10 Reasons You’re Wrong About The Star Wars Prequels

1. They Had An Actual Plan

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy Prequels
Lucasfilm / Drew Struzan

Trying to find consensus when it comes to Star Wars is near enough impossible so it's probably worth clarifying my own position on the Sequel Trilogy before getting into this. The Force Awakens? Great, if not a little derivative. The Last Jedi? Superb. The Rise of Skywalker? Well... not so much.

But if there was one thing most fans would be able to agree on regarding the sequels, it's that they suffered from a lack of planning.

There was no cohesive vision that bound The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker together, with Lucasfilm instead allowing each film to be developed independent of the other. This approach worked with the Original Trilogy - which benefitted from having a variety of filmmakers at the table - but the end result this time around was a slapdash finale that spent so much time undoing what the previous effort accomplished, it ended up rupturing the foundations of the saga altogether.

The prequels, by contrast, did have a plan. They were shepherded by George Lucas from beginning to end, and he told the story he wanted to tell. Was it flawed? Absolutely. But it was harmonious as opposed to dissonant. Everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet, and, at the end of the day, there's a lot to be said about seeing that one vision - as messy as it could sometimes be - unfurl over the course of three films.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.