STAR WARS Can something this biased still be called a review? Love it or hate it, Star Wars has to be the most criticism-proof movie of all time, a film where the notion of whether it's a great film seems irrelevant when one looks at how it's obviously great filmMAKING. Story-wise, it's never been anything all that special, the dialogue has only moments of real inspiration ("I find your lack of faith disturbing."), and the characters are, shall we say, basic; that George Lucas does his best work when aided by a superior writer, I've never heard even the most ardent Star Wars fan deny. Nevertheless, this is the kind of movie that just fills me with joy every time I see it; I first saw this movie when I was about three, and I don't remember much before that, and as a child Star Wars took up more of my imagination and daydreaming than anything else, and through the decades, some age and cynicism have done nothing to tarnish my affection for it. I just have no idea what to write; its sequels (one with more depth, and one that's just fascinatingly misguided in so many ways, still love it though) lend themselves to criticism, but I feel kinda stuck here. (much later - Jesus, this goes on for a while. I can sure go on and on when I'm stuck, can't I?) But that never stopped me from going on at great length before. You all know the story, so I won't bother shying away from spoilers, which would be pointless in reviewing a movie like this. The Death Star gets blown up at the end, you know. And by the way, Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father, Leia is his sister (though nobody knows why, I have a theory though), and Chewbacca isn't nearly as grumpy as he first seems. Star Wars opens with the first "big spaceship" entrance scene that I know of, where a small ship is being chased down by a huge Imperial Star Destroyer. This kind of entrance has been imitated MANY times since, and has only been topped by the introduction of the Super Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back. The capture of this ship introduces us to four important characters: Darth Vader (body by David Prowse, voice by James Earl Jones), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher, sporting her first of several bizarre hairstyles), and the robots C-3P0 and R2-D2 (Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker; I do wonder how necessary it was to cram a midget in that R2-D2 suit, when surely it would've been easier to pilot the thing with a remote control). Fisher doesn't get any dialogue for a while, but when she does, it's a weird mix of American and British accents, as she'd recently come from some schooling in England. I might add that Carrie Fisher single-handed jump-started me into puberty at age three. I had this big Princess Leia poster above my bed and everything - other kids would make fun, but I knew that in a decade or so, they'd understand. Twenty-four years later, it's interesting to see how what appeals to me in women changed (drastically) for a while, changed back, went back to the second kind, and is back full-circle again...yeah, these days, I'd chew glass for a shot at a fiery brunette who wears a gold bikini and is gutsy enough to be sarcastic towards people with the power to destroy her homeworld. Now THAT'S sexy, despite the goofy hair. Many who were fans of the movies when they were young find themselves tiring of aspects of them as they get older; this early on in the series, the most obvious aspect would be the two droids. Hell, I love 'em, they're like Niles and his dad on Frasier, one prissy wuss and one cantankerous old man who wishes the other guy would lighten the hell up and let him do what he has to or wants to without constant worries of impending doom. Okay, maybe a lot of you find Frasier annoying (and certainly, it's seen better seasons than recent ones), but if you like that show, there's no reason you shouldn't like these droids. The only thing I don't like about them is the moment of their escape from Imperial capture, when 3P0 utters the most inexplicable line of dialogue in the trilogy: "That's funny, the damage doesn't look as bad from out here." I have never, EVER understood this line. After the droids land on the desert planet of Tattooine and are captured and sold by Jawas (the first of several species demonstrating Lucas's seeming affection for midgets), we meet Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), an older teenager whose voice keeps cracking, with a long-dead father, an unknown mother and an upbringing from his "uncle" Owen (Phil Brown) and "aunt" Beru (Shelagh Fraser). He's kinda whiny, but there's something about him I find likeable long after I stopped identifying with him directly (at that age, there were two kinds of Star Wars fans: the Luke Skywalkers, and the Han Solos. I was a Luke Skywalker.) - for example, he's so enamored with becoming a pilot that even in the middle of a dogfight he interrupts the pilot of the ship he's on to ask "What's that flashing?" Now that's enthusiasm! The strange thing about Luke is that he's raised in a fairly harsh environment; that he's got a stern uncle who's constantly on his back to help out with farm duties is one thing, but having to worry about attacks from sand people is another, let