After ninety minutes of listening to these pencilnecks and potato-shaped people wrestle with their feelings about George Lucas, I know whose side I’m on.
After an hour-and-a-half of this documentary’s painstaking analysis and “gotcha” quotes of George Lucas contradicting himself and clips of him looking like he smells of sulphur and money, I’ve reached a verdict.
I not only find George Lucas Not Guilty of owing these people anything beyond a movie for their ticket price (whether or not that movie is good; and, hey, sometimes movies are bad; that’s life), but I wish that he had pissed off these twerps a lot more. Do a total re-edit of Empire Strikes Back with Jar-Jar Binks in there giving Luke Skywalker pep talks during Jedi training, I don’t care. As I watched this movie, I had an image in my head of Lucas deliberately venting his contempt for these virgins with his shitty prequels and you know what? I kind of liked it. Fuck the audience. The audience is an intruder. I have no sympathy.
That doesn’t mean that I like George Lucas, by the way. I don’t. Several of the talking heads in this movie speak of how inspiring he is, but, personally, I can’t think of any filmmaker less inspiring than this high-tech hack clinging to his golden oldies. Lucas has been creatively finished for decades now and his revisions to the original Star Wars trilogy are flabbergastingly useless. (My favorite point among the fan nerds here is that Lucas effectively fucks over his original creative team by rubbing his digital shit all over their great vintage special effects work.) We don’t need him. In the pantheon of major filmmakers, I vote Lucas off the boat.
Sometimes though, being a judge means deciding between two wholly unlikable parties. Between Satan and the idiot who keeps giving Satan his money, I’m with Satan.
I know exactly what’s wrong with all of these people, by the way. Let’s start with Lucas.
Lucas’s major malfunction is that he didn’t do much after Star Wars. Yes, he collaborated with Steven Spielberg on Indiana Jones and, yes, he’s produced some good movies, but he never became the kind of artist who moves forward. He never became Martin Scorsese. He never became Walter Hill or Lawrence Kasdan. He never even became Francis Ford Coppola, who at least tried to stay vital past his major hits. I think that Lucas re-edits his past because he’s still stuck in it. Star Wars never became old news to him. The saddest part of this is that Star Wars is such a shallow story, hyper-simplified and full of secondhand ideas. Oh, it’s a great movie, bombastic and charming, taking you by the hand into its ridiculous world. I’ll watch it anytime. Still, there’s not a great science-fiction writer who couldn’t eat every Star Wars script for breakfast and then shit out something much more wild by dinner. Writers like Fritz Lieber, Philip Jose Farmer, Norman Spinrad and Harlan Ellison have ten-page short stories with more ideas in them than all of the Star Wars films put together. Lucas is a great entertainer, but he doesn’t have one of those freaky speculative imaginations. Instead, he redresses old folklore in new clothes and adds lasers. His strength is telling us stories that we’ve already heard. Lucas claims that his changes to the old movies are simply realizations of his original vision, but, if so, that original vision seems to amount to nothing more than a few extra monsters in the background and wider shots of the settings. Lucas adds nothing to the substance of the films; he’s just primping. The man might be richer than God, but he’s creatively bankrupt.
As for the fans, you can’t complain about Lucas being a corporate businessman while you’re wearing a Yoda T-shirt and standing in front of your wall festooned with still-in-the-box action figures and then going to sleep alone that night in sheets with R2-D2 on them. You also can’t complain that something’s been stolen from you when the original movies that you love are still available if you really want them. You’ll just have to get them secondhand. No one raped your childhood. You’re just bored and lonely and looking for something to get excited about. I’m with you in your distaste for Lucas’s actions, but I’m not with you in that you consider it to be a personal insult. Be bigger than that! I know that growing up is hard (especially when you’re in your 40s), but we all have to do it sometime. Look at it this way: When the Imperials bombed Luke Skywalker’s home on Tatooine and killed his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, did Luke stick around and whine to documentary crews about it? Hell, no! He moved on and moved up. I’m not saying that you should hook up with a smuggler and his hairy inarticulate henchman in some seedy bar with awful music playing in it, but, hey, maybe that would help. Look into it. Chop, chop. C’mon. Let’s go!