“it’s only a model!”
Oooh wait, wrong movie.
Great visionary. Good producer. Bad director. Terrible storyteller.
Ep. IV appears to be the best case example when all four are in the mix, with the added bonus that the movie was novel in its day, had stunning visual effects and sound design, and was luckily surrounded by talent, before and behind the camera. Ep. IV was a simple story with okay direction, great production, and powerfully rich vision. Perhaps he took that for granted.
ARGH!!!
Haven’t ANY of you people seen the other films Lucas directed? He is a talented director.
George Lucas has made a total of three films. Three. One of them was in six parts, but as it was a serial, it only counts as one in my book. His other two films were a dystopian, serious piece of science-fiction and the other was a personal reminiscence about his teen years. If you haven’t seen both of these, you don’t have a valid opinion about Lucas’ talent as a director or as a writer. In American Graffiti he got great, naturalistic performances from a cast that featured a mix of seasoned pros and brilliant newcomers, and even got moving performances from people who had never acted before.
Whatever Lucas had for American Graffiti, he’s lost it now. The actors is his more recent movies have been horribly wooden, his dialog is worse than ever, his stories have meandered, his character arcs lack impact, his set pieces are without clear context, and there are plot holes everywhere.
I think Lucas need someone to be able to tell him no, or to force him to change thing that aren’t working. He hasn’t had that since those early films.
The complaints about altering old works is one thing, but there is little doubt in my mind that the prequel trilogy is a collection of three plain-old bad movies.
I think my take on it is even more frustrating than yours - I think they were right next to good movies - sooooo close, but they still missed.
Unless you are speaking in a legal sense, I disagree. Once you put something out there and it becomes part of the public’s cultural heritage, I don’t believe you are entitled to destroy it. Lucas is a jerk for not making the original films available, especially given that they could easily be put into a package deal with the defaced versions. He isn’t the only director to make changes to his own film, but it is the only instance I know of where a director decided to make the original completely unavailable and, in fact, claimed to have destroyed the original.
I’m glad that Lucas appears to finally be stepping down, but it is too little, too late.
I think the worst thing to happen to Lucas was huge success. He got to the point where he believed the hype. Before his movies were more collaborative efforts. As he got bigger his creativity and artistry fell. I believe he said in an interview around RotJ that directing was his least favorite job, or something like that. If he just produced and did the special effects and let others direct he’d be held in much higher esteem than he is currently.
His appearance on the Daily Show was telling. He actually said that he fully intends to make two mroe Red Tails movies, with a prequel and a sequel. Jon Stewart, and I, thought he was making a joke at his own expense. He was dead serious, and it was a little awkward.
THX1138 was a brilliant piece of future, dystopian vision. Obviously inspired by Kubrick and Orwellian tales, but its pretty long (and not in a good way, unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey) and vague. Boring to most.
American Graffiti, again, surrounded by talent before success made him cocksure and barricaded by yes-men. Same with Star Wars IV.
I stick by my assessment in that he has a fantastic vision and knows how to get a movie made. Most of his productions have been a success when he’s producing, and had a general hand in the overall story. Obviously he has great ideas, but the prequels expose, like anyone else, he also has bad ideas as well. A good director knows when to listen to opinions that matter and admit when your ideas aren’t working and needs editing or rewrites. He had two more chances to redeem himself after The Phantom Menace, but kept his fingers stuck in his ears and lost sight of the forest as he pruned every CG leaf on every uninteresting tree.
He practically invented the summer blockbuster along with Spielberg. But Spielberg he is most certainly not. I can’t imagine what Raiders of the Lost Ark would’ve been like had Lucas directed.
In the prequel Cuba Gooding Jr. joins Tuskegee Airmen as an HBO venture.
In the sequel it’s Christmas 1945 and neo-Nazis lure the Allies to what appears to be the ruins of the Reichstag but is in fact a fully functional and heavily space-armed Reichstag with Hitler’s CGI clone now in charge.
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He practically invented the summer blockbuster along with Spielberg. But Spielberg he is most certainly not. I can’t imagine what Raiders of the Lost Ark would’ve been like had Lucas directed.
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The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. (Anybody else remember that show? At the time Lucas was billing it as “the way history should be taught”, which is to say completely inaccurately but with lots of car chases.
::shudder::
A huge fan of the first three Indy movies (okay, well Temple of Doom was a bit silly, but no where near Indy 4), yet never watched an episode. I didn’t care about who Indy was before, and without Harrison and Spielberg, I was uninterested and figured it’d be a Lucas travesty.