alone the possibility of dying of thirst if you're ever unlucky enough to wander too far from home. You'd think that Luke would have grown into a fairly tough and mature young man, but he isn't, at least not yet, because of the extent of the sheltering of his growing up; it is only when he meets Obi-Wan Kenobi that anyone is willing to inform him of the larger realities at work, both politically and metaphysically. Whether Kenobi had been instrumental in that sheltering, is hard to say; the novelization says that Kenobi and Owen are brothers, suggesting that there is more than mere prejudice causing the friction between them, and surely, by the end of the trilogy it's fairly clear that Kenobi had devoted his life, during the rise and reign of the Empire, to watching over Luke from a (very short) distance. It is interesting, however, to see Luke learn things from Obi-Wan Kenobi that don't involve the Force at all (for example, how to promise other people's money in order to get things done). Alec Guinness plays Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi, the last of the Jedi knights (at least, the last with ties to civilization). Guinness was, right up until his death, fairly vocal about how much he wanted to distance himself from this, seeing the Beatles-like relationship of the movies' fans to the movies as misplaced at best, unhealthy and disturbing at worst. It must have pissed him off to no end that this would still be, after all this time, the role he's most widely remembered for. Nevertheless, that wouldn't be the case if he didn't do such a good job; Kenobi is a man who's seen the galaxy at its best, and lives in it now at its worst, and has absolutely no fear about doing what it takes to restore it to its former glory. And yet, he IS an old man, and as he says to Luke, too old to do this sort of thing alone. There is something a little bit spooky about the old guy; he can use the Force to mess around with people's heads, and sense the deaths of millions from light-years away. But it's spooky in a good way; he's the guy you're really glad to have on your side, and one simple thing puts us at much ease about him. Luke tells Kenobi that he will not follow him to Alderaan, and despite initial protests, Kenobi understands (and says as much) that one must always do what they feel is right. He does not try forcing his morality (shaped by a better understanding of political and metaphysical realities) on Luke. In fact, he respects that Luke is strong enough in character not to compromise on what he feels is right. Later, in the famous, alien-populated cantina in the city of Mos Eisley, they charter a ride with a smuggling space pilot, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his co-pilot Chewbacca, a seven-foot hairy humanoid called a Wookie (Peter Mayhew). Chewbacca never gets a hell of a lot of depths even in his best moments, and Solo at this point is mostly just a cocky, cranky loner displaying some of the charm he'd evidence later but not too much of it yet. Actually, if I were seeing this for the first time today, I can't help but think I'd find him to be something of an arrogant jackass, and more annoying than Luke. But Han is interesting, in that his is the first generation to be too young to remember seeing the Old Republic (and, by extension, the Jedi Knights) first-hand; his skepticism regarding the Force is not only understandable, but good thinking. How obvious it was that Ford would be the only cast member here to reach superstar status (or even to regularly get good acting jobs), I can't really say, but I'll bet he's glad he didn't become a carpenter. Burt Reynolds, Christopher Walken and Nick Nolte were also considered for this role; fine actors all (well, maybe not Reynolds), but they each would've made an awful Han Solo. The Mos Eisley cantina sequence is one of the more famous ones from this film, partly because of its wealth of strange costumes and creatures, and partly because of the amusingly light-hearted way it handles the most harrowing violence. Violence might be scary, but it certainly isn't to these people, who lose interest in a life-or-death fight as soon as the body hits the ground. You can leave a body there, but you'd better leave a tip too. In terms of the motley assortment of creatures, I can't help but think that this just wouldn't have worked in a straight, high-fantasy setting, high fantasy usually being too simplistic in its homogenous portrayal of different species (e.g. all orcs are evil, all elves are good). Not that Star Wars isn't often simplistic, but it knows that it's more fun (and it works better dramatically) to introduce a hundred members of a hundred different species which all act similarly, than to give us a hundred members of the same species and make them all the same. At this point in the movie, Luke's story on Tattooine and Leia's story on the Death Star begin their inevitable (re)union into a single tale, moving rapidly nonstop until they're finally away from the Death Star again. The scenes on the Death Star are probably the best in the film, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's the clearest example of how far advanced this civilization is, technologically, that all of these characters get to run around