Lucas’ vision is inconsistent within itself. As one commenter said, he caught lightning in a bottle – twice (SW, ESB), then ran aground when his original ideas bottomed out (hence ROTJ is part re-make of SW and part his very original concept with the Wookie rebellion).
If the rest of the films had been like Empire, we’d all be saying SW was this generations Lord of the Rings. Instead, we have to filter out the kiddified crap with the too-few intercetions of decent plot and action.
The problem with StarWars itself is that, in the films, Lucas preaches an anti-capitalistic, anti-technology message while hawking as much SW crap as possible and pushing every means of tech available to produce them. The message of the overall saga, and espeically Eps I, II and III gets convoluted with the need make a profit from the films themselves (and thereby proving the films’ philsophy wrong). There’s a lot less to the saga than we’d all like to think, actually.
I find the same problem with Star Trek, actually. Roddenberry was a neo-Marxist who had a personal vision for an idealized future (TNG is probably closest to what he wanted). But to pay the bills and get fans to watch, Paramount had to make movies like Wrath of Khan, which is nowhere near that worldview.
This sort of thing is why so many SciFi fans are turned off from the major media. SW and ST both pale in comparison to the works of giants like Robert Heinein and Larry Niven, or even some of the stuff we see from Japan. I’m still waiting for a true SciFi epic. We won’t get it in this generation.
