Caffeinated Opinion

The Star Wars prequels are quite brilliant in the Macro - as a bullet-pointed story outline - about how a weak, sclerotic democracy fails to contain an erupting civil war that transitions the same regime into full military despotism, and one sensitive young man's foretold Nietzschean destiny within it. It's thrilling stuff. It fails in the tactical micro - the script, the casting, the characters, the CGI, the raw filmmaking. But a 90s kids movie is also the wrong cultural atmosphere to execute that story. The original Star Wars succeeded because it landed at precisely the right cultural moment. People were sick of the dry 1960s cynicism, and "Star Wars" was the shepherd that ushered in the fun, imaginitive, and optimistic 1980s. The movies would have been much better had they been done post-GWOT. If they landed today, for young zoomer men, made with the same quality and atmosphere of Andor, they would be legendary films that surpass the OT in cultural impact. You can see Lucas is a very intelligent and erudite man who was likely inspired by reading about the Weimar Republic in his writings for episode 1. That's why, despite the movies not being very good overall, they are excellent meme content decades later. The late 90s - early 00s just weren't ready for them. What the hell is a "trade dispute" in a pre-China, pre-Hormuz world? At the time, nobody understood.