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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2100494" data-attributes="member: 2205">Indeed.  He's never claimed otherwise.  Although I thought it mildly amusing on the commentaries for the DVD release of Hidden Fortress that Lucas was there saying that he thought Seven Samurai was a much better film  For what it's worth, I do too.  Still, filming techniques are a far cry from the claims I've heard that Star Wars is just a remake of Hidden Fortress set in space.Yeah, the two bickering peasants are a straight borrow from Hidden Fortress, and he's never said otherwise.  In fact, Lucas has specifically confirmed that, including the concept of starting the movie off from their point of view.  Other than that, though, the correspondences start to become much more hazy.  There's not really all that many correspondences between the two princesses, for isntance, and it's not like a princess in danger is a unique plot element by any means.I agree.  If only Kurosawa had the resources that Lucas had.I totally agree.  He's obviously been a film school guy who was familiar with truly good work, and tried to imitate it in a very ham-fisted way.  Not only did he ape some of the filming techniques of Kurosawa, he also specifically copied elements from the old serials, from older movies (he said over and over again that he wanted an old fashioned Erich Korngold-esque soundtrack, which John Williams delivered magnificently).  I also think the idea that he had more than a very vague idea of story beyond the first movie (much less specific plans of any kind to make subsequent movies) is unbelievable.I'm certainly glad he made more movies; I love Empire and I even quite like Jedi, and even though I can't even watch them straight through anymore, I still like Menace and Clones well enough for the good elements they do contain, and I'm quite excited for Sith in two months.  But, as I've said before, his talent really just isn't in directing or scripting, and he did just get lucky with Star Wars.  Empire (and to a lesser extent, Jedi) succeeds because his approach is more hands-off of the details, and the same can be said for Raiders of the Lost Ark, wherein he developed the characters and story, but Larry Kasdan wrote the screenplay and Spielberg directed.  With the exception of the first Star Wars (and American Grafitti, but that's such a different kind of movie that it probably doesn't mean anything), the more directly involved he's been, the worse the movie's turned out.Exactly why I'm hoping that Sith is the best by far of the new trilogy.  He'll be more hands off of the specifics of the fight scenes, they'll be more of them, and the actors are serious about trying to make those as good as they can.  If later, after I've seen it three or four times at the theater and own the DVD, all I can do is watch the fight scenes, I'm OK with that.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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