When denial and anger have run their course, there’s always bargaining. Since Star Wars fans are such a creative bunch, everyone disappointed by the prequels has shared this thought: I could have done better. Arguments over exactly how each prequel movie could have been made better have been raging in bedrooms, dorm rooms, and coffee shops for years. Monday-morning quarterbacking is fun, up to a point—but this is Monday through Sunday morning quarterbacking, and it doesn’t look as if it’s ever going to end.
The poster boy for bargaining over the prequels is Michael Barryte, a twenty-six-year-old YouTube star from Los Angeles. Like Stoklasa, Barryte is a film school graduate—from UCLA, Coppola’s alma mater—but he’s younger and way more upbeat in his outlook. Barryte was a child actor on Nickelodeon when he was in high school and played the young Jerry Seinfeld in an HBO special; he still has the excitable voice and wide-eyed shotgun delivery of a children’s TV presenter. When Episode I came out, Barryte was twelve—no bitter old fogey he. But there were things that soon grew to bother him and his friends about the movie, such as the fact that it really seemed as if it should have been Obi-Wan’s story and that Darth Maul’s death wasted a perfectly good villain. In 2012, Lucasfilm rereleased The Phantom Menace, this time in 3-D. Barryte, who ran what was then a minor movie-focused YouTube channel called Belated Media, wanted to do a video review that focused only on the elements he liked. “Plinkett is skewering and deconstruction, and it’s remarkable,” Barryte says. “But I didn’t just want to pan the film. Nobody goes to a movie to be disappointed. I’ve been trying to skew more positive.”
It turned out there simply weren’t enough elements he liked to base a review on, though, so instead Barryte let his imagination roam through a slightly altered version of the movie. The resulting video is called “What If Episode I Were Good?” It took a year for it to go viral, but viral it went; it has now been seen more than two million times. Barryte’s channel went from five thousand to a hundred thousand subscribers. His new fans began clamoring for a follow-up, “What If Episode II Were Good?,” which Barryte, more of a movie fan than specifically a Star Wars fan, had never intended to make. In 2013, he relented. The result got another million views in the space of a week, and Barryte began to be bombarded with emails from fans with their own alternate script ideas. “I unknowingly swatted the biggest hornet’s nest in fandom,” he says. (He’s still working on his Episode III video.)
Barryte’s is an infectious alternate vision of Episode I—and unlike much of the Monday-morning quarterbacking, it is an elegant proposition with as few changes to the movie as possible. In Barryte’s telling, Jar Jar Binks is removed altogether, though the Gungans remain. Obi-Wan is moved to the foreground, becoming the protagonist, but his master, Qui-Gon, is still present. Anakin is brought up in age, and Qui-Gon can simply sense the Force is strong with him, rather than testing him for midi-chlorians. Padmé flirts with Obi-Wan, who later saves her life—diverting him from the lightsaber battle with Darth Maul. Maul kills Qui-Gon and survives, setting up Obi-Wan to hunt Maul down in later movies. Yoda is largely absent from the Jedi Council, creating a sense of mystery around the character. Palpatine becomes a functionary who mediates between the Jedi Council and the Senate, a role that gives him more strings to pull. And that is pretty much it. Barryte speedily recounts the scenes that follow logically from these decisions, with plenty of jump-cuts and visual gags to keep us entertained as we walk through the land of Might Have Been.
But of course, the Star Wars that might have been wasn’t. This is the ultimate problem with the bargaining stage of grief: at some point, the fantasy has to collapse, and we experience the pain of the prequels all over again. Everyone has their preferences; everyone carries their own version of Star Wars in their heads. Expanded Universe author Timothy Zahn hated the midi-chlorian concept of the Force: “I hope that it will be dropped,” he said in 2000, in vain as it turned out (midi-chlorians were mentioned again in Revenge of the Sith). Even Kyle Newman, prequel defender, would have had one actor and one actor only play Anakin throughout the prequels.
The fictional Mr. Plinkett, at least, accepts the reality of what happened in the prequels. “Perhaps the worst thing about them is that they will be around forever,” he says in deathly monotone at the very beginning of his Phantom Menace review. “They will never go away. They can never be undone.”
