Star Wars: 10 Huge Problems No One Wants To Admit About The Jedi

The Prequel Trilogy was widely slated for its wooden dialogue and its lack of fully fleshed out characters. Compared to the friendly banter that ran throughout the Original Trilogy (and was thankfully reignited during the Sequels), a number of Prequel Trilogy characters seemed wooden and flat, and this is most obvious in the Jedi Council itself.

Ki Adi Mundi, Kit Fisto, Plo Koon and a number of other forgettable Jedi sit around the Council muttering a few lines of dialogue between them, each a complete waste of cool and original designs which seem more oriented to selling toys than developing their characters further.

But it's not just these background characters who are personality vacuums, as even important Jedi couldn't escape being flattened by George Lucas' pen. Samuel Jackson does his best to portray Mace Windu as a badass but he's not given much to work with, and even the spiritual and mysterious Yoda from the Original Trilogy is rendered soulless in Episodes I through III. The witty and sarcastic Obi-Wan is better characterised in The Clone Wars than the movies, but even in the Prequel films he has more personality than the rest of the Jedi put together.

While these wooden Jedi are not at all entertaining to watch, this is probably, to some extent, the point. The Prequel Trilogy is quite overt about the hubris of the Jedi facilitating Palpatine's rise to power. Lucas takes the opportunity, however, to demonstrate that the Jedi were not only harmful for the galaxy at large, but posed a more intimate threat to its individual members, each of whom lose their individuality as they blend into the collective face of the monastic Jedi Order.