Regardless of how much you may despise the Star Wars prequels, you have to kind of feel for George Lucas at this point in time. Now that a new Star Wars film is about to be released without his involvement, he has to come to terms with the fact that he handed over his baby to someone else and that the general public is mostly happy about that. He has done his best to stay out of the way of what J.J. Abrams and Disney are doing, but with the movie almost a week away, he has been unable to avoid getting pulled into the press maelstrom. Having recently seen the movie, everyone is, of course hounding him for an opinion on the movie. His response was positive, although appropriately measured and diplomatic. Here’s what he had to say:

“I think the fans are going to love it… It’s very much the kind of movie they’ve been looking for.”

This quote was provided by Vulture, although it follows up on a previous statement from Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy indicating that he “really liked it.” Note that when asked, Lucas cleverly avoided saying that he liked it himself.

There have been a handful of recent interviews with Lucas where he compared the whole situation to a divorce. He realizes it is a predicament he created himself, but he still doesn’t love having to be polite about it. Here’s something from an interview with CBS last month:

“The issue was ultimately, they looked at the stories and they said, ‘We want to make something for the fans… People don’t actually realize it’s actually a soap opera and it’s all about family problems – it’s not about spaceships. So they decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing so I decided, ‘fine…. I’ll go my way and I let them go their way.'”

Do you buy George Lucas’ light endorsement of Star Wars: The Force Awakens?