Does that mean we've isolated who the protagonist of TPM is? Because I'm still not a hundred percent sure of that. I've now met so many prequel lovers - some o

Does that mean we've isolated who the protagonist of TPM is? Because I'm still not a hundred percent sure of that. I've now met so many prequel lovers - some of them people I deeply respect - that I can't chalk it up to dumb, or faulty aesthetics, or hype bandwagoning. I genuinely think there's been a generational shift[0] in how people experience the medium of film. It's a shift that the prequels themselves are no small part of. Blocking, eyelines, camera placement, diegetic/nondiegetic, continuity - these just aren't part of a visual grammar for many among the young and growing part of the population. Although the prequels do make a lot of (really bad) mistakes from a screenplay perspective, you can potentially recover from those with something as simple as camera placement. But the kids don't really care - it's not how the medium speaks to them. The newer Star Wars films[1], while at least cognizant of the film discipline, do entirely throw continuity into the thunder bucket, make a hash of character motivations, and then, after that, still do freaky, weird, film-school-reject editing. But people love those, too, and again, I think there's that generational thing again. And I've more or less made my peace with it. But please don't expect me to lavish any kind of praise on the prequels. They are terrible, terrible films. Not the worst films, but close enough to sight without scopes, and certainly the worst films to have such a hype machine attached. Like if LotR came out, and Frodo turned out to be played by Adam Sandler, and Gollum was just really flatulent, and everyone involved suddenly forgot how to make movies all at the same time. [0] Hanging out with a bunch of undergrads, we watched 1980's The Shining together for Halloween, and - to a man and woman - they were universally bored out of their skins. The movie did not work on these people. That was my "aha!" moment. While I can't prove this, I think that a lot of film basics are obsoleted by the fact that the new generation regards camera position as more or less arbitrary. So a reveal might be just as likely to be frustrating as suspenseful. [1] With the exception of TFA, which is an absolutely perfectly made soft reboot of ANH. I mean, seriously. It's the same movie, a sleazy cheap move that makes me feel all greasy. I think it's the cynicism of that decision that gave me the bad taste. No, wait, it was when I realized that none of the events of TLJ mattered, at all. None of the characters accomplish anything - the movie did not have to exist. So that was a bad taste too. Still watchable. There's like, a good ninety minute movie hiding in there somewhere. The third one, I just kind of lost track of anything, like watching a compilation of unrelated music videos.