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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darrin Drader" data-source="post: 2097398" data-attributes="member: 7394">I'm going to agree with you to a point. When I went back and watched AotC recently, it struck me that the period Lucas was showing in many ways mirrored our own history at the beginning of World War I. At that time, people believed that society as a whole was enlightened and striving towards great progress (the reality may not have reflected this, but idealistic socialites rarely concern themselves with the plight of the working folk who put money in their pockets). Industrialization was seen as a good thing, and no one even conceived of the horror that would be WWI, WWII, or the nuclear bomb. Going into WWI, people thought they would go out, fight their enemy, and be home by supper. It was the first modern war, and it was more terrible than anything they had ever seen before. There was a definite naivety on the part of almost everyone involved, and had they known that it would become an extremely costly war of attrition, both warring alliances would probably have worked out a peaceful solution. I think that there are some definite parallels between that period and the period in the prequels.  In addition to this, Lucas definitely wanted to show how Palpatine did not steal his power, it was willingly given to him. Its a commentary on how governments work, and how people are ruled. Lucas has a pretty good grasp of Machiavellian thought when it comes right down to it, and should serve as a cautionary allegory for what might happen in the free countries of the real world. While the political aspects of the story are not nearly as entertaining as the swashbuckling of the original trilogy, it does setup the back story upon which the original was built. Lucas himself said that the reason he started with IV, V, and VI was because he felt that they were more a entertaining story. Given that this is what he thought in the beginning, it should come as no surprise that the prequels aren't being received as well as they could be. He just isn't telling the same type of story. Despite this, I agree that he could have done a better job with the directing, the pacing, and the characterizations. Jar Jar and pod racing ruined TPM for me (as if the title itself wasn't bad enough), and there were some story elements that probably should have been scrutinized a bit before being committed to film. All in all, they're OK movies that could have been better, but they also could have been far, far worse.</blockquote>

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