I love the saga as a whole, but specifically, I do love the themes & the PT’s feel. Destruction of gilded institutions and ages that are problematic & corrupt? Here for it. When people slag the PT for political meandering, idc bc that’s why I’m here tbh. It feels relevant for me as someone who is suspicious of the West’s, and America’s, imperialism, America’s politics, its neoliberalism, its militarism, and its institutions. The Republic becoming the Empire from the inside out? Here for it. The corruption of the republic and the jedi being reflected in its militarism and its neoliberalism? Yessss.
The OT is a far more classic tale and I love it and it does touch on imperialism and it’s needed as parts of a whole saga but it’s not perfect and I side-eye anyone who think it is. Is the PT perfect? lol no. I have more than few issues with script choices, even though I’m more forgiving on acting because I got what the formalized speak was trying to do. I don’t know – I’m Indian and a Bollywood fan so I’m fairly used to acting styles that jive more with old Hollywood styles than modern acting styles. And, plenty of people, especially Westerners, call that bad acting too, so. Anyways, there are a lot of questions raised in the PT, a lot of deconstruction of previously gilded institutions like the Jedi, and there is a lot of worth in those movies that elevate it.
Tbh, it’s the themes in the PT that probably have kept me here and kept me pondering and kept me thinking. I’d probably have moved on to another fandom otherwise. Classic tales of good and evil are great but maybe it’s the age at which I watched it, I dunno, I like moral greying, I like ambiguity, I like political drama, and I like destruction and deconstruction of gilded institutions and characters. I like the themes it introduced that made the OT more poignant and made Luke’s choices even more powerful. I love the deconstruction of Vader’s persona as a badass ubermensch. He was actually weak and human, victimized and enslaved, the oppressed who became the oppressor, and it shows that he was deferring to authority figures his entire life.
The ideas of identity and personhood raised in the PT make the OT and what happens in the OT more powerful. It makes Luke’s climactic choice in ROTJ (which is probably my favorite moment in all six films) where he chooses and carves a path that defers to no authority, where he models how to make an independent choice free of the Jedi or the Sith, where compassion (Anakin calls this unconditional love in Ep. II) is the hand that guides him even more compelling when we know the faults and flaws of what came before Luke. Luke is the truest of the Jedi here – I love the Jedi and their dysfunction but compassion as a guiding force? They see slavery and ignore it, they are detached and completely out of touch with the the people, and they become soldiers subsumed to the will of a corrupt body of government.
There’s tons more reasons, but I feel bad for butting in to rant, so I’m going to go. But, really, there are a lot of fans who feel the same. Like, I feel bad for even separating the six movies because it’s hard for me to see it as separate, but after years of constantly hearing how the PT sucked, you make mental laundry lists of why you love it and sometimes, maybe that comes off as placing the PT and the OT in a binary against each other and that’s not true, for me at least.