"I felt that the Star Wars series became very pretentious as time went on. Just heavy and leaden"
About this Quote
Milius isn’t just taking a swipe at Star Wars; he’s defending a whole philosophy of popcorn mythmaking against what he sees as self-serious bloat. Coming from the patron saint of brawny, back-to-the-wall cinema (and a key architect of New Hollywood swagger), “pretentious” lands as an aesthetic charge: the movies started acting like capital-I Importance instead of acting like movies.
The wording is doing quiet work. “As time went on” frames the shift as institutional rot, not a single misstep. The saga didn’t simply change; it calcified. “Heavy and leaden” is physical, almost industrial language, suggesting spectacle that has lost lift. Lead is what you add when you want something to hit harder, but it’s also what makes it sink. In Milius’s mouth, that heaviness reads as over-explained lore, over-managed reverence, and the sense that the franchise began to worship its own mythology rather than use it to generate momentum.
The context matters: Milius comes out of an era when blockbuster craft still wore its intelligence lightly. Early Star Wars had a scrappy, serial-kid energy; it moved like it had somewhere to be. Later iterations (prequels, lore expansion, brand stewardship) can feel like they’re auditioning for legitimacy - politics, prophecy, procedural world-building - as if fun needed footnotes.
Underneath the insult is a warning about franchise culture: once a story becomes an institution, gravity wins. The audience is asked to admire, not ride along. Milius, always allergic to piety, calls that what it is: pretension with a production budget.
The wording is doing quiet work. “As time went on” frames the shift as institutional rot, not a single misstep. The saga didn’t simply change; it calcified. “Heavy and leaden” is physical, almost industrial language, suggesting spectacle that has lost lift. Lead is what you add when you want something to hit harder, but it’s also what makes it sink. In Milius’s mouth, that heaviness reads as over-explained lore, over-managed reverence, and the sense that the franchise began to worship its own mythology rather than use it to generate momentum.
The context matters: Milius comes out of an era when blockbuster craft still wore its intelligence lightly. Early Star Wars had a scrappy, serial-kid energy; it moved like it had somewhere to be. Later iterations (prequels, lore expansion, brand stewardship) can feel like they’re auditioning for legitimacy - politics, prophecy, procedural world-building - as if fun needed footnotes.
Underneath the insult is a warning about franchise culture: once a story becomes an institution, gravity wins. The audience is asked to admire, not ride along. Milius, always allergic to piety, calls that what it is: pretension with a production budget.
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| Topic | Movie |
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