Speculation What if Lucas is a Genius!?!?!

No doubt. Star Wars, Indy, Pixar, ILM, THX/Skywalker Sound...list goes on.

He helped create the modern blockbuster. Yeah I think he's a genius in that regard.

So you think that after 2005, when he said he was done with making Star Wars movies and that everything he had to say about it had been said... something he reiterated in 2012 when he sold the company, matters LESS than some conceptual notions he had about 7-9 in the late 70s and possibly early 80s?

What you are delivering is called subjective deduction. What I'm discussing is objective analysis based on what the man has said over the last decade. I take him at his word.

I, for one, think that he was being facetious with his comment earlier this year. He sold his company for $4B; that's not a decision one makes overnight, and it's not even the type of business deal that happens overnight. I suspect that it was already in the works then, and I'm guessing he was just having a laugh.

Definitely. Trash the man all you want, but he has done a great service to the film industry and that cannot and should not be forgotten.

I look at it like this:

George Lucas is to films/movies like the Beatles and Elvis were to modern music. And when I say Beatles AND Elvis, I mean both! (Lucas is that good). The point I'm trying to make is the world has never (and maybe never) see the likes of another Beatles or Elvis ever again. Same thing as we may never see a George Lucas again. Sure their were OTHER good artists during the time of the Beatles and Elvis, but none of them had the world/cultural changing effect that these guys did.

Sure "Maroon 5" is a very popular band/artist these days. They are always in Billboards top 5, they make millions and are loved by millions, but they will never be the Beatles or have the impact the Beatles had. Sure Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams are popular directors, but they are NO Lucas, and they will NEVER have the impact Lucas had.

And as far as "Disney" goes, if we are still using the "music" analogy: Disney is the Capital Records in this situation. They are big and powerful, but they are not the "creative force". Again Capital Records with all their money back in the day could "back" or "promote" a "Beatles like band", but they would never "be the Beatles"..

Maybe, but your analogy cuts both ways. No doubt both the Beatles and Elvis were talented, but also no doubt there was more than talent involved in their success. To a great degree, they were simply the right people in the right place at the right time.

So was Lucas. Star Wars is a good movie - no doubt about that. But it wasn't so good that we can say that the cultural phenomenon it became is attributable simply to how good a movie it was, any more than Beatlemania was attributable to how good an album With The Beatles was. Yes, it was a good movie, but it was also very much the right movie at the right time.

This is kind of hard for people under 40 to remember, but in 1977, this country seemed in many ways to be in even worse shape than it is now. A lot had happened - JFK, Vietnam, Watergate, the social upheavals of the 1960s, and so on - that shook people's faith in a lot of things that had seemed really solid. We were very much culturally and morally adrift at the time - people were disillusioned, cynical, untrusting, and unsure what to believe in. Lucas dropped into the middle of that situation a story of simplicity and moral clarity. It was simple without being condescending, moral without lecturing, and it simultaneously was futuristic and looked back to simpler times.

It was exactly what people needed.

Look, great science fiction has never really been about the future. It's always been allegory for the past and present - a reflection of the fears we have now, and a guess as to how we might face them. That's why the best science fiction stories have always been the ones that had relevance to the times in which they were created. Much could be said, for example, about Star Trek as a Cold War allegory, or the ways in which The Matrix dealt with some of the fears we faced at the dawn of the internet age (and maybe still do).

So now the question: If Star Wars wants to be transcendent science fiction, and not just a set of whiz-bang space adventure stories, what does it need to do in order to be resonate with what we face now? Or, alternately, to resonate with something timeless?

And look, there's nothing wrong with being a whiz-bang space adventure story. If that's all the sequels did, but they did that competently, I'd consider the money I dropped at the box office well-spent. But yeah, I'd still be a little bit unsatisfied, because I'd still want Star Wars to be a little more than that.

Wow, you absolutely nailed it. I was born in the year of Star Wars and in Europe, but I have never heard a better interpretation of the epic sucess of Star Wars. The only thing I might add that secured it's sucess and elevated it even more, was Lucas's deal to get the merchandising rights. Back in my days there wasn't a single kid who didn't have any Star Wars toys and due to that reverently watched the movies so often that it imbedded itself deep in our consciousness...

The shelf over the entrance to my kitchen. The toys are all originals. (Transformers are to the left of these, GI Joes are to the right).

