Via Newstatesman.com:
Trash-talking Star Wars is a favourite occupation of a certain class of cineaste. The accusations are familiar: it turned movies into amusement rides, brought to an end the auteurist experiment of the 1970s and ushered in our endless summer of blockbusters. Without it, Chris Taylor writes, “If we had summer blockbusters at all, they would be more disaster movies in the style of Jaws and less science-fiction or fantasy spectaculars. There would probably be no Star Trek on the big screen and certainly no Battlestar Galactica on the small one. It’s distinctly possible that 20th Century Fox would have gone bankrupt after 1977 . . . and Rupert Murdoch might not control it today.” So there you have it. Star Wars is responsible for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II and Rupert Murdoch. Is there no end to its evil?

This is the magic bullet theory of film history, the idea that but for one film we would all be sitting around watching John Cassavetes movies, rolling doobies, sticking it to the men in suits. The problem with this argument is that it gives Star Wars both too much credit and too little: too much as a harbinger of cinematic destiny and too little in terms of its qualities as a film. In reality, New Hollywood directors had been retooling old genres as blockbusters all decade long – The French Connection, The Exorcist, The Godfather. Martin Scorsese had been sniffing around Philip K Dick for years. Brian De Palma had his eye on a sci-fi property. Six months after Star Wars came out, Steven Spielberg released Close Encounters of the Third Kind, using its own version of the Dykstraflex cameras that George Lucas used to liberate the X-wings in Star Wars. Watching rapt in the front row were Ridley Scott, Robert Zemeckis, John Lasseter and James Cameron. Anyone who thinks that were it not for Lucas’s lightsabers the creator of The Terminator would have upped sticks and called it a day is dreaming.

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