George Lucas is a fucking hack. His movies are unoriginal, boring, and repetitive. He relies on special effects and computer generated showcases in order to hide the fact that he can’t write decent dialogue, he can’t direct good or bad actors, and he has no concept of how humans operate or why people behave the way they do. He doesn’t understand how to pace drama (thus six pointless movies), he doesn’t understand how to write romance, he doesn’t understand how to build character motivation. Why did Ani cross to the dark side? nobody fucking knows, and he took three movies to explain. We were just told that it was going to happen, we knew it would happen, and so Lucas’s complete inability to demonstrate a believable character arc could be glossed over. The third prequel was so disgustingly emotionally manipulative that I felt mind raped by the time I was done. (Well, and amused. “NOOOOOOOO!” I never talk in theaters, but at that point I couldn’t help but yell “Are you shitting me with that?”). We needed to be horrifed by what Ani’s fall and so we had to watch him slaughter children? I believe that scene showed the real depths of Lucas’s sociopathy. He needed us to see how evil this boy apparently was, and so he just randomly threw in THE MOST EVIL THING HE COULD EVER THINK OF. That’s terrible story telling, and unnecessary to boot if he could have made Ani’s downfall mean something and his love story with Panda Bear significant. Most of Star Wars is framed in terms of politics because it’s something Lucas can understand, something clinical, something detached and governed by rules and straightforward motivations. He can’t handle anything more than that, but instead of being honest about it, he blunders through in the most painful way possible.
By the way, Panda Bear’s death almost gave me a stroke. Why not have her bleed out? Why not actually have her die in child birth? That’s far, far less insulting than “She took one look at her kids and died of a broken heart because of Ani.” In order for that to work, we’d have to get something more than “you’re nicer than sand in my underwear” and running through fields. This relationship was supposed to be the driving force of his downfall–I asked my sister for some details with that and she can’t remember either. That’s how paper thin this shit is–if you’re caught up in the movie, you may be able to ignore the fact that nothing makes sense, but when you try to think about it afterwards, it becomes clear there’s nothing to think about. Regardless, she is why he crossed over, we’re to believe. But there’s no emotional connection between them, and nothing he’s supposed to be afraid of is ever really even hinted at. Of course, the real tragedy is that she probably would have been his dark queen. I mean, let’s face it, she fell in love with him because he slaughtered a bunch of people, and she was so fucking selfish she couldn’t even survive long enough to take care of her babies.
But hey, I don’t have to have emotions, drama, character motivation, or an interesting plot in my movies. Really, I don’t. Not a lot of that going on in Mega Shark movies, right? As long as there’s decent eyecandy and the dialogue is a sincere cheesy, I can live. Except, the eyecandy was as cold and soulless as the acting, the characters, the writing, and the directing. Each scene in the prequels went on a good 10 minutes longer than it needed to, and we could never forget that we were staring at computer graphics with people cut in–and we could never forget that if Lucas had his way, he’d get rid of the actors entirely. I don’t think he says that because he loves his special effects so much, but because he literally doesn’t know how to interact with people. They’re a mystery to him, their loves, their desires, their hatreds, even their fears. There’s a reason the actors hate him, and I’m sure it’s because he hates them. He does his best to give a good approximation of what he sees, but it’s all one-dimensional. Everything about those goddamned movies are so one-dimensional.