The Delusion of George Lucas

George Lucas, while in France for the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, mentioned to a Fox News reporter that he'd like to do a fifth Indy movie: "I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie," he said. "I can see it working out." This despite continual assurances from Lucas for the past couple months that fans will hate Crystal Skull.

Yep, you read that right – while press junkets for the film have been surprisingly few and far between, whenever Lucas has had the opportunity to talk up the film, he's been doing the exact opposite:

The fans think it's gonna be the Second Coming. And it's not the Second Coming. They've already written the story [in their heads], and lemme tell ya, it's not that story. So they're going to be very disappointed. I went through this with Phantom Menace. Believe me, I've been there, I've done it, I know exactly the way they react. And they're very vocal about these things. We're not gonna have adoring fans sending us e-mails saying how much they loved the movie. We're gonna have a bunch of angry people saying, "You're a bunch of a--holes, you should never have done this. You've ruined my life forever. I loved Indiana Jones so much and now it's ruined."

That's from an Entertainment Weekly joint interview with Steven Spielberg, who followed up Lucas's comments with a shell-shocked "Uh, he needs to speak for himself here."

While Lucas does touch on the real-enough issue of Internet "fanboys" being impossible to please, his comments are frightening proof of his own blindness. Simply put, he refuses to accept that the Star Wars prequels were bad movies. Nope, they weren't bad, it's just the fans' fault – the people who didn't like them were just a bunch of nitpickers with unrealistic expectations.

Imagine that kind of self-deception.

You can go on sites like Ain't It Cool News right now and find plenty of comments trashing Batman Begins or Spider-Man 2, for example. Somehow the attitudes didn't stop those movies from being considered successful on all fronts – with critics, audiences, the box office, DVD sales, however you want to tabulate it. Sure, some fanboys will always thrive on negativity, but their moaning will not stop inherently good films from achieving success.

While all three Star Wars prequels were wildly successful in terms of box office dollars, they left such a bad taste in audiences' mouths because they were a betrayal not just to fans but to the laws of filmmaking – i.e., the need to give us a good story, well told. Plot, and especially characterization and dialogue, were secondary to Lucas's urge to make the movies showcases upon which he could play around with new digital technology, and it showed. Painfully.

I'm not objecting to Lucas's exploration of new technologies, even though his penchant for using digital sound stages for everything instead of real sets and locations only makes the performances worse and the visuals look faker. (That's a topic for another post; to get some idea of what I mean, read the rest of the EW article.) I'm objecting to Lucas the screenwriter writing a horrible script. I don't need to make a laundry list of atrocious lines, or explain how those undeliverable lines begat atrocious performances. I don't need to explain why the concept of midichlorians de-mystifies what was so awesome about the Force and is a perfect microcosm for what Lucas did with the entire prequel trilogy. You've seen the films; you saw it for yourself. Here's the first line of the opening crawl of the original 1977 Star Wars:

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.

And here's the first line of The Phantom Menace's opening crawl:

Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.

Huh? It's not hard to spot where things went wrong. But you heard the man: it's not his fault the movies were received poorly; it was the fans' fault for receiving them poorly.

So where does this leave Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Luckily, it leaves it in the capable hands of Steven Spielberg, the director; David Koepp (Mission: Impossible, War of the Worlds) wrote the final script after no one could agree on previous scripts by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can), and others. Lucas only came up with the concept of Crystal Skulls and served as an executive producer – which doesn't mean much other than that he originally created Indiana Jones with Spielberg and got to visit the set whenever he wanted.

I don't know if the movie is good or not, but if it is, I'd love to see Lucas trying to rationalize it getting a good reception. Will he realize that unlike himself, his friend Spielberg hasn't forgotten the importance of characters, dialogue, and honest-to-goodness stunt and locations work? The unfortunate truth: of course he won't.

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

**Read more articles by Michael Dance**

Comments

[Mike]

From what I understand people will like INDY 4 if they loved the crappy TV show, but if they liked the movies, its going to suck.

I have read several reviews already using Shia Lebutt and Jar Jar Binks in the same sentence.

Giant bugs? Zombies? Aliens? Good God Lucas you're insane. Most reviews seem to suggest Spielberg's presence is 'missing' and that has way too much like a TV episode with too much dialog explaining everything as if you were a 2 year old... (Sounds like Lucas to me...) Another Lucasfilm COMMERCIAL.

[Michael Dance]

Well I've seen the film, and you should probably give the film a chance as it has neither giant bugs nor zombies.

If you're out to hate LaBeouf from the very start, that's your perogative, but comparing him to Jar Jar is way off. He's a fun addition.

The movie's far from perfect, but it's entertaining, and the Spielberg imprint is very much there.