Ignore George Lucas‘s Daily Show comment (delivered last night) that Red Tails (20th Century Fox, 1.20) is as close as he’ll ever come to making a sequel to Star Wars. The thing to focus on is his claim that Red Tails is essentially a 1942 movie (like the 1951 Flying Leathernecks, Lucas said). The heavily CG’ed look argues with that notion up and down. If it looked and felt like a real 1942 film, I’d be the first one there on opening day.

I wrote the following in a July 2011 piece called “World War II Video Game“: “Could the World War 2 dogfight sequences look any more fake? What a non-pleasure it’ll be to wallow in visual values and terms that have nothing to do with 1940s verisimilitude and everything to do with Lucas wanting to slick this thing up as much as possible.

“Lucas has been struggling with this sucker since filming began in March 2009 and reshoots happened in March 2010. Obviously it’s a troubled and ungenuine enterprise. Failure of this sort couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. The director of record is Anthony Hemingway.

From the Wiki page: “Production began in March 2009. Principal photography took place in the Czech Republic, Italy, Croatia and England. Lucas took over direction of reshoots, in March 2010 as Hemingway was busy working on episodes of the HBO series Treme. Hemingway will have final approval over the footage.”