George Lucas tries to fool the viewer into thinking this is art but art usually has heart behind it and this is a fairly shallow exercise that dresses up old ideas in new clothes, it’s Orwell’s 1984 bleached white. The idea of Lucas railing against a society that programs its citizens to be consumers is, these days, pretty ironic, this is the guy who makes Gordon Gekko look like a charity worker. Add a little to one line in the film and you pretty much get Lucas’ ideal world –
“Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more Star Wars DVDs now. Buy. And be happy.”
You can guess what I added I think. And he may well have said this one to Spielberg about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull –
“Remember, thrifty thinkers are always under budget.”
Am I being a bit hard on Lucas? Probably but I’ve given this film a try twice now, once when I was much younger and now in its shiny new Director’s Cut form (actually the DVD cover proclaims it The George Lucas Director’s Cut as if we were expecting someone else’s). That first time I could put my dislike down to the fact it lacked the bells and whistles I wanted from my science fiction back when I was in my teens, this time though I’m older and more open to an intelligent piece of SF, but spending ninety minutes watching Lucas do the directorial equivalent of navel gazing while wasting the talents of two fine actors is not my idea of fun.
