George Lucas' Best Film Is Not Set in Space

The best movie George Lucas ever directed is not Star Wars. Star Wars has, without a doubt, created the biggest cultural impact and was a technical breakthrough that changed movies forever — but that still doesn't make it Lucas' best film. Partly due to his shepherding of the franchise, Lucas has a much smaller filmography compared to his cohorts such as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. After his debut feature, the hard science fiction film THX 1138, he only made five other films, four of those being Star Wars movies (the three prequels in addition to the original.) In some ways it's sad — without the pressure of Star Wars, Lucas may have gone on to make more films that had broadened what was expected of him. There was one outlier in his career in particular that proved his skill as a filmmaker could be applied to other genres and still make something special. While Star Wars is undeniably a filmmaking achievement as far as entertainment and technique goes, Lucas' artistic peak as a filmmaker actually comes from when he did something entirely out of his wheelhouse: American Graffiti.