Even when George Lucas was on point and wholly invested in the films, Star Wars was always best when he wasn't writing or directing it. He never liked screenwriting, and never had an aptitude for it - and as a director, he made a great editor - but as a producer, he selected exactly the right people to convey his ideas on screen. Had he handed over script and direction duties to others more suited for it, the prequels might have been better films: at the very least, the dialogue would be less likely to have induced ice cream headaches in the poor actors trying to make it work on camera. But really, the problem was that Lucas had very different ideas to most fans regarding what Star Wars actually was. Last November, he told CBS Morning:
The issue was, ultimately, they looked at the stories and they said, 'We want to make something for the fans.' People don't actually realize it's actually a soap opera and it's all about family problems - it's not about spaceships. So they decided they didn't want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing so I decided, 'Fine.... I'll go my way, and I let them go their way.'
Im sure every Star Wars fan growing up with space wizards with laser swords teaming up with space pirates, space princesses and space aliens in space battles in space thought to themselves, no, what this franchise needs is to have the most fearsome villain in modern cinema reduced to a prattling little boy and a sulky teenager in love. SPACE GOALS. The sad fact is that an elderly man shouldnt be trying to write invigorating action drama for a family audience that hes at least three decades removed from. Now, who am I talking about here? A seventy-one-year-old, out of touch George Walton Lucas Jnr, or a seventy-year-old, out of touch Vincent Kennedy McMahon Jnr? The best thing that could possibly have happened for The Force Awakens was to have Lucas as far away from the movie as possible - and, thank God, he had no hand in it at all. Thats the reason for the glowing reviews and the same thing could happen for WWE with RAW and Smackdown if McMahon stepped away from the day to day booking and television production of the show. NXTs creative flair and brilliant character work shows what WWE could be capable of with red hot talent if McMahon and his homunculus Kevin Dunn werent anywhere near it. That could be RAW. That could be Smackdown. That could be WWE.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
