The Star Wars prequels take a lot of flak from fans, but a new video that compares the original trilogy to episodes I through III could offer one of the most compelling cases yet for giving the much-maligned prequels a little more love.
Titled “Star Wars Poetry,” the video created by Pablo Fernández Eyre and posted on Vimeo begins with a clip of George Lucas telling his creative team, “You see the echo of where it all is gonna go. It’s like poetry, they rhyme.” The video then runs through a long list of scenes from both the original films and the prequel, with the footage from the early movies stacked on top of the prequel clips in order to illustrate the visual symmetry of countless moments from both chapters of the saga.
The two-minute video is surprisingly thorough in its collection of similar shots from the six films, and while some scenes are the sort of standard stuff you see repeated in many sci-fi films (i.e., spaceships flying through debris), there are quite a few scenes that appear to be very intentional retreads of past sequences. From the way they’re framed to the positioning of background objects and set design, it becomes clear pretty quickly that — for better or worse — Lucas didn’t shy away from drawing inspiration from the original films while creating the prequels.
Some of the more memorable shots repeated in both films include scenes of C-3PO’s head, Anakin and Luke Skywalker each losing a hand, and the pair’s reactions after seeing their respective mentors killed.
With the next chapter of the franchise under J.J. Abrams’ direction, it will be interesting to see whether any of these shots are mimicked in Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens. More than anything else, the video offers a nice reminder that as much as fans like to draw a line between the original trilogy and the prequels, the two sets of stories hold more in common than just a set of characters.
