While this is another "how to fix the Prequel's thread", this caught my attention because Greenville's idea above is exactly what I thought the "clone wars" were when I watched Star Wars. The Republic gets attacked by clones, and his ideas about the Empire being formed because the Jedi can't handle it, they need something more militarized, then the Empire secretly gets rid of the Jedi and stays in power permanently. That is much more straightforward and just makes more more sense than what we got.
To stay more on topic, the commentators are right that in a sense we got the single prequel movie, actually twice. "Revenge of the Sith"really does tell Lucas' account of the fall of Vader, the Republic, and the Jedi. From the point of view of the plot, your really don't need to watch the two earlier movies to understand what happened. My suspicion is that "Phantom Menace" originally was another Lucas project that had nothing to do with Star Wars, that got re-written to clumsily fit into the Star Wars universe (its actually OK as a non-Star Wars movie)
"Rogue One" turns out to work as prequel that is actually artistically satisfying. It doesn't tell why the Republic or Vader fell, but if you want to watch a "Star Wars" prequel, you are better advised to just watch "Rogue One" (to be fair to Lucas, it is based on his ideas). You can get a good trilogy by using Rogue One as the third movie chronologically and splitting ROTS into two movies, changing the cheesier/ more ridiculous elements in ROTS (the movie still needs a lot of work), and splicing in the better parts of "Phantom Menace" as appropriate.
To stay more on topic, the commentators are right that in a sense we got the single prequel movie, actually twice. "Revenge of the Sith"really does tell Lucas' account of the fall of Vader, the Republic, and the Jedi. From the point of view of the plot, your really don't need to watch the two earlier movies to understand what happened. My suspicion is that "Phantom Menace" originally was another Lucas project that had nothing to do with Star Wars, that got re-written to clumsily fit into the Star Wars universe (its actually OK as a non-Star Wars movie)
"Rogue One" turns out to work as prequel that is actually artistically satisfying. It doesn't tell why the Republic or Vader fell, but if you want to watch a "Star Wars" prequel, you are better advised to just watch "Rogue One" (to be fair to Lucas, it is based on his ideas). You can get a good trilogy by using Rogue One as the third movie chronologically and splitting ROTS into two movies, changing the cheesier/ more ridiculous elements in ROTS (the movie still needs a lot of work), and splicing in the better parts of "Phantom Menace" as appropriate.