Awhile ago, we did a piece featuring the fantastic trailers YouTube wizard, Tom F., made for Star Wars Episodes I-VI; giving each a modern trailer set to the music composed for the epic The Force Awakens trailer (click here for that compulsory viewing). He’s back at it; this time creating a trailer to that same piece of music (which I think we can conclusively say works for EVERYTHING) that showcases the entire Star Wars Saga this point from The Phantom Menace to The Force Awakens. Check it out, because I doubt the Rogue One trailer is coming for a few more months.
What do you make of George Lucas as a filmmaker? Obviously ANH was a groundbreaking masterpiece. And THX-1138 and American Graffiti are good, and I mean REALLY good. Empire was the one SW film Lucas had the least to do with, and it remains the best SW film of them all, but Lucas was THE force behind Jedi, and let’s just say he brought his epic to a perfect conclusion, with grandiosity and style.
And whatever he contributed to the first three Indy films, it worked.
But then I look at all the other stuff Lucas has produced, and I don’t know how to square it. OK so Howard the Duck might not have been his fault. I’ve read a lot about it, and there are a number of conflicting narratives; some people say that it was all Lucas’s idea to shoot the film in live action, with a dwarf in a duck suit; other reports indicate that he more or less got roped in, and saw the disaster coming.
But then you look at Willow, which was Lucas baby. It has some extremley cool effects (for example the scene where Willow messes up the spell and turns the troll into the creepy thing that evolves into the two headed monster) but it’s otherwise just a watered-down mashup of SW and LOTR, with lame humor. Radioland Murders is painfully unfunny and cliched, and Red Tails… I can understand why it took so long for Lucas to get it made, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the reasons Lucas enumerated at the time. It’s SO bizarrely formulaic and cliched. Except for the scenes in the sky, which are incredible (though if you know anything about the subject, they bear no relation to anything that has ever actually taken place in the sky). Strange Magic I think I will pass over without comment. Also Crystal Skull. And while I get that the Young Indy series was groundbreaking in its way, I always thought it was boring. Admirable, perhaps, but just kind of flat and dull.
As for the prequels… you know how I feel about those. Lucas had an incredible vision, but I don’t think anyone would dispute that he needed to hand them off to a director who was, perhaps, not as rusty. Someone who had directed more than one film in the last 30 years. Still, all and all, I think the prequels make the case that Lucas is a genius more than not.
So what gives?
I am tempted to say that Lucas lost his, shall we say, edge as he became so incredibly successful. That he became a victim of his own success. But that does not adequately answer how anyone, much less someone as important to the history of cinema as Lucas, could look at Red Tails or Radioland Murders, and think that they were.. well.. good.
I love George Lucas. He has given me a lifetime of wonderful entertainment. But his career has been so all over the place that it rises to full enigma status, and I was wondering what your thoughts were.
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Oh, George, you enigmatic goitery rascal. I think George Lucas is one of the most polarizing figures in movie history, and his ultimate place in cinema is going to require some distance just because people either tend to love him or light him on fire. Firstly, Lucas gave us Star Wars. All of the frustrations that came later, aside, the creation was his. The journey A New Hope took to the screen is an epic unto itself and the film does not get made without Lucas putting himself through a wringer and his personal finances at risk. He is, collaboratively, responsible for Indiana Jones, which may be the greatest action character of all-time (Crystal Skull aside). THX and ILM not only were film revolutions that also were Lucas’ brainchild, but have affected thousands of movies and will continue to long after Lucas is gone. My opinion of Lucas is that he is a visionary, a man of such imagination that we only see its like perhaps every 50 years and a very average film director. Lucas, as a director, is his second weakest talent (the first would be writing dialogue). While I recognize the vision of THX-1138, it’s not exactly gripping. I am one of the rare few that does not find any appeal whatsoever in American Graffiti. It may be that I just have nothing in touch with the time it romanticizes, but I tried to rewatch it a few years ago and couldn’t even get through it. I think it’s boring as hell. I will readily admit that’s a minority opinion, and we wouldn’t have Han Solo or Indiana Jones had Harrison Ford not gotten his break in the film, so I look at it as an important film, but not one I particularly enjoy. As a director, Lucas’ primary shortcoming is a complete and total disregard for his actors. He’s like a personality vampire. A New Hope is the film in which he does the least interfering with his actor’s ability to emote and with Ford, Fisher, Hamill, joining legendary actors like Alec Guiness and Peter Cushing I think it suffers the least of any of his directed films from the acting leech. Empire and Jedi had different directors, screenplay collaborators and enough of reign on Lucas that the only real misstep in the two films is the Ewoks, which were George’s idea and the beginning of the kiddification of the Saga that sabotaged the beginning of the prequels. He has not made a single film outside of the Saga that has not been pretty much unwatchable. Even when they have things to recommend them (like you mentioned Red Tails dogfight sequences), they’re technical