I’m not sure what finally brought Steven and Harrison around to do Crystal Skull, but they chose… unwisely.
I’m sorry but the show is the ADVENTURES of a young Indiana Jones, a fictional character, who expected it to be on the level of a college history lecture?
The show is sometimes adventure serial, sometimes “historical fiction” with Indiana meeting historical figures like Pancho Villa etc. Of course this isn’t accurate, BUT it can stir an interest in learning more for kids.
High school, not college, and the answer to “who” is George Lucas who when they first premiered marketed them as a way to teach history in the classroom. I can’t find a cite from the early '90s when the show first came out (other than on databases), but fortunately he was still pimping the series and saying so as recently as 2007:
To his credit he has- since it premiered- made accompanying documentaries to go with it. No idea of the quality; as we all know a great documentary is better than a theatrical movie while a bad one is worse than a “Bueller… Bueller” lecture, but assuming the documentaries are good, why not just show those and forget Young Indie? I understand the concept of infotainment, but let’s face it: most kids are going to see this as way more about getting a break from class for a few days to watch some old series than about learning anything, and I’m not confident how much any but the brightest would take away from a fictional series.
Lucas is stupid about sums it up, although Doctor Who started out the same way.
Oh and after watching another absolutely brilliant episode of The Clone Wars I am all for Lucas staying far, far away from the franchise. Seriously all you haters I am telling you the show is amazing, or read a review:
http://www.thinkhero.com/2012/01/20/star-wars-the-clone-wars-deception-season-4-episode-15-review/
I would be interested in the team on the show redoing the prequels 
What “more recent movies” are you talking about? He has only done one movie since American Graffiti (in six installments). And that multi-part movie was a homage to the cheesy Republic serials he loved as a boy, in spite of their ridiculous plots, wooden acting and over-the-top directing style.
If Lucas had done anything other than a Star Wars movie since American Graffiti, you might have something to compare it to.
You are the one trying to frame all six star wars movies as one movie. First of all, Lucas didn’t direct all six. He, at a time when he had less directorial control, directed one good one (then later when he had more control tried to, and succeeded, in partly ruining it). Then he made three terrible movies. He made each separately, spending years crafting each one. I think it is totally fair to treat them separately. And they are awful. Not in a fun cheesy way, or in a cavalier low-budget way, or even in a good “kids movie” way. They just reveal, in a way that is excruciatingly and embarrassingly manifest and public, that he is somehow an oblivious victim of early success, lacking rudiments of basic storytelling and writing skills. If he only made one of the prequels I might be inclined to agree with you. But these really were separate movies; the mistakes of the first could have been recognized and corrected for the second (and then third). But they weren’t.
100% agreed with iamnotbatman.
Had he had the entire story for all 6 episodes laid out before he even started to lens ep. IV, then you might be closer, but I believe he had a general idea about the character arcs and mythology for the universe he created, shot the first one in '77, then fleshed out the rest of the movies, ad-hoc as he went, with mostly the same team, the same cast, and two different directors for ESB and ROTJ.
20 years later, and he decides to create the prequels, 3 years apart for each film, because he was writing each screenplay after the previous film was in the can. He had the chance to course correct, or even bring in other directors/writers. If Lucas shot the prequels how Peter Jackson shot LoTR—all 3 films in one huge shoot—then I might agree with the perspective of seeing the prequels as one big film.
But nope, he directed and wrote Ep. IV, then I, II and III separately and after each previous one hit the screens. I have to count them as individually directed.
This is precisely the sense of massive self-entitlement that makes me sympathetic to George Lucas.
Same here. I am an artist myself, and I want to have complete control over my work. I understand wanting to destroy anything I no longer want people to see. So in a sense, I can sympathize with Lucas. I say “in a sense” because I can’t understand why he no longer wants anyone to see the originals, and all the reasons I can imagine involve him being a jerk. But taking that for granted, the rest I can understand.
None of that, however, changes my opinion on the subject. I don’t think Dostoevsky had the right to burn every copy of Crime & Punishment. I don’t think Shakespeare had the right to eliminate his plays from existence (“Right” is probably the wrong word here, but I can’t think of anything better). By the way, I believe my opinion on this is the minority opinion, and is not a major factor in how people view Lucas. You should limit your disagreement to me personally, and not use my (minority) opinion to judge everyone who says anything negative about Lucas. A more common complaint, for example, would be that he has made some really, really bad films.