Hit Me Baby One More Time

Tyler Cowen thinks that two more Star Wars films, even direct-to-TV cheapies, would be “better than nothing.” Ross Douthat isn’t so sure:

Is what's almost sure to be yet another bad Star Wars movie really "better" than no more Star Wars at all? How you answer this question, I think, depends on whether bad sequels actually reduce your enjoyment of an excellent original. If they don't - if your love for The Empire Strikes Back is unaffected by your loathing for Attack of the Clones - then "better than nothing" makes sense, because after all there's always the infintesimal chance that Lucas will surprise us and make something halfway decent. But if you're like me and find unhappy memories of, say, Matrix Revolutions creeping in when you're watching the original Matrix, then nothing is better than a something that has a ninety-five percent chance of being God-awful.

Ignoring that Lucas’ announcement that he’ll make these films is only slightly more reliable than Quentin Tarantino’s idea that he’ll wait 20 years and produce a sequel to Kill Bill about Vernita Green’s daughter (the one who watched her mom die at the beginning of Volume 1) taking revenge on The Bride, I think this is more or less accurate. I’m of the camp that doesn’t see much harm in bad sequels, except insofar as a bad sequel is a lost opportunity to expand a series in a positive way.

And that, I think, relates to the more important thing to consider when asking whether you want Lucas producing two more Star Wars movies—whether you think that’s a smart use of Lucas’ limited time. Do we really want as talented a visualist and storyteller—recent work not withstanding—as Lucas wasting his efforts on low-rent TV fare? I don’t, especially not when he’s stated an interest in going back to working on smaller, less commercially accessible films like those he started with.

Lucas’ finest picture, without question, is THX-1138. It’s really one of the best science fiction films of all time--literate, thoughtful, complex, visually inventive, politically aware--but because of those things, it’s also a fairly difficult movie, and it certainly lacks the easy appeal of his later work. Like a lot of his 1970s contemporaries, Lucas started out as a talented, quirky guy who didn’t care about pleasing audiences, but he quickly found that not only did refusing to care not pay the bills, but that, despite no particular interest in creating audience-friendly fluff, he was actually pretty talented at making films that audiences did love.

So he gave up on his dreams of defiance and independence, a perfectly reasonable thing to do considering the star-destroyer sized loads of cash he stood to make. He still had the opportunity to innovate technically, and he ripped off the old sci-fi serials enough that the story elements pretty much worked. That’s why, I think, the Star Wars prequels were so gutless: He never really cared for the property the way his fans did, and audience adoration has never been a particular goal of his (though he's been glad to take their money).

No, Lucas cares about moviemaking gizmos and mechanistic imagery packed so dense with detail that you can only really appreciate it on a giant screen with a DVD player and a quick-to-trigger pause-button finger. He cares about finding ways to put his camera into every position, to give it limitless scope and range of motion; he wants to awe his audiences, to impress them, maybe even to entrance them--but he’s far less concerned with involving them.

And that’s what I want to see him do: to go back to making movies he’s passionate about, regardless of whether or not anyone else is. Lord knows he’s got the money for it, and that’s even better. Lucas is the only person alive who could plausibly make $100 million science-fiction art films. Perhaps it’s all selfishness on my part, but I’ll gladly fork over eleven bucks—and then some—for that. The question isn't whether I want, as they say, more, more more--it's more of what. And I think it's pretty easy to agree that, in this case, Star Wars wore out its welcome a long time ago.