Star Wars fandom's relationship with the prequels is not dissimilar to that of Anakin's with the Dark Side; to paraphrase Yoda in Episode I, disappointment leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to cries of underrated. Now before you click away, we're not here to really defend or criticize the prequels - that's been pretty much done to death by this point - but instead look at a very strange resurgence in the once poster child of cynical moviemaking.

It has for the longest time been an accepted fact that they're bad, a single point of agreement in the debate-loving movie community. Everyone hates the Star Wars prequels, almost as much as Anakin Skywalker hates sand.

Except they don’t. Bring up pod racing, Dexter Jettster or younglings in online conversation today and you’ll find the vitriol that for the better part of two decades has dominated discussion of The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith has seemingly dissipated, or at the very least chilled. Rogue One featured settings and characters from movies long-derided to great excitement. Perennial punching bag Jar Jar Binks' story was resolved and nobody was shouting obscenities. Hayden Christensen appeared at Star Wars Celebration to a standing ovation. The Star Wars prequels are, for lack of a better word, cool. And not just in an ironic, underrated way. How did this happen?

The Millennial's Star Wars

The Phantom Menace teaser poster.

This was, to a point, always inevitable. One of the major defenses of the prequels was that Lucas was returning Star Wars to children – not the children who grew up with the films in the 1980s, but the next generation – and if this was true, eventually those 1990s kids would grow up with a strong appreciation of Episodes I-III.

And that pretty much has happened. There’s an entire subculture of fans who grew up with Star Wars as six movies of indeterminable comparable quality; a cohesive saga amplified by a litany of era-jumping expanded material. They preach their love and, in doing so, many more raised to hate the prequels have found their hidden depths and learned to unironically appreciate the more kitsch elements. You’ll see this subculture most prominently in the usual internet ephemera, with memes; subreddit /r/PrequelMemes has grown from less than 1,000 users at the start of 2017 to almost 250,000 at the time of writing. In the newest internet controversy, WatchMojo changed the title of a prequel-bashing video after a slew of downvotes - but there’s a mature side to this too.

Nostalgia belongs to those with the defining culture voice. On the internet, that voice is fractured and twisted but typically comes from those aged 25-35. Today, on the lower extremity of that, you have those who were children when the prequels came out and possibly first experienced the galaxy far, far away with Anakin, rather than Luke. So, just as ten years ago the likes of Ghostbusters and Back to the Future – films that in 2017 are still universally accepted as greats but not readily raised touchstones – were the peak of throwback culture, now it’s shifting to The Matrix and, yes, Star Wars.

We’ve seen an increase of in-depth analysis surrounding the prequels, specifically its defenses, in recent years. It used to be simple statements of how good John Willaims’ score was and the innate awesomeness of the lightsaber duels, but now we have near-academic level theses like Ring Theory that probe the films' narrative and thematic depths. There’s even a fair millennial response to the definitive backlash documentary The People Vs. George Lucas in the form of The Prequels Strike Back. Regardless of how far some ideas push it (the movies are far from flawless), through these, it’s become apparent of a larger vision and appreciation behind the prequels.

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Darth Vader cries out in Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith

They're No Longer The Final Word

But that’s one generation, and as much as a thirty-something fan whose first cinema experience was Return of the Jedi may get a chuckle from Palpatine (or Sheev, as the prequel fandom dictates) declaring himself the Senate or noticing the reverse ascending narratives of Clones and Empire, that’s not enough for them to suddenly forgive George Lucas.

Prequel hate is strong for Generation X, no two ways about it. It was born of disappointment with Episode I and slowly developed into something more incensed as bad dialogue, heavy CGI and a generally distanced tone piled up in the later entries. There was a sense that in being so cack-handed, the three films had "ruined" Star Wars and - while it’s a trite and hyperbolic phrase to trot out - their childhood.

But then along came Disney to "fix" it. The new era of Star Wars films is two very important things – plainly, it's good, with massive critical and commercial praise that directly creates excitement for the future, and it feels like Star Wars. People burned by the prequels’ politics now have films they always wanted – so far a rollicking reunion and gritty direct prequel – which oddly has the side effect of nullifying some of the prequel hate. In retrospect, so much of the backlash was to do with representation and the fact that Lil' Ani was the definitive young Darth Vader, and that James Earl Jones screaming "Noooo" was the series' final cinematic word; it wasn't that the films were just viewed as bad, it's that they were a bad end. Now there's new, good Star Wars that no longer stands, so there’s less need for resentment.

Prequel hate would have worn down naturally eventually as most people realized that in the grand scheme of things Jar Jar Binks doesn’t really matter – People vs. Lucas was preaching that conclusion in 2010 – but the Disney era accelerated that. And the moment you get Episodes I-III on a basic non-plussed level, then you’re open to the millennial hype and, more importantly, reevaluation.

Have We Reevaluated The Prequels?

Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker and Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith

What really solidified prequel hate and allowed it to grow was a rise in explorative media and the prominence of that analysis over the movies themselves. Much of this gravitates around the Mr. Plinkett reviews from Red Letter Media, feature-length takedowns of each of the three films that cover their failures from filmmaking basics to Star Wars lore. They’re so prolific that after their releases in the late-2000s the vocabulary used by prequel haters when taking down the movies shifted to be by-and-large regurgitations of their points; because they were so in-depth, they were taken as writ (conversely, comparably poor prequels like The Hobbit are often given a free pass for lacking such monolithic assessments). And they certainly are impressive pieces of film criticism. The problem was that their points were often taken as proof positive of failure – without actually reevaluating the films themselves.

