George Lucas's Big Criticism of The Force Awakens Was Simple: There's Nothing New

One of George Lucas's biggest criticisms after seeing The Force Awakens was simply "there's nothing new." For Lucas, that constant desire to show us something new was incredibly important.

The Force Awakens took Star Wars back to familiar territory

The movie takes us back to another desert planet. It gives us another giant spherical superweapon. It brings in another group of stormtroopers, and it sets up another rebellion fighting another empire.

The Last Jedi and the third movie kept repeating the pattern

Even The Last Jedi feels like more of the same to me. It is another movie featuring an old Jedi master training an apprentice on a desolate planet, while the supporting characters try to evade the bad guys in space.

And instead of opening on a snow planet, the film closes on one. Or at least one that looks like snow, except it's salt.

And then the third movie just brings back the overarching villain from the last six movies, as he electrocutes himself to death yet again.

The prequels constantly gave us new worlds

By contrast, the prequels constantly gave us something new. We saw pod racing on Tatooine and an entire underwater Gungan city hidden beneath the swamps of Naboo. We took a journey through a planet's core, and we saw a massive planet covered in city, with traffic streaming between skyscrapers thousands of feet in the air. At the heart of it all was a gigantic Galactic Senate.

Attack of the Clones then took us to Kamino, an eerie water world where everything is white, sterile and almost impossibly clean, populated with slender aliens ten feet tall. From there we went to Geonosis, featuring giant aliens that resemble insects. We saw a brutal arena battle before it descended into an all out war between a droid army and thousands of newly created clone troopers.

By Revenge of the Sith, Lucas was jumping from the volcanic hellscape of Mustafar to the dozens of other exotic planets seen during the Order 66 montage.

The prequels changed what Star Wars looked and felt like, and the sequels never really did

It was not only the planets. Even the ships, costumes, creatures and architecture were constantly changing across the prequels.

The prequels weren't just expanding the story of Star Wars. They were dramatically expanding what Star Wars looked and felt like. The sequels, by contrast, never really did that.

Do you think the sequel trilogy did enough to show us something genuinely new, or was Lucas right that there was nothing new?