USA Today has been covering George Lucas's attempts to help the Earth's population contain itself in the face of the imminent release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. "When you do a movie like this," says George, " a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming. And it's not. It's just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up." The paper's Scott Bowles suggests that "The remarks appear to be part of a larger strategy to build interest yet temper expectations for the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise. Only one trailer is playing, and when director Steven Spielberg shows up for talk shows, he doesn't bring footage." Longtime George watchers may find it hard to resist speculation that Lucas is actually trying to help himself prepare to deal with the backlash — the bad reviews and moos of disappointment — that might conceivably be waiting to greet him at the end of Indy's latest dig. As if to confirm this, he went on to compare the new movie to The Phantom Menace, a movie that he regards as having suffered unfairly from too-high expectations among the groundlings, even as some of us think of it as proof that if you're packing enough hype, you can get away with anything. Lucas, who famously said of the first Raiders of the Lost Ark that he went to the trouble of putting it into production because "I just want to see this movie," adds that he and his associates made the new picture for the "fun" of it and that he has next to no interest in its commercial prospects: "It's not going to make much money for us in the end. We all have some money." (One of these statements is true, and both of them reflect what it does to your overall perspective when you can buy and sell Scrooge McDuck.) It's too bad that he doesn't get any charge at all out of the money, since the one thing that we know about Indy 4 going in is that it's going to make a mint. Questions of its quality will have to wait until it starts hitting movie screens — though it's almost certainly a safe bet that there will be plenty of people who'd insist that it was great even if Harrison Ford succumbed to senile dementia halfway through the shoot and started referring to his on-screen son, Shia LaBeouf, as "Harpo."
A few things may be in play here. Lucas may genuinely feel stung over the general consensus that, after all that business about remaking gods and myths for the modern age, the three Star Wars prequels he directed between 1999 and 2003 were, indeed, just movies, and maybe the movies of someone whose fun machine needed oiling. He could also be asserting his right to declare that if the members of the Skywalker family are just some characters in a movie franchise that, like so many others, had to deal with the law of diminishing returns, that goes double for the Jones boys, who only became flesh with the help of George's directorial hired hand and BFF Steven Spielberg. After all, the last time George really made news with regard to the Star Wars series may have been when he informed a stunned crowd at a Publicists' Guild luncheon that "The Empire Strikes Back is always written about as the best of the films, when it actually was the worst one.” That movie, too, had the distinction of not having been directed by George himself.