5 Things The Star Wars Prequels Did Better Than The Force Awakens
1. Doing Something Different
There’s a reason why The Force Awakens has often been accused of having a very similar plot to A New Hope. It’s because it does. It represents a ‘back to basics’ approach; re-establishing the universe and setting the building blocks for an entirely new set of stories. It works well, and makes for a truly great film which also creates a lot of potential for the future.
The original trilogy was, and still is, considered a landmark is film-making. Its plot, its characters and its world were considered truly revolutionary, and inspired a great number of later films. It can therefore be considered quite daring, and really quite admirable, for George Lucas to scrap the formula that worked so well for him with his previous films and do something completely different when making the prequel trilogy.
There are similarities between them, naturally, but the stories told in the prequels are monumentally different in a vast number of ways. Perhaps too many, in fact.
The eternal struggle between the Empire, an incredibly powerful force, and the Rebel Alliance, a small but passionate guerrilla movement, was a riveting dynamic, somewhat continued by The Force Awakens. For the prequels, though, Lucas boldly reversed this dynamic.
The Jedi and the Republic are the incredibly powerful force, while the Sith are underground and re-gathering their strength, and the Separatists are incompetent at best. In the end, this dynamic may not work, but you have to respect the man for trying something different, even more so because he already had a formula that worked.
Much of what George Lucas tried failed. A good example of this is his dabbling in galactic politics; an interesting idea which was utterly dreadful in execution. He tried something different with the prequels, though, and in an industry when sameness and conformity are only growing stronger, you can’t take that away from him. The Force Awakens is much better, though.
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