Am I the only one that's soured on the Plinkett Star Wars reviews over time?
The point still stands: the prequels are
objectively bad movies. They're bad in the sense that they aren't well-directed, that extremely skilled actors are wasted on embarrassing dialogue, that the CGI despite pushing technological boundaries didn't add much bar Lucas' tech-fetishism, that the overall plotline was haphazard at the best of times (having to constantly reset bad guy every movie didn't help). They're however
interesting bad movies: you could see what Lucas was trying to do (a trilogy where "evil wins", a story of corruption and political intrigue) but he wasn't skilled enough to do so, and this time his entourage wasn't up to cover for him. Plus, a lot of the prequel stuff is funny for its absurdity (a.k.a the neverending Prequel memes).
Plinkett's revies came from people that
venerated Star Wars. RedLetterMedia knows nothing about cinema bar 80ies America, they're people that would die if you forced them to watch some good Euro or Asian cinema. They're
ignorant, essentially, of anything outside pop US movie industry bar some limited foray in indie cinema or their love for endless trash movies. So the fact that the Prequels were a failure had this....
existential weight for them, because Star Wars was the
coolest thing ever and the
foundation of pop sci-fi cinema.
Fifteen years later, we have Disney Star Wars. We're completely sick of Star Wars and the original trilogy is kind of tainted by having each and every one of its parts being repeated ad nauseam or mangled through corpo fuckery. Plinkett's reviews nowadays are at best an amusing 2000-era youtube comedy bit, because the context has changed massively: you realize that Star Wars was never good after all and that the RedLetterMedia crew was a bunch of kind-of-clueless fans with decent humor, and that's ok.