I know I know but I love The Phantom Menace and despite everyone’s very reasonable objections I will probably see it a few more dozen times and will continue to see it after that well into my 80’s, and I couldn’t care less if George borrowed his themes from the Bible, from the Martians, from Etruscans, from his home town in Modesto or just plain made stuff up to cover up bad acting in between sketchily put together scenes with bad CG. Because artists are put on this earth to steal and forge new memories, new meanings and new myths from the old ones. This is how Picasso made up brand new form of art – he stole everything african art had going for them in terms of weird eyes and noses, longish proportions and fat vanishing fingers.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1999/02/star-wars
Heady and overwrought sentiments to apply to a science-fiction serial, perhaps, but for a considerable chunk of the American population Star Wars is no mere science-fiction serial. In fact, there’s always been something rather flawed and off-key about the traditional adult take on Star Wars, which is that the existing trilogy is not so much an original work as a teched-up assemblage of references: to Flash Gordon, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford,Metropolis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Greek mythology, King Arthur, Triumph of the Will, etc. For those of us who were kids when the first three movies came out—those of us who, presumably, made the trilogy the huge, hulking cultural milestone it is—Star Wars was wholly, mind-blowingly original. We weren’t hip to the Hidden Fortress borrowings or the supposed whiz-bang retro-camp elements that Lucas had worked in; not for us the high-Cahiers musings of Pauline Kael, who wrote, “Lucas has got the tone of bad movies down pat: you never catch the actors deliberately acting badly, they just seem to be bad actors, on contract to Monogram or Republic.” We simply bought the myth—Lucas, that presumptuous geek auteur, had succeeded in his “conscious attempt at creating new myths” for children.
