I’ve recently played Resident Evil 6 for the 1st time after playing Resident Evil 4 (an absolute masterpiece) & Resident 5 (a pretty good game). I was already aware of the hate this game got over the years. But after experiencing it, it’s only bad in an artificial way. Like yeah, it’s nothing like the classic games and it’s too much in the action category.
Otherwise, as someone who loves action games, it’s a pretty fun game. Especially in Mercenaries Mode, where it’s fun to mow down body-horror themed enemies. As a Resident Evil game, it’s pretty bad. But…as an action third person shooter with splatter punks, it’s quite well executed
Really, a lot of the prequel hate comes from them taking such a huge step down from the OT. In 1999, The Phantom Menace was the first major Star Wars film in 16 years; it wasn’t just a cool new thing, it was a cultural event. People expected great things.
Obviously it failed at that. Not once, but twice. Revenge of the Sith barely even got a chance.
And so the backlash was brutal. While the critique wasn’t unfair in its points, it also came from a perspective of starkly emotional disappointment. People say the prequels are looked at more fondly now due to ‘nostalgia’, but mostly I think it’s that the emotional pain has faded and we can analyze them more objectively as flawed, but ultimately solid films rather than ‘disasters’.
It may be that one day the sequels will be more coldly studied as well, with more focus placed on the issues produced by cycling directorship and management pressures… but I also think even a coldly analytical appraisal of them will still come up as “hollow and emotionless”.
I think they might still be at least verging on disasters, though certainly more interesting ones than JJ’s movies (see elsewhere in this thread for my thoughts on TLJ). The PT actually reminds me a lot of other passion projects (Megalopolis is probably the most recent, and surprise surprise, Coppola is a friend and mentor) that reveal the limitations of deferring to the auteur’s singular vision in a collaborative artform.
The “saved in the edit” narrative for ANH is disingenuous I think, inserting a miracle for a particularly strong example of how the workflow for a weird project should work, but it does hint at the truth that somebody like Lucas has as many bad ideas as good ones, and only the ones he can sell to fellow respected professionals should stay in the final product.
I also think it’s fair to say that because he was frustrated by the “compromises” with actors, writers, directors, and studios who all felt they were equal stakeholders, the unfiltered Lucas was a jarring departure from the OT, yet ostensibly targeted the exact same demographics, and that made it even harder to evalute the PT on its own terms. For me personally, I could never truly get over the stilted line readings that felt exactly like the cheesy serials that Lucas loved, but that the New Hollywood “kids” and British stage veterans refused to let infect the OT. “You can write this shit, George, but you can’t say it.”