Perhaps the largest cinematic disappointment of the modern era would naturally be the Star Wars prequel movies. Spawned from one of the most beloved film franchises ever, the Prequels get a ton of hate for not living up to their pedigree. And the fact of the matter is that they're mediocre films, at best. Specifically, the directing and writing in the Prequels is barely professional quality. George Lucas may be a great ideas-man and great at advancing special effects in film, but he is certainly NOT a very good writer or director, and he took over all of these duties for the prequel films. Which is really unfortunate, because in an abstract, not-written-and-directed-by-George-Lucas form, the Prequels are secretly far more brilliant than the Original Trilogy. Here's Part One of my reasons why.
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| Not this |
The Whole Thing is a Critique of Corporations and the "Free Market"
Remember back to the good old days of American History, specifically to the Industrial Revolution, near the end of the nineteenth century. In those days, the United States went from being barely tamed wilderness to becoming a huge powerhouse of Industry. At the head of the charge of Industry were the so called "Captains of Industry" (also dubbed “robber barons” by their enemies), who amassed a humongous amount of wealth and were pretty much more powerful than the American government at the time, because this was the Gilded Age and the government was ineffectual as shit. To gain so much power, these Captains of Industry relied on the American ideal of a Free Market, where the government tries to interfere as little as possible in the business sector. We like the idea of a Free Market because we think it'll help small businesses and the everyman prosper, while keeping prices for consumers low, because of competition in the market. But a Free Market and a Competitive Market are two entirely different things, as shown by the Captains of Industry. These guys formed monopolies in their respective fields, initially by forcing out small time competition and then by getting other businesses to merge with them to form Trusts, so that they could all be richer and not have to worry about competition driving prices down. Eventually, the government saw these huge Trusts as a problem and passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which allowed the government to stop the formation of Trusts that would create a monopoly. Presidents Roosevelt (the first one) and Taft used this legislation to stop monopolies from forming and preserve the American dream just a little while longer.
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| I'll just put this here |
Now, imagine in some alternate history that the Captains of Industry, people like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan, revolted against the government, saying it was corrupt and ineffectual and needed to be replaced, but with the real intention of destroying regulation and continuing to fill their pockets with tons of money. Well, that's the reason for the Clone Wars.
I think most people don't stop for very long to think about who makes up the Confederacy of Independent Systems, the rebel faction that secedes from the Republic. Well, it's not some random planets or anything. In fact, it's all guys like the Trade Federation, Banking Clan, and Techno Union.
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| Leader of the Techno Union |
So, in short, Mega Corporations. This is a vision of a dystopia where whole planets and star systems are governed not by elected bodies, but by huge corporations with monopolies over some industry; where these Mega Corporations are so powerful as to be able to invade and blockade a random weak star system in protest of a high intergalactic tariff rate and then use their political clout (they even have a delegation in the Senate) to dodge any sort of repercussions. And that's only in The Phantom Menace. In Attack of the Clones, all the mega corporations decide to pool their resources and separate from the government so they can form their own government and have no regulations or tariffs. They decide to bring their third world labor suppliers (Geonosis, the location of the droid factories) in on things too, probably so that the latter can get away with human rights violations or something.
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| Like killing prisoners in a gladiatorial arena |
Additionally, notice how we never see any organic soldiers fighting for the CIS. Their armies are entirely made up of droids. Meaning that the whole Clone Wars is basically a tale of wealth concentrating on only a small amount of people, the "1%" basically, who then decide to ignore the whole other 99% of people and just build a huge army of robots so that they can avoid regulation and become richer.