Star Wars fans often actively ignore the prequels. Many simply just don’t watch them, while entire viewing orders have been constructed to place them at less objectionable parts of a marathon or completely cut out certain films (usually The Phantom Menace) altogether. That's fine - no point spending the better part of seven hours doing something you don't enjoy - but it means that while the prequels are hated, they’re done so based on memory and without really applying subsequent ideas to the film.

Part of the impact of Disney’s acquisition was that is that it made rewatching the full series feel like a necessity - previously it had been viewed dead so the push to revisit wasn't there. With new movies, though, people went back to films they hadn’t seen in possibly over a decade with fresh eyes and were able to measure them against the pop culture deities and devils they’d become. This is part of how Return of the Jedi became viewed as a lesser member of the Original Trilogy, and likewise allowed a pause on full, spiteful distaste of Episodes I-III (best seen in the shift from The Phantom Menace to Attack of the Clones being viewed as “the worst”).

Of course, this was wider film culture; many fans of both generations had already been helped along in their acceptance of the prequels by the existence of The Clone Wars animated series. The 2008 feature film may have been a cinematic clunker, stitched together from a storyline originally intended for the first season of the show, but as it went on it became some of the best Star Wars stories out there. Running for six seasons (give or take), the show took the prequel era and truly explored all its aspects - from the high-command of the puppet-mastered war to solo missions for background Jedi - finding weight and beauty in Lucas' hastily sketched ideas. Above all, it gave us the War, the Jedi and the Kenobi-Skywalker friendship the 1977 film had teased and Episodes II and III been so light on. Those aspects - especially the mature, responsible, conflicted Anakin - were so well done in reference to the main text that the effect bled over into the movies the show bridged.

Between that and the rewatch, many now see the prequels as the complete pictures they are, not the besmirchment they'd become; at the very least accepting the good in them, the conflict. Although that’s nothing on what the new era 0f Star Wars actively did for the bastard trilogy.

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Queen Amidala in Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace

The Prequels Are Different

A major overarching criticism of the Disney movies so far is that they're familiar. The Force Awakens relied heavily on nostalgia and brought back several major plot points from the original trilogy, while Rogue One was set mere minutes before the first film, replicating much of the design and tonal elements of A New Hope. Both were different to each other - Episode VII is the Star Wars the wider culture knows, while the Story is more what fans expected from the Expanded Universe - yet they were still firmly in the same, safe bubble. That worked and was honestly necessary to lay the groundwork for what's going to be a never-ending run of stories, but has become a concern going forward. And this is where they really help the prequels.

The prequels are different. They introduce a completely opposed galactic backdrop - a crumbling, corrupted Republic instead of a binary civil war - have a litany of fresh, sleek designs (before slowly evolving into the ships and planets we know), and for all the narrative parallels (as George famously said "it's like poetry, they rhyme") they're telling a fresh story. Above all, they're tonally separate. Anakin's fall is a dark companion to Luke's arc, yet it comes alongside Palpatine's Machiavellian rise and dogmatic politics.

If you're expecting the same old elements repeated, that's going to jar, but as we've seen people don't necessarily just want more of the same. Many of the issues the consensus have with the new movies are not present in the prequels (and some of the praised elements are), to a degree making them harder to hate - the justification is weaker - but mainly highlighting that there is something unique there.

That's not to say all the differences are necessarily all good - and the filmmaking faux pas' still remain - but there's an emerging recognition that Lucas semi-purposely made something inherently challenging. Scrape away the obvious CGI sets and wooden delivery of muddy dialogue and the ideas - ideas that, importantly, Lucas had mapped out in the late-1970s - are strong; he's dissecting the notion of the Jedi as noble protectors and the basic concept of the linear Force.

The Prequels Are The Future?

Star Wars The Last Jedi Book and Luke’s Hand

Between Millennials inheriting the cultural voice and the previous generation moving on, the new movies offer a way to get over the disappointment and view the prequels in a new light, seeing them for what they are rather than what they aren't. Of course, they're never going to be viewed on a par with the originals but it's now less egregious to suggest something like that than it was ten years ago. Star Wars fandom has gotten over the hate - it's found balance.

And balance really is the word. There's not been much in the way of prequel elements in the new movies, but one thing that is prominent in The Force Awakens and seems to inform where we're going in The Last Jedi is the idea of balance in the Force, which comes from the Chosen One prophecy introduced in The Phantom Menace. Something from the prequels has been accepted into the fold as a defining trait of the series, and as time goes on we're going to get more of that: Rebels has openly tied up loose ends from The Clone WarsHan Solo may be set closer to Episode III than Episode IV; and an Obi-Wan movie would bring back Ewan McGregor, reaffirming that there are good things in those movies.

We stand on the brink of, after a dark couple of decades, Star Wars once again being a coherent whole with every movie a part of it - the fabric that all fans grew up with and deep down want. So maybe the prequels were always cool. It just took us time to realize.

NEXT: Why The Latest Star Wars 8 Leak Is False

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