All thinking Star Wars fans must at some point wrestle with the significant gap between the shining, perfect idea of Star Wars and its sometimes less than perfect execution. The most passionate fans are often the most perfectionist, so they wrestle with this problem a lot, and this can lead them to the penultimate stage of Star Wars grief: depression. Nobody can say how widespread a condition prequel depression is, but remember those Darth Vader YouTube parodies I mentioned back in Chapter 9? The most viewed of all is “The Star Wars That I Used to Know” (15 million views), a parody of Gotye’s monster 2012 hit which feature Vader singing to George Lucas. (“No you didn’t have to make them blow. . . . What happened to the Star Wars that I used to know.”)
No fan wants this state of mind; it just descends on them—not so much like the Dark Side of the Force but more like the version of the Dark Side that Lucas conceived during the second draft of Star Wars: the Bogan Force. When you’re struck with the Bogan as that early version of Han Solo was, you too have to drive it from your mind. Otherwise you find yourself in the garbage masher with a line of thought that might go something like this:
It’s no use trying to love Star Wars the way you once did. You can’t go home again; you can’t find the spirit of 1977 except in history books. We’re know-it-alls now, as the Navajo Nation’s Manny Wheeler put it. The Internet is filled with us. We’re too ready to throw our peanuts from the gallery and loudly opine on the nearest social media soapbox about what we would do differently. No one can just enjoy a sunset, so no one can successfully tell an epic, nonironic story any more; we lose the ability to be enraptured as teenagers. We gave in to hate. We got the prequels we deserved. We should accept that this was just diverting doggerel for children; its Creator couldn’t come up with enough new ideas, so made movies that rhymed with the predecessors. This is the fate of all creators and all creative endeavors: they get tired; they get repetitive. The whole Joseph Campbell monomyth thing was just a pretentious layer self-consciously applied by Lucas in the 1980s and agreed upon by a society that was so desperate for escapism, so enamored with newfangled special effects, that it placed three movies on a pedestal that nothing else could reach, when really they were on rickety foundations to begin with. The only solution is to give up on Star Wars altogether and commit ourselves. Let us sell the Star Wars figures in the attic. Let us put away childish things.
If that’s the way you’re thinking by this point in the chapter, if you’ve hit rock bottom in prequel grief, then perhaps it’s time for a come-to-Jesus moment—or a come-to-the-Force moment, if you prefer. Let me introduce you to a good old-fashioned revival preacher.
Acceptance is the hardest stage of the grieving process, but also the most crucial. Only by understanding the prequel movies the way they are—not the way they might have been—can fans hope to move on and find peace in their perception of the franchise.
I wanted to see the prequels the way defenders saw them. So I turned to Bryan Young, Star Wars blogger (at StarWars.com, among other places), podcaster, and one of the smartest and most reliable defenders of the prequels on the planet. When Phantom Menace came out, Young had just graduated high school and waited in line for thirty days at his theater in Utah. Unlike the rest of the guys in line, he actually worked at the theater and was able to see the movie seventy more times. His son was born immediately after Clones; Young named him Anakin.
A solid-looking guy with an utterly unflappable demeanor, Young moderated a few “Why We Love the Prequels” panels at conventions. And he has done what no one else, to my knowledge, has dared: one drunken night at a Celebration in 2012, he defended
the prequels in person to Jake Lloyd, the actor who played Anakin Skywalker in Episode I. Lloyd quit acting after that movie; now, in his early twenties, he bears an unambiguous, sneering disdain for the film, for which he was hounded throughout high school and college. Young didn’t exactly succeed in winning Lloyd over to the prequels; Lloyd simply disengaged when he found out the name of Young’s son, and later unfriended him Facebook.
I sat down with Young for several hours and craft beers in his hometown, Salt Lake City, and told him I was going to play devil’s advocate. I was going to hit him with every problem anyone ever had with the first three movies, every question I could come up with. He nodded stoically. “Dealing with prequel hate is my specialty,” he said. Ladies and gentlemen: Bryan Young, Star Wars therapist.
