He may go down in history as American cinema's master mythmaker, but George Lucas still can't tell a story.
Three years after concluding the epochal Star Wars franchise and very publicly retreating to his sprawling Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California, to make "my own little movies", Lucas has reverted to form.
Earlier this summer, he produced and co-wrote yet another instalment of the lucrative but creatively exhausted Indiana Jones adventure series.
Now there's Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animated spinoff that Lucas executive-produced and that looks like precisely what it is: a television show that has been puffed up into a feature-length advertisement for itself.
Taken together, the two movies represent a dispiriting, anticlimactic and altogether predictable move from the man who reinvented movies - changing forever the way they're made and marketed and even their collective meaning - but is still incapable of reinventing himself.
Lucas (64) has become such an ingrained presence on the cinematic landscape, such a brand unto himself, that he's attained the pop-culture equivalent of elemental status.
To question what he does and how he does it is tantamount to questioning the air we breathe or the water we drink: George Lucas just is.
But what, exactly, is he? Visionary? Businessman? Gearhead? Showman?
All those things, and probably much more. But it's time to admit it: He's not a storyteller.
For all of Lucas' command of myth, symbol and sweep, the nuances of narrative still elude him, in a CGI-saturated age when we need them most.
Lucas' vision and fierce independence have led him to be compared to such visionaries as Walt Disney and Orson Welles.
But those comparisons only demonstrate how wildly Lucas' career has been misunderstood.
Indeed, in terms of his influence on filmmaking, the movie business and the culture at large, the figure Lucas most closely resembles is Thomas Edison.
Edison is credited with helping to create the rudiments of cinematic grammar with his early short films, but they were created not to tell stories but to demonstrate the cameras, sound recorders and other equipment he was inventing.
Like Edison, Lucas has used his movies more as software to demonstrate or advertise his visual effects, sound, game, TV and animation businesses.
Lucas founded the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic in 1975 to create effects for his upcoming Star Wars movie.
Not only did ILM create dazzling and revolutionary computerised imagery for that movie, but Star Wars served as a nifty demo for a company that quickly became a major effects provider for non-Lucas films. (Want to stage a dogfight on your very own Death Star? We can make it for you wholesale.)
Similarly, Lucas used the 1983 film Return of the Jedi as a debut of his THX sound system, a novelty that went on to become standard-issue equipment in theatres around the world.
This isn't to suggest that Lucas is cynical: He's never been all about the dollars, or he would have taken his billion-dollar business, Lucasfilm, public years ago.
And he's made some confounding business decisions: In 1986, jammed financially by a divorce, slow licensing returns on Return of the Jedi and the Lucasfilm flop Howard the Duck, he sold his digital animation division to Steve Jobs for a paltry $US10 million.
Jobs would rename the operation Pixar and later sell the company to Disney for $7.4 billion.
But even more important, Pixar would make movie history with such family classics as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, defining the artistic gold standard not just for digital animation but for cinematic narrative.
Which makes The Clone Wars all the more poignant and even fraught with a certain amount of pathos.
Following the wag-the-dog pattern he perfected with The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, Lucas is again using a Star Wars spinoff less as a story that needs to be told than an advertisement for some other Lucasfilm business - in this case, its new digital animation division, an upcoming programme on the Cartoon Network and merchandising tie-ins with Toys R Us and McDonald's.
Reportedly, The Clone Wars was never supposed to be a feature film.
It was planned as a TV show that Lucas insisted be released theatrically after he saw it. But one need only consider The Clone Wars alongside its cousin WALL E to grasp how far Lucas has fallen behind the artists and technicians he once employed.
In other words, WALL E, like every Pixar movie, hews to the company's famous motto: "Story is king."
And story has never been king with Lucas.
Consider American Graffiti, his 1973 coming-of-age comedy.
The film, which spawned night-in-the-life imitators from Dazed and Confused to Superbad, was in large part based on Lucas' own car-obsessed youth in Modesto, California, in the 1950s.
But unlike the best movies it influenced, American Graffiti plays like little more than a series of vignettes, featuring generic teenagers who don't resemble actual human beings as much as Characters Who Stand for Something.
A soundtrack-driven pastiche of pranks, petty crimes and stiffly choreographed set pieces, the film was a big success, not because of its intrinsic worth but because it so shrewdly manipulated baby-boomer nostalgia.
Similarly, the Star Wars space opera consistently demonstrated Lucas' limitations as a storyteller, even as it tapped into the mass audience's most fundamental hunger for archetype and myth.
As refreshing as the initial 1977 instalment was - an escapist, retro thrill ride in the midst of a grittily realist era - the Star Wars movies were more about plot than story, with Lucas far more interested in mechanics, spectacle and marketing than capturing the beat of the human heart. (To the extent that the Indiana Jones movies succeed as old-fashioned yarn-spinning, that's no doubt due to the warmth and fluency director Steven Spielberg brought to Lucas' otherwise hackneyed scripts. As one critic remarked earlier this summer, "How many variations are there of 'We meet again, Dr Jones'?")
One need only watch Hayden Christensen awkwardly declaim in Lucas' last directorial outing, Revenge of the Sith, to be reminded of how important actors like Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness were to giving the famously leaden Star Wars dialogue even a shred of believability.
Once Star Wars became a multibillion-dollar economy unto itself, when the movies increasingly served not "the story" but the games and the sound systems and the effects business and the lunch boxes, Lucas' weakness became his greatest strength.
Who needed story when the audience would be satisfied with spectacle?
He got rich, and we got Jar Jar Binks. - Ann Hornaday
