George Lucas

 

Yeah, I'm talking about Star Wars again...this will probably be the last one, but no promises. I guess that I'll be talking more about George Lucas actually. As the short film portrayed, I think that George has a fantastic imagination. No matter where he drew his inspiration for creating this narrative, the man made quite the enduring story.

But as much as I continue to enjoy the product of George Lucas' imagination, he should have found someone else to direct them. I can understand that with the first Star Wars that he would want to take the reins, but then he did have others direct ESB and ROTJ. And this worked really well, so why then did he decide to direct the prequels? These films have consistent strengths: beautiful score, sound, visuals, effects; they shaped worlds that couldn't possibly have been made during the 80s. But then the films had common weaknesses: writing, acting, both of which were his responsibility. The man is notorious for not giving his actors much direction to work with. Let's take Natalie Portman. I'm not saying she's necessarily a Meryl Streep, but she's not a bad actress. She was given some of the worst dialogue in the entire series. After discovering Vader's dark deeds, she replies with, “Anakin, you're breaking my heart.” Even as a 15 year old seeing Episode III in theaters, I thought that she should have had something better to say. When your character is written poorly, there's only so much you can do. That's George's fault. People are quick to blame a poor film on the actors, but who has the final say on casting decisions? Who wrote the part for the actors to play? Who is responsible for guiding the actors' performance to match with the unified vision of the film? In the case of Star Wars, it's George Lucas.