans will argue that large swaths of the Star Wars prequels should've never been committed to film, most will agree that one of the prequel trilogy's major mistakes was in straining itself to explain the Force.
In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) explains to a young Anakin (Jake Lloyd) that the building blocks of life and therefore the Force are midi-chlorians, a sort of space bacteria naturally occurring in the universe.
It was a blatant attempt to hand-wave the inconsistencies in the Force from the original trilogy, yet beyond being rather silly, only made things even more unnecessarily complex.
Plus, there was much charm and intrigue in the mystery of how the Force worked, and lifting the veil on that - sort of - was a major mistake.
Granted, numerous references are made to the midi-chlorians throughout the prequel trilogy, but it's Qui-Gon's straight-up explanation which proves the most egregious.
At least if midi-clhlorians as a concept weren't something so clearly defined, by removing this scene from The Phantom Menace, fans would have one less thing to complain about.