In a behind-the-scenes feature on the creation of the Star Wars prequels, there’s a moment where George Lucas makes a statement on the thematic relationship between his newer films and the original trilogy. “You see the echo of where it all is gonna go,” he says, referring to the images onscreen in the new movies, and how they relate to the later ones. “It’s like poetry, sort of. They rhyme.” Anyone who’s seen the prequels is probably more than willing to claim that Lucas must have been talking out of his ass, because the main thing those later films rhyme with is “bad movie.”
Only, that’s not exactly true. The films do have a kind of imagistic symbiosis, as is demonstrated in this new video from Vimeo member WhoIsPablo (a.k.a Pablo Fernandez Eyre, a director and editor in Los Angeles). Eyre has taken scenes from the original trilogy and paired them with the conceptually similar scenes from the prequels, showing Lucas’ claim about the films “rhyming” isn’t as silly as it sounds. There are definite corollaries between them, sometimes more abstract (as in the shots of council meetings or spaceships glimpsed through windows), and sometimes quite overt (such as the almost exactly matching shots of young Anakin and Darth Vader). Even if these weren’t always intended by Lucas, Eyre finds them, and his two-minute video makes a solid case for the (occasional) artistic merit of the later films. Or maybe it’s just a testament to his own editing skills. Either way, it’s a good video.