Star Wars vs The Terminator

If consuming the heart of Hollywood, as a preliminary to snuffing out its soul, wasn't bad enough

witness for the prosecution, Paul Schrader:

"Star Wars was the film that ate at the heart and the soul of Hollywood. It created the big-budget comic book mentality".

the serial killer franchise is now the prime suspect in the Death of New Journalism

Robert S. Boynton in the LA Times:

"The 1977 appearance of "Star Wars" on the cover of Rolling Stone suggested that, from then on, most magazines would function as little more than "press organs for movie stars." The journalistic form with which writers like Wolfe chronicled postwar consumerism eventually succumbed to it."

Read more here.

Once you add Tim de Lisle's allegations to the Lucas rap sheet

#36 --"The Rebirth of Corn" -- is a beaut:

"When all was said and done," Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), "Lucas and Spielberg returned the 1970s audience, grown sophisticated on a diet of European and New Hollywood films, to the simplicities of the pre-1960s Golden Age of movies ... They marched backward through the looking-glass." And life followed art. First Reagan, then George W Bush returned American politics to a set of simplicities, corny, infantile, reassuring and often fictitious."

More here

and factor in Anthony Lane's complaints

What Lucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morality tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence. Judging from the whoops and crowings that greeted the opening credits, this is the only dream we are good for. We get the films we deserve.......it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation.

you start to wonder why the Star Wars supremo hasn't been excised from the showreel of history by a cyborg editor from the future.

Then again, maybe The Terminator did work his robotic magic (after the let-down of Aliens vs Predator, finally a franchise fusion to savour!), Lucas really ended up on the cutting room floor, and we're merely components of a worst-case -- what would have happened if Lucas had lived? -- simulation?