The Last Jedi turns Luke Skywalker into a sock puppet for half-baked subversive metacommentary that never really sounds like it should be coming from him of all people. The Force Awakens is a sequel to Return of the Jedi that barely bothers to reconcile itself with the major events-chiefly the Rebel victory over the Empire-of the movie it’s succeeding. But then the sequels are also weirdly careless with the canon. Disney rehired the old cast to further perpetuate the so-called Skywalker saga. The Force Awakens unveils yet another fleet of Space Nazis launching yet another Death Star. The sequels, in contrast, tried to have it both ways. He was right to pitch Star Wars to a new generation, on new terms, rather than rededicating himself to the old style. But Lucas was basically right to make The Phantom Menace a kids’ movie, as goofy as it is. There’s the uncanny writing, the flat characterizations, the iffy performances, the soapy tone, the absent-minded retcons. Lucas made many mistakes directing the prequels. It’s memorialized in the very first seconds of the very first trailer for The Phantom Menace: “Every generation has a legend.” There’s a peculiar wisdom in George Lucas’s direction of the Star Wars prequels.
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