achievements not directorial triumphs. His ideal role is that of producer in collaboration with a team of strong people whose opinion he respects. That’s what worked with Empire, Jedi and the first three Indy films. His direction of the Prequels are actually the three best films I think in terms of his direction (the problems in them are no screenplay collaboration for the first two episodes and no strong visionary on the team to bounce ideas off of). In that vacuum, Lucas pretty much became an autocrat with Rick McCallum (who IS a yes man’s yes man) reinforcing whatever idea he had. The main flaw again in his directing was the actor disconnect. Ewan McGregor pretty much ignored him and did what he thought was right by Obi-Wan, and that’s why people who even hate the prequels don’t bear animosity toward McGregor. But give me another director in the world that can suck all the personality out of Samuel L. Jackson? It fountains out his eyes, but Mace Windu is boring. Natalie Portman is a brilliant actress, but she clearly dislikes Hayden Christensen and it comes across on the screen. Hayden Christensen, I feel sorry for, because he CAN act. Broken Glass was a masterpiece. He could have been the Anakin we all wanted, but he’s an actor who needs a strong relationship and feedback from his director and he didn’t get it. Episode III is, I think, the best film Lucas has ever directed both in terms of quality and story. THIS is the film Lucas had in mind when he started the Prequels. The path to getting to it could have been so much better if someone he respected helped shape his dialogue and choices. But the only flaws in Episode III are wasted opportunities in I and II. The duel on Mustafar was, until Han’s death, the most tragic, exciting, moving moment in the whole Saga. You can never look at Vader the same after that film, but what if we’d gotten two more that really had that moment as the driving force to lay down foreshadowing and momentum? You know my ultimate opinion on the Prequels is that there are brilliant nuggets and a lot of wasted opportunities. I could fix Episode I. Episode II is a train wreck with a lot of cool vignettes. I think the decision to make Anakin as young as he was to start the trilogy was a mistake. I think we should have picked up with him at the age he was in II and his origin could have been handled through dialogue or Force visions. There’s nothing about it I’d miss. So all that being said, when it was time to tell the story that fans knew was coming since they read the Jedi novelization, Lucas didn’t disappoint. He went even darker than I thought he could and Order 66 is so tragic. What if we’d gotten to know each of those masters in two previous episodes as supporting characters instead of podracing and romping through meadows? But enough criticism of the man. Directing is not his strong suit. He’s a singular talent in his ability to combine his imagination with a prescience about where the technology of movies is headed. I think history, now that Star Wars will be more than two dueling trilogies, will remember him as the founder of one of the most popular universes in the history of any sort of fiction and as a technological visionary. That he isn’t in the class of director of Spielberg or Coppola is, ultimately, unimportant to how he will be remembered. I’m sure it matters to him, but I think his legacy is much more secure and positive than it was 2 years ago.
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I have been predicting, for a very long time, that the reputation of the prequels would improve as the years went by, and by leaps and bounds. The prequels were unlucky enough to be the first casualties of the Internet era, the first films to be shot down by the nerd community as they sat at their computers. But the internet is not the real world.
The prequels are the films of a visionary genius, and they perfectly sum up the career of George Lucas. They are wildy experimental works that pioneered the use of an entire film technology… their ambition and scope is so immense, it’s almost insane… they’re set in his most famous creation, The Galaxy Far, Far Away, and they’re almost a meta-commentary, a cinematic work about SW instead of a mere continuation of the story. And they are wonderfully imaginative, filled with Lucas’s unfettered, whimsical visual ideas. They draw from all sorts of movies, myths, and literary works. And yes, they are the work of a man who treats performances like afterthoughts, who either struggles with dialogue or simply doesn’t care. The producer and the idea man is more embraceable than the director, and perhaps we see more of the technician than the artist. But I want the prequels I got, not the hypothetical “better” versions directed by Robert Zemekis.
Getting to see the skills and imagination of George Lucas unleashed, with no compromises and no punches pulled, was one of the greatest pleasures of my moviegoing life, and I have no choice but to go with the flaws, because when it comes to Lucas it’s a package deal, and that’s OK. George Lucas owns it all. May the Force Be With Him.
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BTW… I do not accept the canard that he’s simply surrounded by yes men. That theory might help explain how some of his more questionable ideas slipped into his movies, but it does not explain the questionable ideas themselves. Of COUSE when he was a nobody making American Graffiti people were more comfortable challenging his creative choices. But if the prescience (or not) of yes-men was the only difference between 1970’s Lucas and the Lucas who made Red Tails… well, that means American Graffiti would have been an abject disaster but for the intercession of the people pushing against his ideas. And that film is a near work of genius in every respect, so I don’t buy it.
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