The fact is, whatever magic George Lucas created in the ‘70s and ‘80s, he could not have made an authentic Star Wars film by the late ‘90s. By that point, Star Wars was not what he thought it was. However insightful and talented they might be, no creator can ever truly appreciate their own work in the same way way that its audience does, in much the same way that no one person sees in the mirror what the rest of the world perceives. That’s just the nature of the difference between creation and consumption. Both sides have a completely different relationship with the work in question.
And as the years went on, it became increasingly clear that George saw only the flaws in the original trilogy. He didn’t see what we saw. He didn’t appreciate the films as glowing, cultural touchstones, full of vitality, humanity, exhilaration and joy. He saw them as imperfect technical exercises, as matte paintings in need of tidying up, of composite shots that would have been better in CG. It’s a long-stated axiom that no piece of art is ever finished, that the creator just finds a point at which they can lay down their futile perfectionism and step away. It’s a truthful one too. But George never stepped away. He tweaked, he revisited, he tinkered, and through both his interviews and his output – by way of the now-dominant, much maligned Special Edition trilogy – it became clear that he saw Star Wars primarily as a broken down fixer-upper, a machine to be repaired with spanners, screwdrivers, and polished, computer-generated green-screen work.
Going into the prequel trilogy with that mentality in charge, neither we nor the films had a chance. That became apparent as the three unfurled. It wasn’t Star Wars. It was a man long out of touch with Star Wars trying to emulate what he thought he remembered Star Wars had been, mechanically pastiching its image, but forgetting its soul, and building only a plastic façade, a superficial theme park recreation, in the process. It was a flashy, hollow and sad experience, and for all the naivety we had back then, those of us who were old enough could tell the difference immediately, even if we denied it for a little while.
Because we were naive back then. Back then, there had never been a bad Star Wars film. We had only ever known the original trilogy, and Star Wars had only ever been a sparkling, scintillating source of wonder and adventure. Star Wars was good. It was just good. It could not be bad. Another impossibility was the very idea of another Star Wars film even existing. We’d all been teased as children by that ‘Episode IV’ subtitle. We’d all spent years – decades, even – dreaming of the possibilities, soaking up the expanded universe through the books and games, excitedly debating how Anakin had gone wrong, how the empire had come to be, how old exactly Yoda was, and what had forced him into hiding. Episodes One to Three were folklore and myth long before they existed as tangible stories, and carried a power and a weight that tangible stories could not. Their announcement was, on two separate levels, a fairy tale become real.
2015 is nothing like 1999 was. We’ve had 15 years of bad Star Wars. We’ve had that direct, unbroken link to the original trilogy smothered by three misfiring impersonations. We aren’t naïve any more. So why are we losing our shit, a decade and a half older, wiser, and supposedly more cynical? Because The Force Awakens feels different. We’ve seen Star Wars done wrong. We know what that looks like now, and we appreciate what good Star Wars looks like all the more for it. We know clearly and instinctively what really matters, in a way that we never did before it was taken away from us. And The Force Awakens looks to be made of what matters.
