about lucas

(this is my response in a discussion with a friend about the prequels…)

it’s not so much that he lost ‘it’ as that he lost ’star wars’. he changed too, and he wasn’t the same guy, when he sat down to make episode one, as he had been when he made a new hope. hell, he wasn’t quite the same guy when he made jedi as when he struggled to put out that first bit of his vision.

i think if he’d made the prequels starting in about 1985, maybe river phoenix could have been anakin, we’d have had a much better string of films that more closely meshed with the classic three, and told a better story in a better way.

there are arguments to be made that lucas lost his touch, but i don’t think it’s that he couldn’t as much as that he didn’t. he didn’t seem to have cared as much this time around. he didn’t have the foresight to do like he did on empire and get a different guy to direct his script, or even give his notes to a different scriptwriter.

in any case, he could have done more, been more heavily invested in it, but he got older and i don’t think he had that kind of passion in him for this story that was fairly well done for 20 years. he tried, but it was so obvious that he should have simply handed his over-arching storyline to the lucasfilm concept guys and let them go apeshit all over it. they came up with most of the brilliance of the prequels.

lucas still has his skills, as evidenced by key sequences in the prequels, mostly involving palpatine. the realization at the end of episode one that everything you’d just watched was nothing more than a clever ruse to gain political power. the bits in episode three as he’s revealing himself to anakin. some of the obi-wan stuff, most of qui-gon’s bits, and much of the battle sequences.

but other bits, he’s obviously not been young and in love for some time, and it was the scenes without dialogue that struck the most powerful romantic chords.

anyways. i’ve worked out significantly more than a quarter of a screenplay for my version of star wars, but that’s another post.