To begin, then: the dialogue. It was uniformly dreadful throughout Episodes I to III, right? To my surprise, Young didn’t disagree. “George Lucas is not a writer,” he said simply, and of course the Creator himself has said as much. Then how, I asked, are we to take the dialogue—as an intentional, humorous pastiche of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers? Young nodded sagely: “I have to take it that way if I’m going to enjoy the movies.”
For the kind of fan who needs in-universe reasons for things, Young has one of those explanations for their stilted dialogue, too. These three films deal mostly with aristocrats and politicians, queens and senators, the high-falutin’ Jedi Council. To hear how that kind of person talks in the original trilogy, listen to Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin. “They do talk in that really stilted faux-Victorian style the prequels are permeated with,” Young said. “Only there isn’t a Han Solo character to come in and roll his eyes at everything and sound cool. That kind of character doesn’t exist in the prequels because we’re in a different world. You’re dealing with royalty. In the classic trilogy, you’re dealing with every farmboy and shitkicker in the galaxy.”
Ah, but there was one prominent member of the unsophisticated class: Jar Jar Binks. Surely there was no defense for this prattling, insufferable addition to the Star Wars canon? Again, Young was disarming: he found Jar Jar “totally obnoxious” just like the rest of us. “It took me a while to come around to why he was in the story,” he said. It wasn’t until he was watching an episode of Clone Wars with his daughter, who was eight at the time, in which Jar Jar featured; she declared that Star Wars wasn’t Star Wars without Jar Jar. “He’s supposed to speak to the kids and be obnoxious to everybody else,” Young explained. “He’s obnoxious to all the other characters. The moral of the story is you have to put up with these annoying people sometimes. You still have to treat them with dignity and respect. Every life has value.”
It’s hard to argue with that defense of Jar Jar, and it certainly beats the argument I’d heard from Lucas on stage at Celebration—that contemporary viewers hated Threepio in the original movies just as much as they did Jar Jar in the prequels. (That’s a false equivalence if ever I heard one.) Regarding Young contemplatively over our beers, I began to think Lucasfilm should hire him to go on the road and evangelize: an old-time prequel preacher.
As devil’s advocate, it was time to take the gloves off. How about the casting of Hayden Christensen as Anakin in Attack of the Clones, I asked him? Surely Young didn’t buy Anakin’s painfully whiny attempts to romance Padmé in that movie? Turns out he did. “He isn’t any more or less whiny than Mark Hamill in Episode IV,” he said (and it wasn’t hard to tell what line Young was thinking about: “But I was going to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!”*).
Christensen acted appropriately for the situation he was in, Young believes. “Think about it: you’re a celibate monk who doesn’t know how to deal with a girl, and all of a sudden you’re thrust into a situation with probably the most attractive woman in the galaxy. You’re going to act like an idiot and talk even stupider. Can you remember the first thing you said to a girl as a teenager? Was it any better than ‘I don’t like sand, it’s rough, coarse, irritating, and it gets everywhere’?”
I conceded that it was not.
When Young does take issue with the prequels, it tends to be over the kind of thing you only notice after you’ve watched each movie dozens of times—such as the few scenes in Attack of the Clones where Ewan McGregor, filmed in pickup months after the original shoot, wears a fake beard that’s glued on like a toupee. Young doesn’t see what I see in much of McGregor’s performance: boredom and barely disguised contempt. Maybe, just maybe, that perception vanishes when you’ve watched these movies as many times as Young has. “Nostalgia and familiarity are two things people don’t attach to the prequels,” he said. “If they did, they’d like them more. Think about it: by the time Episode I came out, how many times had you seen Episode IV?”
I admitted that I’d worn out my dad’s VHS tape of Star Wars back in 1983 and stopped counting after I’d seen it fifty times.
“There you go,” Young said. “Part of the feeling of watching a Star Wars movie is knowing it inside and out. I saw Episode I seven times over that first weekend, and I guarantee I liked it more the seventh time than the first.”
