Attention All Geeks: Don’t Suck George Lucas’ Balls Too Hard

This is where I hate on one of my heroes. I’m not exactly pleased with this. But seeing as how I know his work pretty well (dare I say better than most?), I gotta do it. This is not something I thought I’d ever say but here goes: George Lucas ain’t a genius.

There, it’s out. Can’t say I’m exactly pleased with myself either so don’t think this isn’t painful for me. It’s true though, George Lucas really ain’t all he’s cracked up to be. I have my reasons for this though, my statement definitely isn’t unfounded. That would just be stupid if that were the case. See, George Lucas isn’t a genius exactly but he’s obviously way above average and definitely sniffing around the edges of genius. The reason George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, isn’t a genius is because he’s a victim of circumstance; George Lucas was pretty much at the right place at the right time.

It’s sometime in the mid-1970s. The film industry is floundering. The post-Vietnam War American attitude is bleak and Hollywood reflects this. Anti-heroes like Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (played by Gene Hackman in The French Connection) and John Shaft (played by Richard Roundtree in Shaft) pepper the cinematic landscape. Hope and heroes are in very short supply and dwindling rapidly. Along comes George Lucas, a self-effacing dreamer from Modesto, California, who changes everything. Lucas comes up with Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and fights tooth and nail to get the film made (he worked so hard on the movie that he actually suffered severe chest pains at one point and had to go to the ER because of this) and, obviously, it’s a smash hit. Star Wars gives the American people reason to believe in hope and heroes again. Despite the wild success of not only A New Hope but The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi later on, Lucas ain’t exactly happy with the movies. He delivered a product the likes of which had never been seen before and the fuckin’ guy wasn’t pleased with himself. Why? Because, according to Lucas, none of the original three Star Wars movies were up to snuff effects-wise.

Before I go any further, I need to make a quick digression about the effects used on the original movies. One has to realize that for 1977, Star Wars was the crème de la crème of blockbuster movies. The effects, for that time, were absolutely groundbreaking and set the bar for the blockbuster movies to follow. It isn’t hyperbole when I say that nobody had seen anything like Star Wars before 1977 simply because the effects that Lucas used for Star Wars had to be invented (fucking invented!!) by him and the crew who would later on become the founding members of Industrial Lights and Magic, the A-1 best special effects company in Hollywood today. George Lucas did the absolute best with what he had at the time and the movies that came out of it were fucking brilliant. From 1977-1983, I will admit that George Lucas could definitely be considered a genius. And he would’ve stayed that way. That is, if he didn’t pull the bullshit that he pulled in 1997.

In 1997, twenty years after the first Star Wars movie came out, George Lucas decides to re-release the movies. Only this time, they’re cleaned up and re-cut with new effects and new scenes. Now, I always find the expression if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it to be one of the best cornpone expressions ever simply because it’s true; if there isn’t something wrong with whatever, don’t try to improve it. George Lucas, obviously not a fan of old-timey expressions, didn’t pay any attention to the one I just mentioned because he tried to improve three movies that didn’t need to be improved at all. He took Episode IV: A New Hope and inserted a bunch of scenes that didn’t need to be there (such as the infamous Jabba the Hutt scene), put in a bunch of effects that were unnecessary (overly detailed camera pans and other Michael Bay-esque bullshit cinematic wizardry), and chopped Han Solo’s balls off (in the original A New Hope, Han Solo, after being threated by Greedo, that green bounty hunter who confronts Han in the Mos Eisley Cantina shortly after his meeting with Luke and Obi-Wan, quietly unholsters his laser blaster and non-chalantly blows Greedo away and walks out of the cantina, flipping the bartender a coin and uttering “Sorry for the mess.” Han Solo, just by this act alone, is definitely recognized by the audience as one bad, space pirate motherfucker. In the 1997 version of the movie, however, fuckin’ Greedo shoots first, misses, and Han then returns fire, which makes Han look like he’s defending himself instead of aggressively dispatching a lowlife bounty hunter for no reason other than the fact that he annoyed Han. In other words, the 1997 version kind of made Han Solo out to be a pussy, which he ain’t. But I’m digressing). Lucas also inserted the same sort of worthless crap into the other two movies, again fixing what wasn’t broken. A genius wouldn’t have done this. A genius probably also wouldn’t have made episodes I, II, and III the way Lucas did either.

