I thought EP3 was a pretty solid recovery considering the first two... still a little bloated and clunky in places... we probably didn't need 25 minutes of lava acrobatics before Obi-Wan defeated Anakin... but generally speaking, I liked Ep3. While I kind of drifted into and out of the Clone Wars stuff, I generally enjoyed it.
But in general, I felt TFA nailed the SW universe vibe much better than the prequels did. From the get go, the prequels looked cheap. Nobody was fooled that this was anything but Lucas sitting in a greenscreen covered warehouse outside of San Francisco filming his actors read banal dialogue. They just felt lazy from the get-go. There were exceptions obviously, with TPM returning to Tunisia and such... but just way way way too many obvious digital matte paintings sucked the immersion dry pretty quickly. It just didn't really pass the smell test at the time and today looks dated as fuck. Lucas was more worried about advertising for ILM then he was in telling an engaging story or getting his actors to wake up. But I will give Lucas credit where it is deserved, the prequel trilogy slowly improved over time while Disney shit the bed and crashed with their 2nd entry.
I can tell you've never seen Lost (or you have fetal alcohol syndrome and liked it). One and a half seasons of Lost, supplemented by Wikipedia synopsi, opened my eyes to just how much of a hack JJ is. So none of this shit surprises me.
TFA paid lip service to being Star Wars. Weird fucked up retread of ANH it was, it copy and pasted shit from the OG movies, but didn't quite get there. They wanted you to believe it was Star Wars.
Where JarJar got you, and anyone else not wise to his bullshit, is that TFA is litered with Mystery Boxes. You are tricked into thinking these are Lucas' plot hooks - that neckbeard nigga can't write dialogue for shit but he is great at broadstrokes and melodrama - but they aren't, they are empty boxes with a jar of screws inside. JarJar has no plan for them. If backed into a corner and forced to act on one, he'll pull whatever resolution is convenient at the time because there's no forethought, no world building, no figuring how this figures into the greater scheme.
JarJar does a cargo-cult aping of people with talent to trick the audience into believing he also has a plan when he doesn't.
The Prequels, by extreme contrast, were meant to fill in gaps & backstory (which is I feel a big part of why they failed) not introduce new questions
also to sell a shit ton of toys now that Hasbro-nee-Kenner had fucked up and lost their sweet license on toys and Lucas was able to negotiate one more in his favor. But this sense of deep backstories and only alluded to events is what made the OT so great, the sense of the unseen vastness and depth.
For example: Han is in debt to Jabba because he dumped his cargo of smuggled goods. But we don't know what he was hauling, or where, or what was going on when he was forced to drop his contraband. Your mind can come up with all sorts of scenarios, the falcon being boarded by storm troopers as Han tries to fast talk his way out of the jam. But if you actually tried to expand on it, its likely going to suck. It'll either be boring (least of all because you know how the story ends) or nonsensical*. Its BETTER that this never gets fully addressed, and fully addressing it is immaterial to the plot or Han's character.
But that's not how JarJar does his mystery boxes. Instead of tossing rando world building horseshit on throw away lines, he'll shroud it in extra mystery. JarJar would have suspense music and tight zoom on Jabba "You know how important that cargo was to me, Solo! Its simply....IRREPLACEABLE", making you BELIEVE there's some important element or story to the cargo. No, its just something that JarJar thought sounded cool.
Take Luke's lightsaber. That's a story for another time. There is absolutely no fucking way to deliver a good story about how it got there, and JarJar clearly has no idea, he just wanted to toss in some nostalgia bait get the fans worked up and doing his job for him. Rey could have gotten another lightsaber, or even Luke's saber from RotJ, and there could be a line about "I got it from a friend", which might set up an actual delivery where Yellow Yoda got it from Luke before he went into exile, or maybe from one of the Jedi trainees who left before everyone got Renned over. But those are actual interesting ideas that you have to set up and deliver one, instead of pulling random bullshit out your ass with whatever sounds good at the moment.
The best thing Rian did by subverting expectations with the TLJ was wake people up to the complete lack of any planned narrative beyond "Rey is the best at all the things, destroy anything we have to pay Lucas royalties for".
That said, I will give you: If you have never seen Star Wars or otherwise give no fucks about the franchise, TLJ aside, they are
better more entertaining movies (and I won't fault you for taking TLJ over attack of the clones). But the PT is the better trilogy in that it IS an actual trilogy and not merely 3 movies with roughly the same cast & characters.
*Of course that ignores you zigging rather than zagging; say Han never dumped his cargo, he's actually ripping off his boss. But that changes the tone of the character from Rascal with heart of gold to actual ruthless con artist shitbag.**
** Until the DOUBLE reveal that is was Chewie betraying them both THE WHOLE TIME.
