Scalzi on Star Wars

Scalzi has a blog. (Got the link from ProfBainbridge.)

He, uh, doesn't hold much back.

Star Wars is not entertainment. Star Wars is George Lucas masturbating to a picture of Joseph Campbell and conning billions of people into watching the money shot.

There is nothing in the least bit "popular" about the Star Wars films. This is true of all of them, but especially of Episodes I, II and III: They are the selfish, ungenerous, onanistic output of a man who has no desire to include others in the internal grammar of his fictional world. They are the ultimate in auteur theory, but this creator has contempt for the people who view his work -- or if not contempt, at the very least a near-austistic lack of concern as to whether anyone else "gets" his vision. The word "entertainer" has as an assumption that the creator/actor is reaching out to his or audience to engage them. George Lucas doesn't bother with this. He won't keep you out of his universe; he just doesn't care that you're in it. To call the Star Wars films "entertainment" is to fundamentally misapprehend the meaning of the world.

Well, that pretty much says it all.

Got to admit that I was hoping there wouldn't be any silliness in the movie, but completely expected it. I was hoping for a film-noire feeling and got much less. Still liked the movies, but probably would have watched them more than once if he had been a bit dark in the overall presentation.