there is a good outline of a story in the star wars prequels. it's basically an inversion of the godfather storyline - instead of the father being good and the son being bad, it's reversed. trilogy 1 is the father's rise, trilogy 2 is his fall and his son's rise. i think the sequels were trying to get in on this by showing luke's fall as well, but they didn't do it well either.

but yeah, the basic ideas are pretty solid storywise. it's all of the details and execution that aren't great. which makes total sense because george lucas was always mainly an ideas guy, not the person actually making stuff happen. he should have hired a team of experts in each area, given them ideas, and then just walked away to let them figure it all out. basically what he did on the original trilogy.