But then Hornaday does something that every disillusioned Star Wars fan has been tempted to do, during a long Dooku night of the soul: She reads the prequels back into the original trilogy:
Similarly, the "Star Wars" space opera consistently demonstrated Lucas's limitations as a storyteller, even as it tapped into the mass audience's most fundamental hunger for archetype and myth. As refreshing as the initial 1977 installment was -- an escapist, retro thrill ride in the midst of a grittily realist era -- the "Star Wars" movies were more about plot than story, with Lucas far more interested in mechanics, spectacle and marketing than capturing the beat of the human heart. (Although the difference between plot and story may seem arcane, it's quite crucial: The plot is merely a sequence of events, whereas a story limns those events' deeper motivation and meaning. The plot gets characters from point A to point B; the story makes us care.)
One need only watch Hayden Christensen awkwardly declaim in Lucas's last directorial outing, "Revenge of the Sith," to be reminded of how important actors like Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness were to giving the famously leaden "Star Wars" dialogue even a shred of believability. Once "Star Wars" became a multi-billion-dollar economy unto itself, when the movies increasingly served not "the story" but the games and the sound systems and the effects business and the lunch boxes, Lucas's weakness became his greatest strength. Who needed story when the audience would be satisfied with spectacle? He got rich, and we got Jar Jar Binks.
Now, look: Certainly the original Star Wars movies were not exactly masterpieces of storytelling on par with The Godfather and Chinatown. Certainly their dialogue was not up to the standard of, say, All About Eve. But as far as sci-fi blockbusters go, they were pretty damn good - I know that I cared about what happened to Han and Leia, and to Luke and his heavy-breathing father - and they were about, oh, seventy times better than Attack of the Clones and its companion pieces. Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness made a difference, sure, but Ewan MacGregor, Liam Neeson, Christopher Lee and yes, even Natalie Portman aren't exactly chopped liver, and they couldn't do anything with Lucas's craptastic prequel scripts. (And while the whinging Hayden Christensen was overmatched as Anakin Skywalker, the original trilogy had Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in lead roles, and they were hardly master thespians.) It's fine to say that Lucas's weaknesses were present, in embryo, in the original trilogy - and especially in the mediocre, weakly-plotted Return of the Jedi, whose Ewoks anticipated some of the worst excesses of the prequels. But we shouldn't let the dreadfulness of the late Lucas obscure the fact that the early Lucas birthed a pop-culture classic: If we do, the Gungans will have won.
