I meant how he took a Jar-Jar shaped dump on Star Wars. Did he make a huge pile of money? Of course. Will he go down in history as a hack who was good with special effects? Looks like it.
Just to be clear, I hate the Star Wars prequels as much as the average person born before 1990. And I deeply want to believe that the arc of history bends toward justice. But the realist part of me thinks, no, the prequels indoctrinated another generation thoroughly into the Lucas mythos. For all they may have been a missed opportunity to get the older generation further fanatical about Star Wars, the new movies are thoroughly loved by kids. People who are
not fanatical about the original Star Wars (say, people born before 1960), in my experience, tend to view the movies as all about the same quality, although that's not a scientific sample at all.
Also, for what it's worth, I don't think the problem with the prequels is that Lucas decided to go "too epic." (That's why I assumed you were talking about the Indiana Jones movie, which clearly
did make a big shift toward more epic-ness, like surviving nuclear bombs, meeting aliens, etc.) Generally the knock on Episode I is that the scenario is too pedestrian: a trade dispute leading to a rather unimportant battle between a merchant cartel and some local natives. Episode II is still not particularly epic, not by comparison to the original trilogy. Sure, there are a lot of cluttery battles, but the stakes are generally lower than in the original trilogy. In some ways the mythos is more epic (Annakin is conceived in a virgin birth!), in some ways it is less epic (the Force is mitochondria!). Overall, I don't think a desire to go too epic is the problem with the prequels; there are lots of other problems that have been better spelled out than I can, but one of the problems is that the prequels try to add a degree of moral and political sophistication that the generic epic fantasy setting can't really sustain.
The original trilogy worked well as a basic fantasy story set in space (particularly the first movie): the orphan farm boy who is secretly a lost prince with magical powers is tutored by a wizard, gets a magic sword, rescues the princess, defeats the sorcerer, and slays the dragon by striking its one unarmored spot. The movie took that story, which is fundamentally tied into our culture -- at a much more specific level than the generic monomyth: we're basically talking a pastiche of King Arthur, Lord of the Rings, and Chronicles of Prydain -- and then wrapped it up in really cool space stuff.
The second trilogy doesn't really map onto any fundamental stories because it's basically all about just setting up the original trilogy. I mean, it kind of sort of has elements of Arthuriana in there (with Annakin as Mordred and Obi-Wan as Arthur), but it's all jumbly, a mix of 70s political thriller, early 2000s political commentary, and fan-service prequel.
Incidentally, I developed a healthy detachment from Lucas-hating by reading the posts on the (sadly now defunct) website Grognardia about Star Wars. Apparently for people (read: nerds like us) who actually saw Star Wars in theaters (before it was "Episode IV: A New Hope"), Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi ruined Star Wars. It's fascinating because his reasoning is pretty persuasive: that Vader wasn't meant to be Annakin but actually was supposed to just be a dude who killed Annakin; that Leia wasn't meant to be Luke's sister; that Jedi don't wear robes, Obi-Wan wore them to blend in with the native population on Tatooine; etc., etc. And then there's a set of people who love ESB and think ROJ ruined it with the ewoks, the second Death Star, the way the Force is used in the final duel, etc. All this made me realize that people develop irrational but very real attachments to works of art and feel a kind of ownership as a consequence; and just as it seems irrational to me to hate ESB, I'm sure a non-hipster 12 year old would tell me it's silly to hate the prequels.
/derailment of topic
Put otherwise, if I could achieve what George Lucas did, I would take it in a heartbeat, Jar-Jar and all, notwithstanding my views stated elsewhere that I think his ruining of the series was immoral.
