Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 12 Reasons It's Better Than The Prequels

2. An Exciting And Simple Story

A movie without a good story to tell isn't much of a movie at all. It goes without saying that a film needs a plot to propel the characters into new action and different situations. The plots of the Star Wars prequel trilogy are not very strong. They are bogged down with boring political dialogue, disputes about trade, discussions about prophecies, but overall, not much actually happens. The prequels managed to strike an incredible balance between having a story that was convoluted, yet nothing of significance actually happened. The Phantom Menace is about discovering Anakin on Tatooine and a blockade on Naboo, and Attack of the Clones is concerned with an assassination attempt on Senator Amidala and the secret creation of a clone army. Nothing really happens until Anakin's fall to the dark side and the destruction of the Republic and the Jedi in Revenge Of The Sith, and even that is incredibly rushed. Overall, the dialogue scenes have such poor writing, unrealistic dialogue, unclear character motivations, and lazy camera work that it's clear that the writing was incredibly rushed and Lucas just wanted to get those scenes out of the way to get back to the action. In The Force Awakens, events of significance actually occur. Sure, the story is pretty derivative of A New Hope, but the story is simple enough that it works. Just the opening title crawl was a relief, with one of the most concise and clear summaries: Luke is missing, the First Order are the bad guys, the Resistance are the good guys, Leia sent a pilot to find Luke. Everything else that follows is a direct result of earlier scenes, and the movie moves at a very fast pace. There's never a moment to breathe, and for an action movie, that's not a bad thing.