George Lucas
Star Wars

I happened to read (not here, on other sites) from internet users who wondered why films like "Battleship Potemkin" or "The Birth of a Nation" could be considered masterpieces (I know, this happens too!) while I, sometimes trying to answer them, wondered why everyone (or almost everyone) praised films that I found rather uninteresting. Among these, as punctual as taxes, "Star Wars" always came up.

Everything has been said about "Star Wars," books have been written, treatises and some have even done their thesis on it. Everyone shouting 'masterpiece', and there I was asking myself why. After all, while not being a fan of the fantastic genre, or rather 'science fiction', I cannot speak ill of films like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" or "2001: A Space Odyssey". But they have different characteristics compared to "Star Wars". The first is part of a series of science fiction films popular in the mid-fifties, a sub-genre also called 'political science fiction'. Basically, under the pretext of telling humorous stories, they targeted governmental institutions and satirized McCarthyism. Kubrick's film, on the other hand, is something elusive: cultured, philosophical science fiction, difficult to assimilate even after countless viewings. An adult film, to be clear.

So much has been done in the past to ennoble science fiction, and so quickly twenty years of effort and experimentation were demolished. Because no one doubts that "Star Wars" is a technically perfect film: special effects used sparingly when the plot requires it; high-level performances; scenes with a strong scenic impact (viewed on the small screen, the power of the images is somewhat lost); grandiose set design; characters destined to enter the collective imagination, after all, how can one forget Harrison Ford/Han Solo or Mark Hamill/Luke Skywalker; and no one would dream of questioning the legendary statuesque presence of Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness (unforgettable Obi-Wan Kenobi).

The problem is George Lucas. His overwhelming presence as director, screenwriter, producer, and true Deus Ex Machina of this overrated sci-fi blockbuster.

I am not one of those who likes to heap blame on Lucas and Spielberg (two great friends for life, even from the days of "Star Wars"), but from a director like Lucas, endowed with great cinematic skills as well as generational-reflexive (think of the excellent "American Graffiti") it is reasonable to ask for a little more. A little more than this rhetorical and fundamentally hollow film, created only to destroy cultured science fiction by trivializing the entire sci-fi genre. Before Spielberg's childish whims (which, nonetheless, were excellent), there were the poor Lucasian whims: commercializing science fiction, desecrating it from within, bringing it to the most sugary childish dimension, and reducing it to a simple framework of scenes from an American blockbuster. Just like many American movies, only with extensive use of special effects and a dizzy script full of holes and clichés, useful only to daze the audience and try to amaze it. But this, gentlemen, is sheer and outright blackmail.

Thus, because of "Star Wars", the blockbuster settles in, meaning the film good for everyone, the so-called national-popular cinema, that which must please everyone, delight everyone, make everyone shout a miracle, but does not possess (because it cannot afford) its own trademark, its own signature, always teetering between satisfying the wishes of the average audience and enticing the most ardent cinephiles, spicing them up with quotes bordering on plagiarism: Laurel and Hardy (C-3PO and R2-D2), the myth of Robin Hood; Flash Gordon; the chariot race from "Ben Hur" and also the great masterpiece of Fritz Lang, "Metropolis".

The trivialization of the genre is complete: science fiction becomes fertile ground even for children, but it has lost all its essential characteristics (search for the existence of life, philosophical complications, greatness of Myth) and has given way to the drab and inconclusive mediocrity of a family film.

An endless series of sequels will follow, each worse than the last. Always quotes, always plundering from other films, always assorted banalities, until one day Lucas, tired of earning billions upon billions, will finally stop raping the global science fiction imaginary. With peace of mind to all those simpletons (and there are many) who have been beguiled by the superficial and glossy beauty of this blockbuster which everyone, for some reason, calls a masterpiece.