10 Reasons You’re Wrong About The Star Wars Prequels

3. They Pioneered A New Aesthetic

Star Wars Dusk Coruscant
Lucasfilm

Not to begrudge the Sequel Trilogy - which, with the obvious exception of Episode IX, is genuinely strong - there is a lot to be said about aesthetics and how those films were found wanting in bringing a new kind of Star Wars to the fore.

There are obvious reasons for this - the fact they take place after the Original Trilogy being one of them. But they feel derivative - comfortable, even. They're tapping into a version of Star Wars that everyone knows and loves.

The prequels, by contrast, pioneered a whole new kind of aesthetic to contrast with the rougher, carbon scored edges of the original films. They're sleek, extravagant, and while the iconic designs seen in Episodes IV, V and VI are foreshadowed greatly throughout, they present an image of Star Wars that was fresh and exciting, and unquestionably alien-like.

Lucas, his concept artists and his costume and set designers struck a chord balancing the familiar with the unfamiliar in the prequels - a lesson Lucasfilm is currently applying to the upcoming High Republic initiative, which takes place a few hundred years before The Phantom Menace.

Content Producer/Presenter

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.