The Guardian has a concise post about how George Lucas’ obsession with making his epic shinier and prettier more or less killed it’s warmth and life. Nothing new, really, as it’s kind of hard for anyone without a vested interest in the Star Wars story to deny that all the rejiggering over the last decade or so has slowly but surely drained the excitement from the marketing juggernaut’s bloated corpse, but this piece is well written enough to be an interesting read.

Thirty years later, the ramifications of this re-emphasis on technological exhibitionism are now apparent. Where the original Lucas trilogy balanced its visual excess with appealing pop culture characterisation - a mythic narrative and numerous cinematic and generic tropes - the recent trilogy, opening with The Phantom Menace (1999), foregoes characterisation and narrative in favour of spectacle alone. Like Jackson’s bloated King Kong (2005) or Verbinski’s interminable Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), they are vapid confections, eye-candy for a dumbstruck generation intoxicated by CGI.

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