In 1999, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is released and fans are frothing at the bit for something that has been the talk of speculation for years. The hype is through the fucking roof. The trailers look stunning. And the actual movie, well, the actual movie is…a complete piece of shit. Everything’s shot against a green screen, one of the main characters, Jar Jar Binks, is annoying enough to make random geeks personally edit him out of the movie later on, the acting is on par with that of a high school play, and it absolutely does not live up to the original three movies at all. In 1999, George Lucas shat the bed and the audience had to lay in it while Lucas raked in fucking millions. Or, hell, billions for all I know (actually, it probably was billions by the time the two subsequent movies came out. Which were – pretty much – just as god awful as the first one, by the by). This all begs the question: why? Why did Lucas fuck up his magnum opus? How did he take one of the best concepts of all time and actually manage to make it nearly unwatchable? The best answer to this question, in my opinion, is to explain how episodes I, II, and III should’ve been made.

My friend Brian and I were talking one day a couple years back and somehow we came to the conclusion that The Phantom Menace (episode I), Attack of the Clones (episode II), and Revenge of the Sith (episode III) sucked ass because they were nothing like the original movies. What I mean by this is that, like I said before, 95% of the newer movies were shot against a green screen, the acting was horrible, and Lucas himself directed episodes I, II, and III. If Lucas were really a genius, he would’ve followed the same pattern that made the original movies such a success: A) used as few green screen shots as possible and make huge, elaborate sets – and shot on-location – like he did for the original movies, B) vetted and obtained well-trained actors (to their credit, Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor are A-list actors but they simply weren’t used properly; it ain’t their fault the direction sucked), and C) gotten other directors to direct the second and third – if not all – movies (Lucas only directed Episode IV; Empire and Jedi were directed by Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, respectively). If Lucas had done that, I can almost guarantee that the newer movies wouldn’t have been as horrible as they were. But, hey, this isn’t what Lucas wanted and it’s always about what Lucas wants, right?

George Lucas obviously has a vision, nobody can argue that, the guy has enough vision to fill, well, a galaxy far, far away. What I can argue is that George Lucas’ vision has one mission: to please George Lucas, not the audience. If a genius saw that the audience was happy with the original Star Wars movies, they never would’ve been re-touched. A genius simply would’ve left them alone and made other movies, which Lucas actually did until the technology got to the point where he could take that technology and use it to take a steaming dump all over the originals because he was less than thrilled with them. I mean, I get it, in Lucas’ eyes, the movies weren’t perfect, they weren’t exactly as he envisioned them. But once the product is out there and everybody likes it, is it really up to him anymore? I mean, if the movies were being complained about constantly, that’s one thing but everybody liked the original Star Wars movies, nobody was screaming for a change. Lucas made the changes he wanted to satisfy what I can only imagine is a gigantic fucking ego. He never once thought about the audience, how they’d respond. This is exactly why the re-touched originals and the newer movies sucked balls; Lucas thought about his vision in his eyes, he never thought about his vision in the eyes of the audience. A genius, especially an artistic genius, always stops to consider the audience because, let’s face it, if an artist expects people to shell out hard-earned money for his or her art, an artistic genius makes sure that it’s well fucking worth it.

I’m a HUGE Star Wars fan. I love those original movies. I’ve literally watched them dozens of times and they are some of the best movies I’ve ever seen. And every time a new Star Wars tale is introduced into the world, whether a movie, a cartoon, or a comic book, I always give it some consideration because the Star Wars universe has always fascinated me. And let’s face it, that universe is the product of one man: George Lucas. He gave birth to the entire thing. And that’s something that only a few people have ever been able to do well. But the term genius is thrown around way too much nowadays. George Lucas isn’t really a genius. He’s a guy who came up with a genius concept but his ego got in the way and pretty much fucked things up, which simply isn’t an act of genius. In other words, the Force was strong with George Lucas before he turned to the Dark Side.