Simon Pegg says new 'Star Wars' movies are 'missing George Lucas'

Simon Pegg reckons that the new Disney Star Wars universe is missing the vision of its original creator George Lucas.

Famed prequels hater Pegg, who appeared in Star Wars: The Force Awakens playing Jakku’s ‘junk boss’ Unkar Plutt, says it was The Last Jedi that changed his mind.

“I must admit, watching the last Star Wars film [The Last Jedi], the overriding feeling I got when I came out was, ‘I miss George Lucas,’” he told Adam Buxton on his podcast.

“For all the complaining that I’d done about him in the prequels, there was something amazing about his imagination.

“I think he’s a real first adopter, and he saw CG as this way of realising his own imagination, not really realising that it might end up looking a bit flat and empty. That was not his intention, and I don’t think he was being lazy using too much CG.

“I think also back in the day when he was making the first films, there was Gary Kurtz and Alan Ladd Jr, these producers who were there to reign in his incredible miasmic imagination which could very easily overflow into confusion. There were people there keeping it nice and restrained.

“Those first three films were the product of real collaboration, and then with the prequels it was like ‘do what you want’. And without someone to steer him in the right direction, it did overflow into the slightly muddled, less elegant.

“I do feel like his voice is missing from the current ones.”

Indeed, Pegg has rather more mercilessly slated Lucas’s prequels in the past, so this is something of a complete about-face on the subject.

“I hate the prequels,” he once told MTV, adding to the New York Daily News: “I don’t really have any respect for anyone who thinks those films are good. They’re not.

“(They’re) a monumental misunderstanding of what the (original) three films are about. It’s an exercise in utter infanticide… (like) George Lucas killing his kid. Jar Jar Binks made the Ewoks look like f***ing Shaft!”

However, over the summer he said that he regretted some of his more specific remarks about Binks.

“I feel so ashamed of the fact that there was a victim, a human victim in that,” he told NowThis.

“I think most people were regarding Jar Jar Binks like he was a real creature. And wailing on him for being annoying, or whatever, or not liking him. But there was a person behind that. And I read that and just thought, ‘I’m one of those people.’ It makes me feel awful.”

Mind you, he also called working on The Force Awakens ‘genuinely magical’, so who knows what’s going on, frankly.

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