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I raised this in another thread, but it was suggested that I start a thread on it. I've not been losing sleep over this, but it would be nice to get an answer.

In the OT, the Empire uses imperial stormtroopers, who can't aim. The rebel alliance uses normal-looking human soldiers.

In The Phantom Menace, the Trade Federation has an army of battle droids, that it controls from orbiting spaceships. They also can't aim. They are pretty effective because the Republic doesn't have any army at all, and Naboo just has pilots and a Gungan militia.

In the two other OT movies, we learn that the battle droids are manufactured on Geonosis. The Separatists absorb the Trade Federation, and nearly take over the galaxy with what seems to be an all droid army. At least they manage to kill alot of Jedi. There even is a cyborg general. The Republic, which we learn becomes the Empire, counters with an army of cloned humans, which become the stormtroopers.*

When I first saw the droid army in TPM, I thought the idea was pretty cool. TPM came out around the time as Iraq II, and I though the droid army was Lucas' way of poking fun at the increasing reliance of militaries on high-tech gizmos in the real world. I especially liked the fact that there was an equivalent to an "off" switch in the movie. I just assumed at the time that the droids were satire.

Lucas using them in the two other movies as the mainstay of the Separatists raises a question. Apparently the droids were effective after all, or else the Separatists never had a chance. So why was the Trade Federation the only outfit with droids? Why didn't the Republic counter the threat of manufacturing its own droid army? And why -the internal story reason, not that Lucas hadn't thought of them yet- aren't they used in the OT universe?

There's got to be some explanation in the EU for this.

*Lucas is using the cheese scifi convention of pretending "clones" are created as fully formed adults, using some sort of ultimate Xerox machine; the clone stormtroopers have no relation to clones that actually exist in reality.

First, apologies to the moderators if they have to chuck this discussion into one of the subfolders. I wasn't sure if it belonged in the fan fiction folder or was of more general interest.

That said, looking at some of the attempts here at rewritings of the prequels, it seems that they suffer from one problem: they are actual rewritings. The fans plunge straight into crafting an exciting scene, with dialogue, usually about a swashbuckling space battle.

It seems that the problems with the real prequels wasn't that Lucas wasn't able to do this, after all he did give us much the same with the beginning of ROTS. At least to me, the problem was that with every movie Lucas needed to make "real" the backstory. He had to create an alternative universe which consistently followed its own laws and its own history, and with each movie the strain of doing this showed more and more. This seems to be becaus he was making up things as he went along.

So the first task in rewriting the prequels is to fully flesh out the alternative universe Lucas hinted at in Episode IV, and began to flesh out in Episodes V and VI. Then write the story. Lucas' own alternative universe that he supplied in the prequels would have to be junked because, well, it just didn't make sense. It failsthe first test of all alternative fantasy and scifi universes in that its not internally consistent.

So rewriting the prequels as I envisage it is looking for answers to several questions raised in in Episodes IV-VI but never really answered.

Here is one to start off: who is the Emperor?

Is the Emperor human or alien?

Is he some sort of a mutant, like the Mule in the Foundation series?

Who were his parents?

Who taught him and what did they teach?

What motivated him; was he evil in the Hitlerian sense or was there "some good" in him? Did he marry and/or have children? What did he do to relax?

What was his natural lifespan?

Did he do anything noteworthy in his pre-Emperor days?

Was he ever a Jedi or received Jedi training?

Was there some legitimacy to his rule or was he completely an usurper?

The real prequels supplied answers to many of these questions but not all of them, and not to the crucial question of motivation. And they did a better job handling this part of the alternative universe than with other parts.

I submit that once these questions are answered the story starts to unfold. For example, for some reason I always viewed the Emperor as non-human, either an alien or mutant. Already you get a different set of prequels. Give the Emperor a daughter, and have her fall in love with Anakin, and you immediately get a drastically different set of prequels from the ones that made it on screen.

I discovered two websites, or blog, where another geek named Andrew Rilestone has a good deal of interesting things to say about the prequels and how they relate to the original trilogy. Unfortunately there is too much stuff there to be easily summarized, but I'll direct those interested to the sites.

The older site has a few essays about The Phantom Menace and The Attack of the Clones:

http: //www.aslan.demon.co.uk/arts. htm

The newer site is in blog format and its harder to find stuff, but there is alot on The Revenge of the Sith posted in June:

http://andrewrilston. ..ne_archive.html

People should be warned that the writer seems to actually like the prequels, at first. But that turns out not to be the case.

Probably the most provacative idea is that of the six movies, Episode IV is the one that is the odd one out, the real outlier.

There is also a fair amount on Peter Jackson's valiant attempt at a Lord of the Rings movie trilogy as well.

I had only seen the second half of the Revenge of the Sith, got to see a bit more tonight, starting with Anakin's conversation with Padme right before the Opera Scene and ending with Palpatine's duel with Mace. At that point I had to run out and make a phone call. By the time I got back it was into the final scene of the movie.

So this means I'm still missing the opening battle, Anakin's initial "rejection" by the Jedi Council, Palpatine's face melting, Anakin killing the younglings (except on hologram), and Order # 66. Except for Order # 66, none of the descriptions I've seen of this stuff indicate that I'm missing anything. Still the movie is entertaining enough to me to want to see more, which is a big improvement over the other prequels.

The opera scene itself is wonderful. First, we see people in Coruscent going about their business, unconcerned with the lives of the main characters in the movie, and once again get a sense that space is a big place. Second, the conversation between Palpatine and Anakin is interesting, makes sense, provides a good deal of insight in the motives of Palpatine and a little bit into the motives of Anakin. Excellent acting job by McDiarmed and decent acting by Christiansen as well.

Unfortunately, the movie next goes to the Wookie's impersonation of Braveheart . The next few scenes that follow are increasingly ridiculous, with overuse of CGI and implausible acting, and when Palpatine started swinging the lightsaber like a baseball bat I had enough.

A real shame, I got a glimpse into what could have been.

Repeatedly on this forum you read bashers, sad people with nothing better to do than to criticize some movies, writing that the plots of the three prequels are incoherent, that they contradict the original trilogy, and so on. But if you take the prequels seriously and study them carefully you realize this isn't the case.

You have to understand that the prequels are not told from a neutral perspective -they are not Lucas showing us what happened before the OT. Instead, the prequels are supposed to be the propeganda movies put out by the Empire, telling its subjects why the Republic and the Jedi had to go and how the Empire and its key officials came into being.

Viewed that way, the prequels absolutely make sense and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.