If a film-maker sets out on a new project with the best of intentions, is it really fair for fans to criticise them when the result of their endeavours ends up the most rotten of eggs?
Last week in this column, I asked whether, 20 years after the execrable Phantom Menace was first shown in cinemas, it might be time to forgive George Lucas. As recently as 2015, the Star Wars film-maker was still defending himself in public against critics of his second Star Wars trilogy, aghast that he should be subjected to such vilification when all he had ever wanted to do was make films.
“You go to make a movie and all you do is get criticised, and people try to make decisions about what you’re going to do before you do it,” Lucas told Vanity Fair. “And it’s not much fun. You can’t experiment. You have to do it a certain way. I don’t like that, I never did. I started out in experimental films and I want to go back to experimental films.”
It is hard to argue with this auteurist line of reasoning. The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith were Lucas’s movies – at least until he sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney for $4bn – and, from a certain point of view, he had every right to deliver 400-minutes-plus of self-indulgent space fantasy claptrap provided it cleaved snugly to his own creative vision. Such an argument only breaks down when you actually watch the prequel trilogy, when it becomes obvious that no amount of decent intentions can make up for the folly of Jar Jar Binks, Zebedee-Yoda and Anakin the whingeing teenage Jedi. (It is also worth noting that Lucas has not actually gone back to making interesting experimental films – or indeed any films – since.)
I was reminded of Lucas’s comments when reading Ridley Scott’s recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, to mark 40 years since the release of Alien. Discussing the 33-year gap between that and the release of Prometheus, during which he stayed away from the slasher-in-space saga, the British director revealed he had misgivings about retreading his iconic work, and that he only agreed to return when given permission to divert the series away from its roots.
“You get to the point when you say, ‘OK, it’s dead in the water,’” said Scott. “I said to them, ‘Listen, you can resurrect this, but we have to go back to scratch and go to a prequel, if you like.’ So we go to Prometheus, which was not bad actually.”
It is easy to see why Scott did not want to give us another movie about xenomorphs, preferring instead to explore how the evil space beasts got to LV-426 in the first place (and what kind of horrid race might have engineered them). Unfortunately, the Engineer race whose origins were teased in Prometheus ended up so tediously portentous on a conceptual level that even Scott managed to conveniently forget all about them by the time the sequel, Alien: Covenant, rolled around five years later.
Once again, this is where the argument in favour of directors being given free rein to experiment breaks down. For all that we, Scott’s fans, want him to be able to pursue his original vision, free from the pressure to shoehorn his films into any box, it is very hard to take when those visions finally find their way into cinemas as virtually unwatchable drivel.
The news that Scott hasn’t given up on making a third prequel (despite Covenant’s lukewarm reviews and dreadful box-office receipts) does little to discourage the view that he really should take a deep breath and walk away. Alien is such a great and groundbreaking film that no amount of redundant prequels and sequels will ever reduce its luminous majesty. It will always be there as a never-to-be-improved-upon metaphor for the icy despair and inhuman horror of deep space.
That does not mean Scott should be allowed to keep indulging his increasingly haphazard and madcap attempts to flesh out the story. Down on Earth, the fans are making noise all right, but it turns out their screams still go unheard.
