I’ve been saying for a long time that the Star Wars prequels deserve a lot more credit than they receive, not just from fans but from the film world at large.  While you may dislike choices George Lucas has made in his making of the prequels, it’s pretty arrogant to feel that there are no redeeming (and indeed brilliant) qualities behind each of the Star Wars movies.

Over at the LA Times’ Hero Complex, Kevin McLeod, makes a case for the prequels that I’ve been saying for a long time.  Star Wars is poetry on some level and the prequels are the dark early verses that are ryhmed with and riffed on in the classic trilogy.

I would say that his essay is required reading for anyone interested in the language of cinema, doubly so for Star Wars fans. And that goes for fans on both sides of the line of the prequels.

The idea that each concept and idea in the prequel trilogy is a mirror of things that come later is not a new idea, but McLeod boils it down in a way that is much more scholarly than I might be capable of.

One of the points I often raise when I speak of the prequels fits nicely into his theory of pattern cognition and that is the matching trials of Anakin and Luke in Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back, respectively.

Each of them is on their own and have terrible visions about their loved ones being in harms way and step outside the wisdom of their masters in order to confront that.  True, the consequences are exceedingly different for their actions, but having Anakin go through it in Clones makes Luke’s trials that much more riveting in Empire.  Try putting yourself in the shoes of a viewer who has never seen Star Wars and is watching it for the first time 1-6.  Then imagine watching Luke making all of the same mistakes his father did and I defy you not to feel that the ending of The Empire Strikes Back and the beginning of Return of the Jedi is that much more harrowing.

At the end of the day, you don’t have to like the prequels, but it would be nice to see some intellectual honesty in people so they can admit when the prequels did something right.