It's reminiscent of the difference between the Star Wars prequel and sequel trilogies. Regardless of your opinions on the quality of those movies, the biggest differentiator is that the prequels were the singular vision of a self-funded artist while the sequels are a corporate product of a global media empire. Even if the latter produces a better movie, it ends up sanding off many of the edges and those edges are where a lot of us found the magic of Star Wars. The Lucas Museum is similar in that it very clearly is the product of an excentric billionaire rather than the same type of curatorial thinking you will find in other art museums.
These are two crappy choices, and it's not a coincidence that a resource strapped filmmaker having to engage with many skilled artisans to sharpen their "singular vision" resulted in much better films (the original trilogy) than either of those two.
If you think he was significantly resourceful strapped making Empire and Jedi you are mistaken. At the time they were some of the most expensive films ever made.
Mostly self-funded too (a higher percentage for Jedi than Empire) so even in the original trilogy it was still Lucas signing the checks and making the ultimate decisions. Him being willing to delegate more in those days was personality driven rather than financially driven.
Let’s not forget though, the prequel trilogies were—not good. Lucas is at his best when he has collaborators who can help take the half-baked ideas and fully bake them.
They were better than good. I wouldn't call them masterpieces (my biggest critique is that they tried to do too much in II which messed up the pacing of Anakin's arc) but they're great films.
Yes, but while I may prefer "good" when it comes to the multiplex, I much prefer "interesting" when it comes to my art museums and Lucas's prequels and museum are both very interesting.
