I can die happy now. He really liked the movie. It was the most important review to me.
Gareth Edwards’ reaction to George Lucas seeing Rogue One
george lucas
Can we not just enjoy Star Wars as a movie instead of referencing it to political events?
Nope!
You can ignore the political context, if you want, but there’s no reason why other people should. Star Wars is and has always been intensely political.
The original trilogy was written in the context of the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War, and intended to resonate in those terms. The prequels are deeply concerned with the Bush administration. Lucas once corrected a NYT reporter who scornfully described Cheney as Darth Vader: “Anakin Skywalker is a promising young man who is turned to the dark side by an older politician and becomes Darth Vader. George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the Emperor.”
And even if Star Wars weren’t obviously relating to specific eras of United States politics, the power of art is in connection to our lives and the world around us, not in some sterile isolation. People are never going to enjoy art in a contextless vacuum, and it’s both absurd and unfair to expect them to.
“A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars…I figured I couldn’t make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you’d have essentially a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings…a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire…The empire is like America ten years from now, after Nixonian gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots aiding rebel groups and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a “total control” police state was welcomed by the people. Then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs.“ -Lucas
Also, Revenge of the Sith was considered so anti-Bush, people actually boycotted it!
Early one morning during the crisis, global markets were plunging. Hobson doesn’t usually focus on day-to-day fluctuations, but this day she was staring at the TV, hyperventilating. She and Lucas always talk at 7:30 A.M. Chicago time when they’re in different cities. “George said, ‘What do you know better than anyone else because you live in Chicago?’ ” she recalls. “I said, ‘George, I have no idea. I’m not interested in mind games.’ He said, ‘The one thing you have in Chicago is snowstorms. What do you know about snowstorms? In a snowstorm, when you’re trying to get from one place to another place, you never look up at the storm. You watch your feet. If you look up at the storm you will fall.’ ” Hobson says, “I went to work, and thought, We must stay focused and watch our feet. We must just do the work.”
[x]
is there a name for the phenomenon where an up-and-coming artist creates a really inspiring work with radical, progressive themes, and it becomes popular, and they’re pulled to create more work, but as they become more successful they start leaning more to the conservative side and it almost seems like they never understood what made their original work so important in the first place?
I mean, you may have suspected this from the title of this blog, but I disagree wholeheartedly about Lucas being included in that list of tags. The original Star Wars trilogy is white as hell. Male as hell, too. Looking back on it, it’s actually discomfortingly white in all honesty? I really think that. The first Star Wars may have been progressive in terms of storytelling and technology, but that was about it.
But flash forward sixteen years and the prequels are quite a bit better: there’s more women (Padme, Shmi, the handmaidens, assorted queens) there’s many more men of colour in prominent roles (Mace Windu, Bail Organa, the clones, Jango Fett, Boba Fett revealed to have been a Maori man behind that helmet) and whilst things weren’t perfect they were certainly improved. Which is what progressive means I suppose.
Fast forward a few more years and Lucas financed, produced, and hired the right people for Red Tails, in his own words “an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all” which is a faaaaar cry from the original Star Wars trilogy which has precisely two speaking roles in it, I’m pretty sure, that aren’t white. (Lando, and a pilot. Not sure whether to count JEJ doing the voice of a white character.)
-fast forward a few more years and he’s stopped making movies, but he is working on anti-Trump ads and donating vast sums of money to Black and Latino filmmakers and other progressive causes. I bet a lot of that is Mellody Hobson’s influence, but still, Lucas definitely didn’t start out with progressive movies and become more conservative! He went the exact opposite way.
you make several really good points.
is there a name for the phenomenon where you percieve an artist’s earlier work as being more progressive, but upon further inspection, they’ve actually been making strides over the course of their career, and the supposed perfection of their previous content boils down to mainly nostalgia?
heh thanks!
(Star Wars Tinted Glasses? I have them too.)
Everyone bear in mind though that I think Lucas became more progressive throughout his career/later life because of the people around him mostly : his best friend (Spielberg) is possibly the most prominent Jewish man in Hollywood, and his wife is one of the few Black women behind the scenes of what we all know is an incredibly white-male-dominated industry. (Mellody Hobson is legit amazing, incidentally.) And he has a child with her. But I think the mark of progression in anyone is being receptive to the people around you and changing once you meet people. I’d have been really, really disappointed if he hadn’t used his position as Incredibly Famous White Male Billionaire to do at least something, be it donating lots of money or anything really, but luckily he did. (Otherwise this blog probably wouldn’t exist.)
suffice it to say, I would actually consider it a really Good Thing if Lucas went back and edited some actors of colour into the super-white original Star Wars, there would be so many opportunities there, but a) he’s probably not allowed to edit them anymore now that Disney owns them and b) this is the same fandom which has a large amount of ‘fans’ screaming about political correctness whenever Finn does anything, so maybe that wouldn’t work so well in the long run :/
is there a name for the phenomenon where an up-and-coming artist creates a really inspiring work with radical, progressive themes, and it becomes popular, and they’re pulled to create more work, but as they become more successful they start leaning more to the conservative side and it almost seems like they never understood what made their original work so important in the first place?
I mean, you may have suspected this from the title of this blog, but I disagree wholeheartedly about Lucas being included in that list of tags. The original Star Wars trilogy is white as hell. Male as hell, too. Looking back on it, it’s actually discomfortingly white in all honesty? I really think that. The first Star Wars may have been progressive in terms of storytelling and technology, but that was about it.
But flash forward sixteen years and the prequels are quite a bit better: there’s more women (Padme, Shmi, the handmaidens, assorted queens) there’s many more men of colour in prominent roles (Mace Windu, Bail Organa, the clones, Jango Fett, Boba Fett revealed to have been a Maori man behind that helmet) and whilst things weren’t perfect they were certainly improved. Which is what progressive means I suppose.
Fast forward a few more years and Lucas financed, produced, and hired the right people for Red Tails, in his own words “an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all” which is a faaaaar cry from the original Star Wars trilogy which has precisely two speaking roles in it, I’m pretty sure, that aren’t white. (Lando, and a pilot. Not sure whether to count JEJ doing the voice of a white character.)
-fast forward a few more years and he’s stopped making movies, but he is working on anti-Trump ads and donating vast sums of money to Black and Latino filmmakers and other progressive causes. I bet a lot of that is Mellody Hobson’s influence, but still, Lucas definitely didn’t start out with progressive movies and become more conservative! He went the exact opposite way.
The anti-Trump ad by George Lucas and Bill Bradley.
It didn’t work, but…thanks for trying.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
The anti-Trump ad by George Lucas and Bill Bradley.
It didn’t work, but…thanks for trying.
(Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/)
A new political ad conceived by George Lucas offers a Darth Vader-like Donald Trump
A new political ad conceived by George Lucas offers a Darth Vader-like Donald Trump
I know this was from before Trump actually *spits* became President, but I can’t believe the media will so happy elevate Donald Trump just to knock the Star Wars prequels/Lucas’s filmmaking skills.
I mean, what?!