The prequels have superb cinematography

As someone who has worked in Television and studied cinematography I can say this with a fair degree of experience.

This image is confusing cinematography with the rule of thirds and framing. Overall the prequels have a very flat and sterile visual aesthetic to them that aren't pleasing to the eye and how they were shot on the early generation of digital cameras gives them an artificial and false look to them that will only get worse with age and you won't be able to fix them with remastering.

Alot of the wide shots in the prequels were done more in post production with visual artists and VFX teams so of course they're going to try and make them look as good as possible considering most of it was shot on green screen sound stages. I'm not sure if it actually does count as Cinematography if 90% of it is done later in post.

But generally speaking the prequels just don't look good regardless of their reputations as films. The scenes when they're on Tatooine is just bland and souless when everything is covered in the same beige and earth tones and everyone is wearing the same coloured clothes. And then later in Attack Of The Clones the big outdoor battle scene looks terrible because they didn't understand how the sunlight looks and it's this awkward mish-mash of forrest landscapes with the robot army. And those shots in the image are so minor and spread out between alot of indoor and interior scenes with bad lighting that was often harsh and blasted onto the actors with no sense of purpose or intention.

And George Lucas would edit multiple takes together and layer them ontop of each other within the same scene and it makes it really distracting and annoying and goes against common sense filmmaking. You can't do that in a real feature film. You would be fired from the movie if you tried to do that with any other film: https://youtu.be/da8s9m4zEpo?t=46m17s

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