IMO aliens wasn't the problem, lots of key moments in the film felt like vintage Lucas/Spielberg and others felt like power rangers garbage by a director on work experience using card board cut outs in a studio as pretend jungle and quicksand.
The film could easily be fixed with a director's remaster if lavished with the same cgi as the last film, but completely weird take that the most impactful and talented director of the last 45years is being called a 'bad' director while having a dispute with the second best. What craziness is this when without Lucas' direction we be left with just the 99.9% fodder we get today.
I'll happily take 5 amazing minutes of Lucas direction/cinematography in a middling 3hr film than anything that's being directed by the pretenders today.
It has only taken 15-20years for the world to realise just how good his prequels and clone wars were, despite being tonally different from his first trilogy.
LOL the prequels have never, will never be well made films, or "good".
They do some things that add value to Star Wars, which they always did. It becomes more apparent because Disney is even worse adding pretty much nothing in exchange for what you need to sit through, but they're still absolutely terrible films and Lucas should be embarrassed he directed them.
Sugar-coated shit does not become gold just because someone took an even bigger shit with no sugar on it.
Concerning his directing abilities, we have a case study on this called Star Wars 1 2 and 3, where he was free to direct in any way he chose in an unmitigated fashion, and the results were put simply, horrible scenes you can't believe escaped production or met his standard. You could pick it apart but why bother, we've all seen it, we all know it was
bad.
I never said the only problem with Indy was aliens. I thought the premise that Lucas blocked the movie until Spielberg agreed to do aliens was enough to make the point. They met some sort of compromise after much talking, implying George wanted
more Aliens but Spielberg managed to contain it somewhat.
Edit: To be clear, would I prefer more badly directly Lucas SW to Disney SW? Absolutely! At least in exchange for suffering through the horrific execution, you got some cool story and characters, even if you wouldn't want to watch it again right away (Star Wars '77), or with somebody next to you because it's too stupid. Disney executes better, unfortunately, they execute bad decisions, storylines and characters. If you could combine Lucas' creative genius with some balances and outside direction, you'd have PERFECTION. Oh wait, that's OT.
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