As I mentioned earlier, George Lucas having too much control with the prequels hurt those films, although by Episode III, you could tell he was becoming aware of some of the flaws with the other two films. That being said, I don't dislike the prequels. I actually like Revenge of the Sith better than Return of the Jedi, which I felt was rather weak compared to Empire Strikes Back. However, there is another problem that I didn't bing up yet and I'm not sure if anyone else did.
Despite the myth surrounding the original Star Wars trilogy, it was not this epic story that was planned out into three parts from the beginning. After all, both the astroid chase scene from Empire Strikes Back and the Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi was supposed to be in A New Hope. This didn't happen because it was impossible so Lucas saved those ideas for a potential sequel. However, he also didn't know if the first movie would do well enough for a sequel to happen. Because of this, the first three movies were made to be complete films within themselves, although one could argue that even during the making of the second one, they kind of knew a third one was going to happen. With the prequel trilogy, they knew how many movies there were going to be and how to connect the dots. As a result, you got movies that didn't necessarily feel like complete movies but instead felt like serials. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, it meant that the quality of the storytelling for each movie wasn't the same as the originals.
In the end, there's no way this could have been avoided. Star Wars was a poorly thought out, poorly planned series of movies. This includes the original trilogy with those promotional images of Princess Leia clutching on to the thigh of the man who would turn out to be her brother. With this new trilogy, they might be better off since the entire series now takes place after all the other movies already happened.
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