The Jedi Council in the Prequels was Supposed to be Frustrating
Just watched a review of the prequels, and the complaint was made that the movie was bad because the Jedi Council was awful, that they were “d*cks” who did nothing. I was stupefied; that’s one of the better aspects of the prequels! The Jedi were stagnant, arrogant, and narrow-minded. This contributed to their fall. Of course Yoda was awful; he was supposed to be awful! He was supposed to be old and set in his ways. It’s nothing new; he called Luke “too old” as well. The hints of the truth of the arrogance of the old Jedi Order is in the OT. Why are you complaining about something in the prequels that is actually done fairly well? Why?
#they complain because they wanted them#to be what Obi-Wan promised #they’re supposed to be#Guardians of peace & justice #why are they actually just dicks#the good guys are supposed to be stalwart and pure#now we have to empathize with Anakin #and he’s just supposed to be pure evil (Tags by @redrikki)
This makes sense, I suppose, but wasn’t what you described the whole point of the prequels? That Darth Vader had once been a nice guy, and a very good friend to Obi-Wan? (Who is a very biased narrator…) But Anakin fell to the Dark Side, and was lost? Ergo, it is a tragedy, because a good person became something truly evil? I mean, if we don’t even sympathise with the man, why are we going to rejoice (twice-over) when Luke saves him? Moreover, totalitarian dictatorships have historically, consistently come out of chaos due to poor economic and/or governmental systems. Therefore, it can hardly be surprising that the Empire came out of a time of distinct arrogance and moral greyness. The logic, to me, is truly baffling: They may loathe the prequels for not being what they expected…but then what were they expecting?
What were people expecting? Lucas addressed this:
“Well, when I said I was going to do the prequels, everybody said, ‘That’s great, we get to see Darth Vader kill everybody.’ And I said, ‘That’s not the story.’ When I announced that the first story was going to be about a nine-year-old boy, everybody here said, ‘That’s insane, you’re going to destroy the whole franchise […] And I said, ‘Yeah, but this is the story.’ ” —George Lucas
and:
“People expected Episode III, which is where Anakin turns into Darth Vader, to be Episode I. And then they expected Episodes II and III to be Darth Vader going around cutting people’s heads off and terrorizing the universe. But how did he get to be Darth Vader? You have to explore him in relationships, and you have to see where he started.” —George Lucas
To those of us who actually love and appreciate the Prequels as they are, it may sound nuts, but so many fans back then legitimately expected (or perhaps just wanted) those films to be about ‘Darth Vader’ *as* Vader, and to just show him hunting down the Jedi the whole time. Far too many fanboys just wanted to see Vader being a ‘badass’ on-screen, while still maybe having a smattering of cool Jedi heroes to mindlessly root for. For some reason, many viewers had missed the entire point of RotJ and didn’t seem to realise that Anakin Skywalker was a good person and someone for whom we were supposed to feel pity and empathy. So they couldn’t understand why we were being shown his childhood and why the Jedi were being so harsh and cold to him. Surely it must just be because he was 'evil all along or something’, no way we might actually be meant to be question the Jedi’s treatment of him…🙄
