I’ve gone on ad nauseum about remakes and sequels and so forth, but I’ve never really delved into the prequel side of things. There are a couple of reasons why I’m bringing this up. First up: It was announced by Warner Bros/New Line that a new Lord of the Rings movie was in development. The title? The Hunt for Gollum. It’s bringing back the main writing team that wrote the screenplays for the LOTR Trilogy, and Andy Serkis is returning to play Gollum. He’s also going to direct the movie and Peter Jackson will be on hand for nearly every aspect of the film’s production. The second reason is that I recently picked up the Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi series on Blu-Ray. So, the idea of a new LOTR movie sounds great, right? Not so fast, and I will be bringing Kenobi into this as well. Everybody knows where these characters eventually end up. Gollum ends up frying in the bowels of Mt. Doom along with the Ring of Power, and Obi-Wan gets sabered by Darth Vader half-way through the original Star Wars movie. So, the ending to these characters is pretty definitive, yes?
That is the built-in problem with prequels. If you’re going into the backstory of familiar characters, you already know the eventual outcome, which generally robs a story of any kind of suspense or mystery. With Star Wars, we learned what happened to Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father, over the course of the Original Trilogy. We learned that he was a powerful Jedi and a cunning warrior, but he was also seduced by the Dark Side of the Force and eventually became Darth Vader. So, everybody knows that. What the Prequel Trilogy did was provide the backstory of how that happened, since the original movies didn’t go into any specific details of Anakin’s fall. Personally, I actually really liked learning the backstory of Anakin Skywalker. Whether you like the way the character was written is almost immaterial. But it filled in a lot of gaps and answered a lot of questions that fans had over the years(whether those answers were accepted or not is also not important). That brings me to the issue of Obi-Wan Kenobi. When I first saw it on Disney Plus last year, I wasn’t overly impressed with it, because it wasn’t really the story that needed telling. There was a lot of things that Kenobi did between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. But then again, did we really need to explore what Kenobi was doing between those movies? Not really. What I appreciate about the show is that it gave us a broken down Jedi master who was still dealing with his failure to properly train Anakin as a Jedi Knight. I thought that was a really good angle. But they didn’t need to bring Leia Organa into the mix, which actually kind of took away the focus from Obi-Wan and Vader.
Ultimately, while I enjoyed Obi-Wan Kenobi on a rewatch, the overall story feels superfluous in the overall story of the Skywalkers. It’s also the problem I see with the upcoming Acolyte show, which is set during the High Republic era, which is about 150-200 years before The Phantom Menace. If you’re going to set a Star Wars show before Episode I, you need to set it closer to the Old Republic era, about 2,000-3,000 years prior. That way, you’re not going to have a direct connection to the Skywalker Saga and you can branch off into a completely different direction. That’s the flexibility of the Star Wars universe. You could do that, but Disney and Lucasfilm seem afraid to do so, although, one upcoming movie is supposed to be about the origin of the Jedi, some 20,000 years before the Galactic Empire. Again, there’s a lot of different directions that you could take that kind of story and just have it be its own thing.
Lord of the Rings, though, is far more rigid in what film-makers can do. That has a lot to do with Tolkien’s Estate having absolute control over what elements of Middle-Earth can be made into a movie. You’re never going to see a movie directly based on the Silmarillion because it’s super-convoluted. There’s a lot of stuff happening, but there’s not enough information provided to the reader of what’s going on. And again, the Tolkien’s are loathe to allow anybody to make a movie based on anything in the Silmarillion, which is why the Rings of Power show on Amazon feels somewhat scatterbrained. There are details that had to be created from scratch, because the show-runners were limited in what they were allowed to use. With the character of Gollum, we know his backstory, and why he craves the One Ring. We also know how the Ring betrays him at the very end. These are elements that really don’t need to be explored, regardless of the talent involved with The Hunt for Gollum. But considering the details of the plot haven’t been revealed as of yet, it’s entirely possible that the story may not be from the perspective of Gollum. We do know that there was a 500 year period from when Gollum “found” the One Ring to the moment of his death, so it’s really hard to say when it’s going to take place. I will admit, I’m curious.
But these things bring me back to the issue at hand: What purpose does a prequel serve? From my perspective, a prequel exists only to fill in gaps and missing information of the original story. With a sequel, you can take the story pretty much anywhere, but with prequels, you’re kind of limited to what direction you can go without forcing plot-holes in the original narrative. Ultimately, I don’t mind prequels, but there a lot of people out there that would rather have the story move forward instead of back, and that’s a very reasonable mindset. While I understand the business side of things when it comes to franchises and prequels, from a narrative standpoint, it can be a slippery slope that can end in disaster if you’re not careful. There’s nothing worse than a prequel that tries to justify its own existence. But those are my thoughts on the idea of prequels.