Why were the Star Wars prequels such a mess

First off, my favourite film is Return Of The Jedi, the Emperor torturing Luke was a powerful scene and Vader's inner conflict was interesting. My 2nd favourite is The Empire Strikes Back because of it's dark and gritty take on the Empire and another obvious reason, and my 3rd being A New Hope... Watching the Prequels I noticed massive flaws... -Hayden Christensen. Possibly the worst actor I've ever seen, has he ever heard of method acting? His acting is so stiff and has little emotion or feeling. And the way he presents the lines just sucked....Anakin Skywalker before the prequels was meant to be the fall of a great man. That great man never came, we got a whiney little emo boy. He just didn't act or develop. -Dialogue. Seriously, lines like "Ani, your breaking my heart" was truly WTF. -Anakin and Padme's chemistry. They had no chemistry, Leia and Han had chemistry by pretending to hate and resent it each other...it was magic. -Plot. The originals were simple, the prequels were too complicated. Like Attack of the Clones, Sidious planning the invasions and getting his own clones to attack his own droids? A legal invasion? It was too complicated. -Anakin's turn to the dark side was too rushed, honestly, maybe another movie (gulp) or make use of his development. -Make use of characters. Interesting characters such as Windu, Grevious and Maul were killed off to soon. On a side note, Christopher Lee and Ewan McGregor were fantastic.

I thought the prequels were okay...

agree 100% except for my favorites are:

Empire Strikes Back: awesome

Return of the Jedi: great- ewoks

A New Hope: Great- The only lightsaber duel was terrible

Revenge of the Sith: good- Anakin and Padame's acting, though it is not as bad as the other prequels (I feel like Natalie Portman probably hated the script she had to act out in the prequels)

Attack of the Clones: alright, would have been good except for this was when the lovers were at the peak of bad performance, just skip all those scenes though and you'll like this movie way more (good)

That which will not be named: You may just wanna skip this one and watch the Darth Maul lightsaber duel on Youtube instead

AAaaand to answer your question.... George Lucas likes money, he likes to make it, he likes to sell things, he likes to get the money from those things, he likes to rake it into a pile, and eat it out of a cereal bowl. Jar Jar Binks is proof of that. He did it purely for the kids... which is not necessarily a bad thing. But really he just wanted more kids to see the movie and he wanted to sell things with a comedic relief character. That is the key thing. The ewoks were the first time he did that and he did it with that movie too. In the beginning, making a good move was his main goal (the original trilogy) until he was enveloped in the media (Ewoks-JarJar) and then his main goal was to make a blockbuster (prequels). One thing he does not do with his money though... is spend it on a good actor for his lead role. I really don't know what he saw in Hayden or what he did with the script there.

I thought the twist that the storm troopers were created and they were all clones in Episode II was interesting, but the way it happened was so weird. There was a Jedi Knight (Sifo-Dyas, I believe his name was) who's mentioned, who makes the order on behalf of the Republic, ten years previous to the movie, behind-the-scenes, we never actually meet this Jedi or ever hear about him again after the scene. It was too ridiculous to even comprehend unless you actually went out of your way to research what the hell happened.

I never believed the romance between Anakin and Padme. I kept thinking about how much older she was supposed to be compared to him. She was what, like 16 or something in the first one, and he was 9 or 10? That was kind of strange to me that 10 years later, without having seen her in that time, Anakin's still dreaming about her and Padme's still holding onto feelings she had for a 10 year old when she's in her mid-to-late twenties. Didn't add up.

The events in Episode III felt just way too rushed also. They were really picking up the pace to tie it up with the old trilogy. I felt like they had introduced so many unnecessary details with the prequels to make it feel like it's own unique trilogy that the transition into the next one doesn't come off as smooth as it should.

I thought they were alright but i have to agree with above poster. George Lucas loves money and didn't show quite enough faith and consistency when writing those prequels. I loved Natalie Portman though.

@comicdude23: George Lucas did all the job, in the original trilogy, he let other guys do most of the work, for the same George bite more that what he could actually eat.

Hayden is a pretty good actor, he has at least 2 movies with great acting, saddly George dont know how to direct actors.

In que prequels he takes all the control, in the original trilogy, he lets the rest of people do their jobs.

I honestly believe Attack of The Clones has aged worse than Phantom Menace.

George Lucas is a fantastic director, but his writing skills (especially when it comes to believable, engaging dialogue) are a bit sub-par. A number of the iconic lines and scenes from the original trilogy owe their existence more to Irwin Kirschner than to Lucas (Han saying "I know" to Leia's "I love you," for instance; Lucas originally wanted Han to just say "I love you, too).

@Illuminatus said:

I've seen this video.

The prequels were a mess because noody challange george lucus. They didn't tell him all the stupid things that were wrong with the phantom menace. After watching this video a few days before, I never releasing how many things were wrong with this movie. This isn't worth your 15$, just go do something else with it.

They were good to me