The more he watched the prequels, the more parallels between the trilogies Young found. He saw and heard that rhyming Lucas kept talking about, and he liked it. Anakin’s and Luke’s journeys started to mirror each other. Both ignore their training in their second movie because of their emotional attachments, for example. When Young heard about Machete Order, he embraced it, but reinserted Episode I, and now enthuses about how much it enhances the rhyming. You see Anakin’s fall in its entirety after Empire Strikes Back; then the first time you see Luke in Return of the Jedi, he’s dressed all in black and choking pig guards in Jabba’s Palace. You can’t help but wonder: has he fallen like his father? “The prequels enhance the experience of the classic films so much it’s disgusting,” Young says.
We went on for hours like this. Young handled everything I threw at him. The fact that the dirty “Used Universe” style seems to vanish in the prequels, to the point where historically inept reviewers chided Lucas for shunning the grime of Alien or Blade Runner? That just makes it clear how much of a mess the Empire has made of the galaxy by the time we get to Episode IV. Midichlorians in the bloodstream? They just showed that the Jedi were spending way too much time studying, over-intellectualizing everything. Young came out with the responses so readily, so naturally, that it was clear he wasn’t just rationalizing. He genuinely believes in the prequels, as do millions more—whether they feel comfortable admitting it in public or not.
I may never be able to watch Episodes I–III without wincing, or perhaps playing them on mute with John Williams in the background. But I have finally made my peace with them. The novelizations of each movie are helping in this process: in those, at least, there are no worries about wooden dialogue or poor acting. Legendary fantasy author Terry Brooks clearly enjoyed himself turning Phantom Menace into prose (he called it a “dream project”). Brooks’s literary version of Jar Jar is a sympathetic exiled Gungan who just wants to make things right with his people. Matthew Woodring Stover’s interpretation of Revenge of the Sith is a minor classic, much beloved by fans; it fleshes out much of Anakin’s motivation that was missing from the movie. Other entries in the Expanded Universe also have the benefit of resolving flaws and absences in the prequels. That whole “Sifo-Dyas” plot hole is tied up in the 2005 novel Labyrinth of Evil. The “tragedy of Darth Plagueis,” the story Palpatine tells Anakin at the opera in Episode III (but which he leaves tantalizingly sketchy), was fleshed out into novel form in 2012’s Darth Plagueis.
In short, if you want to find a new angle on the prequels, they are there for the taking. You could, for example, consider the possibility that there were actually two ideas of Star Wars. One idea belonged to us, the audience, and it was of a believable universe of cheerable heroes and hissable villians, one that transfigured in the retelling into something darker, weightier, more mythological, more adult. We saw Sergio Leone in a de
sert landscape, when it was really only that desolate because the Creator didn’t have the budget to properly populate it. And this was fine.
Then there was the other idea of Star Wars—the Creator’s idea. It was always a little bit goofier, and a lot more stuffed with wacky aliens and Land-of-Zoom spaceships. It was Flash Gordon fan fiction intended for children and our inner children. And this too was fine. And if you just can’t appreciate the prequel movies or rationalize them away, does that make you any less of a Star Wars fan? Certainly not—just so long as you’re the live-and-let-live type. “Star Wars is a buffet,” Young says. “Take what you want, and leave the rest for everyone else. You don’t put your finger in the mashed potatoes if you don’t like them.”
If it helps, consider the prequels are as effectively one long shaggy dog story. Anakin Skywalker is supposed to “bring balance to the Force,” the meaning of which seems blithely accepted by the Jedi Council but little explained. Yoda and company simply seem to believe that the prophecy means something good. But after the prequels, so far as we know, there are two Jedi left in the galaxy (Obi-Wan and Yoda) and two Sith (Palpatine and Vader). That’s balance, right?*
The prequels thus become a fable with a moral, and the moral is: don’t believe everything that’s foretold. For example, don’t believe a filmmaker who says there will never, ever be any more Star Wars movies, period.
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* Pegg also says Lucas offered him this advice at the London premiere of Episode III: “don’t suddenly find yourself making the same film you made thirty years ago.”
* Lucasfilm confirmed to me that Lucas has no interest in watching The Phantom Edit.
* It was around this time, in the 2004 documentary Empire of Dreams, that Lucas started comparing his life story to that of Darth Vader’s: a man trapped in the Lucasfilm machine.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 52