I know hating on Lucas is all the rage these days, but it seems rather disingenuous to blame him for Christiansen's failures on camera. None of the other actors turned in the kind of bizarre, wooden deliveries Hayden did in Episodes II & III, and I thought Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan is phenomenal. The interaction between Hayden & George may not have worked out for the best, but clearly it wasn't a combination that had the same negative impact on every actor involved.
"When everywhere you walk smells like dogshit, it's time to check your shoes." All of the actors turned out terrible performances - Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan sounds whiny and panicked half the time, which I never realized until I saw the TCW Obi-Wan and realized that the tone Lucas was trying to achieve was 'snarky and sarcastic'.
I've been hating on Lucas since Episode 1 released - in fact, I can pinpoint the
exact moment I started hating Lucas: about one-eighth of the way through the podracing sequence where, in a crowded premiere, i stood up in the theater and shouted "GO POD RACER GO!!" Nothing he has done or said since has convinced me of anything other than a man completely out of his depth.
So I recently stumbled onto The Clone Wars behind the scenes stuff, and found out that
almost every one of the arcs that I hated had Lucas' wangprints all over them. "let's remake Godzilla and King Kong!" Lucas' idea. "Let's send 3P0 and R2D2 on a Gulliver's Travel style hallucination journey!" Lucas' idea. "What if Jar Jar and Mace Windu teamed up to rescue a princess that, hehee, fell in love with Jar Jar!" Lucas' idea. "What if the Mon Calamari needed the only other aquatic species we've ever seen as warriors to rescue them!" Lucas' idea. "What if a virus was about to be released on Naboo that would kill a bunch of people!"
...You get the idea whose idea it was. The worst (and most hilarious) part is that watching these people talk about the face-palmingly dumb ideas Lucas created you can see, SEE that they know how dumb it is, and yet can't
tell him because he's their boss and has created the kind of environment where if he looked outside and said, "The snow is black," they'd agree with him. Or get fired.
Star Wars is a collaborative storytelling element. Maybe Lucas was the sole voice at one point on Star Wars (doubtful if the rumors about how Luke Starkiller was supposed to be 40 and C-3P0 was supposed to be a smarmy car salesman are true), but now it belongs to each author who adds something to it, and there's a solid directorial vision that knows what it wants to say.
