Imperial Light & Magic
While the six part limited documentary series may have been intended to promote the movie company, it also chronicles a few of the dark sides of a beleaguered, rag-tag band of independent rebels engaged in open conflict with a vastly-superior enemy.
I never quite got over the high-handed yet cowardly exclusion of Han Dykstra from the fold, and find it awfully tempting to ascribe the leading and supportive, heroic (Rose) and villainous roles intermittently to people I don’t know (because I wasn’t a member of their exclusive little old-boyband of longhaired dweebs), but whether we’re scrutinizing the cruel & inconsiderate red-pen marking-up and mutilation of original art by Darth Lucas (“not much of a student”, “no artist”, “not a good writer” & didn’t direct much despite a lot of credit[s]) or reliance on the rise of an all-pervading digital alternative to the obsolete empire of practical and analog special effects, or suddenly sentencing the shops to carbonite hibernation, the sense of something awful and inevitable haunts the GENIUS laurel wreath with which Providence favored George, who comes off in the documentary (in my opinion) as a persistent spoiled brat who needed the Cinematic Digital Revolution in order to produce five flat, defective imitations of the first film, the holes in which grow larger every time I go back for a refreshing sneer. For example: The laws of physics and ballistics interfered with the climactic killing of the Death Star, so those laws were suspended.
The seedy and arbitrary fabrication of artificial suspense hasn’t survived 45 years of disinfecting sunlight any more than CGI really replaces craftsmanship in storytelling, and the jubilant feeling I radiated while driving home from San Francisco’s Coronet Theater in 1977 won’t be replicated by George Lucas, regardless of the mythic force to which he may at last resort.
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