With Star Wars, George Lucas created a universe complex enough to make you believe he was showing just a fraction of it. Even though many like The Empire Strikes Back best, with its darker and unresolved themes, I was always partial to the original. I love the feeling of discovery in that first film, getting a taste of the vague but pervasive macro-politics of the Rebel Alliance versus the Empire (even if we never really know what exactly they're fighting about, other than the Empire's love of planetary destruction). Empire shifted the focus from inter-global politics more to the characters and the difficulties of living in a Jedi family, which was fine, and Return of the Jedi made it even more of a soap opera. As I said, I liked the first one best.

Seeing the original Star Wars again, I was impressed with its low-tech aesthetic--how the '70s vision of this advanced society had lots of flashing buttons, with the aliens almost exclusively men in rubber masks. Because Lucas told the story with enough imagination, though, none of that mattered. All of the advances made by Industrial Light and Magic--except for the many explosions in space--were behind the camera; subtle effects that weren't too showy. Knowing that Lucas had planned on a trilogy of trilogies, nine films in all (he has since revised the total number of films to six), I thought, wouldn't it be cool to see what he would have to do in order to create a world slightly less advanced than the one in Star Wars?

Well, he screwed that up with the re-release of the trilogy. Using new computer graphic technology, he added all sorts of squirmy dinosaurs into the films. If the computer-generated (CG) creatures are annoying, gratuitous, and entirely unnecessary, what's even worse is that their presence has given him free reign to pack the prequels with even more CG creatures. I hate those squirmy dinosaurs! Couple them with Lucas' awful and increasing infatuation with cute and funny aliens--from the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi up to that entirely computer-generated Jar Jar character in The Phantom Menace--and my dread continues to grow.

I'm still looking forward to Star Wars: Episode 1--The Phantom Menace, despite the awkward title. One thing's for sure, though: even if it's too late for the first prequel, the global shut-down of computers thanks to the Y2K problem is the trilogy's only real hope. Maybe that will inspire the guys who direct Episodes Two and Three to take those damn squirmy dinosaurs out of the Star Wars universe! I mean, it's just like when Luke's flying into the Death Star and the ghost of Obi Wan tells him to shut off his computer. It's the exact same thing. We don't need this new technology.