The Star Wars prequels are just awful and I like to pretend that they don’t exist. Except for the Lego videogame version, which is great fun. It helps that the Lego characters speak only in subtitles and gestures, like a silent movie. Maybe Cory Doctorow is right: the Star Wars prequels are entertaining if you switch on the Italian dialogue and pretend that they’re operas.

Now we have this brilliant reinterpretation of the original Star Wars in light of the prequels. It’s interesting that this essay stops before it gets to Empire and Jedi. Perhaps that’s because Empire, a better film than Star Wars in many ways, is nonetheless a bit too tidy: it doesn’t leave a lot of loose ends to work with. There’s no need for an insightful essayist to explain how R2-D2 and Chewie are the heroes of Empire, or that Yoda is cagey when he first meets Luke because he fears Luke’s dark side: these things are really, really obvious. Jedi is even more transparent: The good guys are cute, the bad guys sound like Vincent Price, and you don’t even need the dialogue to understand what’s going on.

So, once again we see that each new George Lucas movie makes Star Wars look better and all his other movies look worse. Alas, poor George…