Star Wars: The Force Awakens
may be well on its way to breaking every box office record on the planet, but not everyone is thrilled with what JJ Abrams did with the film. It might be hard to notice amidst an avalanche of nostalgic drenched praise, but a number of critics have lambasted the film for shoddy character development, subpar dialogue, and an all-too familiar plot.
And recently joining the chorus of naysayers is none other than George Lucas, the mastermind behind the original trilogy. During a wide-ranging and nearly hour-long interview with Charlie Rose, Lucas lamented the fact that
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“They looked at the stories, and they said, ‘We want to make something for the fans’….They decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing,” Lucas explained. “They weren’t that keen to have me involved anyway — but if I get in there, I’m just going to cause trouble, because they’re not going to do what I want them to do. And I don’t have the control to do that anymore, and all I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, ‘Okay, I will go my way, and I’ll let them go their way.'”
Of course, it’s not easy to feel bad for Lucas seeing as how he sold Lucasfilm to
As for his objections to the new Star Wars film, Lucas echoes a point that a number of the film’s critics have raised, namely that
“They wanted to do a retro movie,” Lucas said. “I don’t like that. Every movie I work very hard to make them completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships, make it new.”
Lucas goes so far as to loosely draw parallels between Disney’s profit-oriented approach with the new Star Wars movie and the wave of 80s Star Wars knockoffs that engulfed Hollywood in the late 70s and 80s.
“Everybody went out and made spaceship movies and they were all horrible and they all lost tons of money,” Lucas explained. “And you say, there’s more to it than that. You just can’t go out and do spaceships.”
Lucas’ full interview with Rose can be viewed below via Hulu.
