The Projector #101: Prequel Problems (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

Over the weekend — presumably inspired by The Many Saints of Newark, the subject of a forthcoming episode — political columnist Jeet Heer asked a question on Twitter: “Has there ever been a good prequel?” It’s hardly the first time the question has been asked. But it’s still a question worth asking, especially since the replies kept bringing up the same titles over and over again: The Godfather Part II (which Heer dismisses as a non-prequel), Better Call Saul, the recent Planet of the Apes movies (an edge case, at best), and a few making a case for the Star Wars prequels and Rogue One. But that was pretty much it. There are many more prequels out there, but does anyone like them?

Factoring out literature, where the tradition of authors penning this-happened-first stories to their own books and the books of others has produced some notable works, it’s a largely inglorious tradition that’s produced a mix of forgotten "characters you know but younger" projects (Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, The Carrie Diaries) and easy cash-ins (just about anything subtitled The Beginning). (The two categories are, of course, not mutually exclusive.) Prequels have gotten a bad name, and it’s not hard to see why. The worst of them do little but extrapolate backwards to figure out how we reached the story that excited us in the first place. (Cue Patton Oswalt’s classic routine.) But, despite some high-profile flops, they also tend to be economically sound investments thanks to brand recognition.

There’s a third category that makes it hard to write off prequels entirely, however: those with ambition enough to try to do something new within a world we already know. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were divisive and understandably so. But they also play like Ridley Scott’s attempts to use a universe he helped create to ask some pretty big questions. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was widely dismissed or disliked at the time by fans of the show — I was one of them — but has emerged as its own difficult-to-grapple-with mutation of that project, much like Twin Peaks: The Return would be years later. Whatever your feelings on the Star Wars prequels, it’s easy to admire Rogue One’s attempts to use the Star Wars universe as the setting for a Star Wars movie that put the emphasis on the “wars.” I was surprisingly taken with Cruella, for the most part. There are possibilities to prequels. They just don’t get explored that often or that well. It’s best not to be dismissive of the form as a whole — and we might have been on the show, now that I think about it.

Am I off in wanting to defend prequels a little bit? Or do you reflexively cringe at the idea? Let us know below (or send us an email at comments@nextpictureshow.net). We'll have more opportunity to talk prequel problems with our next pairing, but in the meantime we hope you're enjoying our most recent pairing of Hard Eight and The Card Counter. 

Finally, may we interest you in some additional reading?

• At The Washington Post, Brian Broome talks about the problems with Dave Chappelle’s latest stand-up special.

• At Vulture, Nate Jones offers an early look at next year’s Oscars.

• At The Ringer, Chris Klimek chronicles 60 years of Bond stars complaining about the gig.

• At GQ, William Goodman offers an appreciation of Alan Cumming: Goldeneye style icon.

• At The Guardian, Scott Tobias looks back at The French Connection at 60.

• Ted Lasso fans, how are you feeling about that finale? We touched briefly on Nate's arc in our recent bonus episode on the show, and now that we've seen where that arc lands, it's worth considering what the character, and the show, have been telling us all season, which Jen Chaney does over at Vulture.

• Finally, at The Reveal, Keith Phipps considers the comforting apocalypse of Shin Godzilla, and reviews No Time to Die and Lamb. Scott Tobias looks at Quentin Tarantino’s novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, argues for Memoria’s unconventional release strategy, and considers the year's best films so far, as determined by Metacritic.