True. What George did to Star Wars can't take away everything he gave to the world. I definitely come down on the side of genius.

That right there makes him a freaking genius. Lucas took less money in exchange for merchandising rights and the studios thought "SUCKER". Lucas laughed all the way to the bank.

Fox let Lucas pass up an additional $500,000 directing fee in return for keeping licensing and merchandising rights for himself -- a decision that would cost the studio billions...over 20 billion over the life of the franchise. HA! GENIUS!

Well said, "appropriate to the character"

This makes some sense, and this is possibly why the PT was deemed a "failure" by some. I feel (story wise) the PT was very close to the OT. With what you said before, then the PT was not right for the "times". The PT was not right for the times.

I believe Star Wars should always be timeless. It is a fairytale, and any good fairytale does not need to be modernized or gimmicked up to be great. I know it will be hard for writers and directors to stick to this style. It's not easy, but if they pull it off they could make a great ST..

Lucas is the emperor.

The fear that the world is not real?

The fear of what some of the dark sides of technology might be, or some of the darker places it may take us. The reason that the Borg are probably the best Star Trek villains ever (with the exception, of course, of Khan) is that they largely played off the same fear.

I used to like the Borg until I found out they're a complete ripoff of the Cybermen from Doctor Who.

But in the Matrix that's about the machines taking over, just as it was in the Terminator franchise. It's nothing new and is old news in science fiction by 1999.

Also with 2001 which came out in 1968 where an A.I. takes control of the ship and wreaks havoc. Probably earlier movies than that.

Uhmmm... and? Here's a news flash: Very little is new. Anywhere. Ever. In any genre. The fact that someone had talked about those issues before doesn't make them not relevant after that, and it doesn't prevent The Matrix's treatment of it from being particularly so.

Anyhow, the Terminator's version of "machines could be bad" and The Matrix's are very different from each other and explore very different issues. I mean, if we're going to say that two works are basically the same simply because they have some extremely broad version of that theme to them, then we'd have to say that both The Matrix and The Terminator is basically the same as Hard Times, the novel about industrialism that Charles Dickens wrote in 1854.

It's like saying that Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Macross, Red Dwarf, Legend of Galactic Heroes, and Dark Star are all basically the same because they're all about people traveling around in spaceships, or that Looper, Somewhere In Time, Primer, and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure are all basically the same because they're all about time travel.

And thus it has little if anything to do with the so-called "dawn of the Internet age" as alleged. As such it is no more germane to ( real-world ) 1999 than, say, the films 2001 or The Terminator.

Such as?

Sure it does. Again, it's the specific treatment of it, not the general theme. Hard Times was a treatment of the general theme that was relevant to 1854, The Terminator to 1984, and The Matrix to 1999. Just like how From The Earth To The Moon was a treatment of the general theme of people traveling around in spaceships that was relevant to 1865, Star Trek to 1967, Star Wars to 1977, and so on.

If we're going to create a vastly broad theme like "the development of new technology could prove to have some disastrous downsides", well, that could include everything from Gulliver's Travels (written in 1726) to Frankenstein (written in 1818) to Brave New World (written in 1936) to Sword Art Online (released this year). Even the narrower theme of "our technological creations could turn against us" could include everything from Rossum's Universal Robots to Wargames to Ghost in the Shell. The thing is, the broader you make a theme, the more stuff, and the more different stuff, will fit under its umbrella. Eventually, you could end up with a theme like "a person or group of people struggle to overcome a challenge", which is so broad that just about every story fits inside it.

How?

Well, in how much detail do you want me to explain the plot of The Matrix to you?

Again, if you're going to insist that two stories are essentially the same just because they both fit into a broad theme, you can do that. But seriously - I could think of a broad theme that I could use to group any two stories in - that doesn't mean they're similar in any appreciable way. Both The Master and Margarita and Little Nicky deal with the devil coming to Earth and creating havoc in the lives of people around him. Does that make them essentially similar stories? Both Alien and Pride and Prejudice deal with one woman's attempts to secure a happy ending for herself despite tremendous challenges placed in her way that stack the odds against her. Does that make them essentially similar stories? Both Avatar and Borat deal with someone coming a long distance to study a foreign culture that they misunderstand at first, but come to admire as they find themselves immersed in it. Does that make them essentially similar stories?

Exactly.