in celebration of May the 4th I’ve been rewatching the originals and the prequels - and the writing in both is uh, surprisingly bad. Set designs, costumes, world building, and the overall presentation are amazing! but the dialogue and motivations are sometimes downright laughable. It feels like George had a great idea of the key plot points but then instead of writing a story to fill in the gaps he opted to put in 3-4 action sequences where the plot should’ve been, so now the story goes from “hmm the jedi council are acting odd towards me, i’m starting to question their motives” to “i need to kill children to defeat death because this clearly evil guy told me so” within a single scene. I know prequels are a cheap shot but this extreme example highlights the issue rather well
don’t get me wrong, i still like star wars! but i don’t watch those movies for the writing lmao
this is exactly why it’s rare for directors to also have written the script for the movies they direct in the filmmaking world - it’s easy to get married to your idea and fall flat on the execution, because who is going to tell you to stop? The only people that could are producers - but they don’t really care about the writing either, just the money to be made, and if “ehh” writing got George that far then the second Star Wars became a thing he got full immunity from criticism