JournalOfDecline

They fail at being epic operas even more than they fail at realism. The writing and acting is mostly flat and boring. Same goes for the cinematography. There’s nothing operatic about it. Epic perhaps in theory but certainly not in execution. You guys have created a version of the Star Wars prequels in your heads (a version that sounds pretty interesting, if only it existed) and have grafted it onto the actual films which in reality fail at whatever they were trying to do, unless they were trying to be verbose, clumsy, wooden, and bland. It’s very clear to the rest of us that the people trying to rehab the Star Wars prequels are just nostalgic for something that they enjoyed as kids. That’s fine. I have a nostalgic attachment to some crappy 90s movies like Independence Day for example. It came out when I was 10 and at the time it seemed to me like the greatest cinematic achievement in history. But then I grew up and I can now see that Will Smith punching an alien and saying “welcome to earf” is not a high point of western art. And that’s fine. It’s stupid but I still remember it fondly. You don’t have to try so hard to intellectualize some dumb bullshit you liked when you were a kid. It’s okay. It can just be dumb bullshit, which it is.