Finally got to see this today. By the way its a featured movie on the Android market so its going to get alot of exposure.
Honestly I hated most of this doc. To let you know, I love the original untouched OT and enjoy the prequels. I also think the preservation efforts of the fans are amazing.
And thats why I hated this doc. The focus really should have been how we loved the untouched OT and wanted it preserved as well as how the prequels disrupted what came before in the OT.
What we got was about an hour of comedian hipsters ranting about their childhoods and how they had all the action figures. There was a good 30 minutes devoted to fan films which really didn't have anything to do with Lucas at all but how fans just love Star Wars.
Heres a breakdown of my thoughts
1. Dale Pollock and Gary Kurtz! They actually got these people to speak against Lucas (just by appearing in this doc) and they're shown for about a minute each. WTF Talk about missed opporunity for interesting stories and insight on Lucas outside the propganda machine of Lucasfilm.
2. David Prowse! Another missed opportunity of what went down on the ROTJ set in terms of Lucas and secrecy. He has about 50 seconds tops in this film.
3. Theres tons of commentary by this comedian named Nar. Hes this ex host of Attack of the Show on G4. Ex meaning he wasn't considered good enough to stay. We hear tons from him. The only good segment he was in was the midiclorian discussion.
4. The hipster commentators, especially that rock group member who had never seen ROTS, but never really had any SW toys either. So why is he here? And why are any of these comedians here. They aren't adding to the discussion at all. They were horrible. The worst was some panel (of people never identified) where one guy couldn't speak a sentence without the F word every five seconds. I don't mind the F word, I use it quite a bit myself, but this guy had nothing intelligent to say.
5. The biggest crime was the lack of commentary on the preservation movement. What the whole point of the film should have been. I wanted to see 10-15 min of Adywan discussing what Lucas wasn't doing with his film on the dvd releases, I wanted to see guys like Puggo (where is his footage!) talking about preserving even the 16mm prints since they are important.
6. Things I liked: the bit on Jar Jar, the midiclorian discussion, anything with Chris Gore who seemed to be able to put together some words intelligently, the bit on Han shoots first, the mention that ANH is in the library of congress but theres no movement to get a pristine original print of that film.
7. All the fan films clips. Talk about not necessary. You can make an extremely intelligent doc with just talking heads and stills. I get it, people love making their own SW films. But it wasn't clever or interesting to show all the footage, it just got tiresome. Did we really need to see endless stop motion animation done by 19 year olds in a film called "The people vs Lucas"?
Some would argue the film was for casual fans. This doesn't excuse the overall quality of this doc which was poor. There just wasn't any center, it was a hodgepodge of random fan interviews and clips from fan films. It really felt like an extended Attack of the Show segment gone wrong. If you want to see some good documentaries watch some of Oliver Stone's recent work like his Castro doc and South of the Border about Hugo Chavez. Thats literally talking heads with some historical footage, and its all riveting stuff. For a film criticizing Lucas' work, I think they need some improvement themselves (I know that sounds like a TFN comment but theres got to be some truth there)