Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 8 Things The Prequels Did Better

6. They Portray A Lived-In Universe

In the prequels, we see the Star Wars universe in a way we've never seen it before. We witness the vastness of the Galactic Republic, a sprawling underwater Gungan civilisation, the market settlement of Mos Espa, the metropolis of Coruscant, the swampland of Naboo... and that's just what we see in Episode I. Attack Of The Clones gives us the violent ocean planet of Kamino (complete with massive cloning facility) and the paradise of Naboo, inhabited by tons of alien wildlife, while Revenge Of The Sith ends on Mustafar, a scorching lava planet that's completely covered in bits of unfinished construction. How much more lived-in can you get? In The Force Awakens, we revert largely to the sparseness of the original trilogy. The most we see of any extended civilisation is a very brief clip before they're blown to smithereens by Starkiller Base. There's a Resistance who we barely know anything about, a desert planet with a tiny camp and... the bad guy's fortress. Hell, the most heavily populated place in the universe is apparently a bar on the planet Takodana, where we meet one of the film's key players Maz Kanata and learn approximately nothing about her. The prequels felt like they were showing off slices of a massive world, whereas The Force Awakens feels like there's nothing beyond the boundaries of what we can actually see.