this moon-sized space station. The sets are all very cool, and the costumes for the Imperial military (both Navy command [quite reminiscent of Japanese uniforms circa World War II] and stormtroopers) are all eye-catching. A sense of danger also hangs over these scenes in a way that doesn't repeat itself in the movie; our heroes are, after all, surrounded by something like half a million people who want them dead. But the best reason why these scenes are the best is probably the fact that that's where Darth Vader has almost all of his scenes. I've long since found Vader to be the most interesting character in this series, and it's a good bet that just about everybody would agree with me. At this point in the series, there wasn't much to him beyond his obvious villain status; the future revelations about his family either hadn't yet even all been thought of (e.g. look all you want for father/daughter subtext in his scenes with Leia, but it ain't there) or just weren't yet introduced. He has all sorts of creepy things about him, aside from his imposing stature and scary black costume; for one thing, he breathes entirely separately from the way he talks, like he has two sets of lungs, and his voice sounds like it's put together electronically and projected from a speaker, as if maybe he isn't using lungs, throat or mouth at all. The first time we see the Force in action, is when Vader uses it to choke a defiant Imperial commander; we'd been told about it earlier, but the Dark Side is the first side of it we really see, giving the Force a dark kind of scary mysteriousness that stays with it for the rest of the series. Darth Vader gives the impression of somebody who, if he existed in real life, would cause almost everyone he comes across to soil their shorts in terror. I can almost imagine meeting Vader and being able to HEAR the evil around him, as a sort of extremely low-frequency oscillation that's deafening until you try paying attention to it. This of course makes inevitable the conflict between him and Obi-Wan Kenobi, who (as is made obvious early on) isn't afraid of anything; things there are exacerbated by a few comments from Vader which suggests that he hates Kenobi more than you or I have ever hated anyone or anything in our entire lives. Vader seems to exist outside of the Imperial military, but is subject to the will of the Imperial government. The only person we see him take orders from here is Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing); even the Emperor is only mentioned once or twice in passing. Just what his role is in everything is actually fairly unclear at this point; so far, all we know is that he's powerful and almost everybody's afraid of him. The nature of the Empire as a galaxy-spanning government isn't looked into too much, except that obviously, it's corrupt enough to destroy populated planets. (Alderaan's destruction seems needless, but it actually saved the Rebellion, because the Death Star could just as easily have destroyed Tattooine, a planet nobody would miss, to prevent the plans from getting offworld) The officers, for the most part, seem there less because of their belief in the system but because they're afraid to quit. At this point, the higher-ups in the Imperial Navy still, for the most part, have American accents, excepting Cushing. Cushing didn't seem to get that many villain roles, but he's so hissable in this, I have to wonder why he didn't get more; despite his lengthy list of horror-film accomplishments, this was the first time a lot of us ever saw him (I was, after all, three) and I'd always seen him as a sort of "villain actor", even long after it became obvious that he didn't get many villain roles. The one genuinely, certifiably power-mad villain in this movie (would Admiral Piett have blown up Alderaan?), Tarkin crosses the line maybe once or twice (he's amusingly angered by Leia having lied to him, despite his lying to her and then blowing up her homeworld) but he's still a great villain. Our heroes manage to escape to the Alliance with the Death Star in hot pursuit, setting up the climax of the film, but not without a serious price to pay, as Kenobi is killed in battle by Vader. Actually Kenobi submits entirely, and is murdered by Vader without hesitation. If you're wondering why he did that (God knows I did for a long, long time), think of Luke abandoning his Jedi training in the next film to save his friends; Luke really WOULD have tried shooting through a platoon of stormtroopers and Darth Vader himself to try to save Kenobi, no matter how foolish it might've been. And, of course, he (and the Rebellion) would have been lost. We find a few odd things in this scene; for one thing, when a Jedi is killed, his body disappears. And while he may be dead, he can still reach out from the spirit realm to communicate with the living. A few plot problems make what follows in the film bog down a little, and the climactic attack on the Death Star goes on a little long anyway, but it's still quite a rush to see Han return from his abortive trip back to his criminal lifestyle to save Luke's ass, and another rush to see Luke score the winning shot on the Death Star. Star Wars closes out with a medal-awarding scene heavily inspired by Triumph Of The Will; harmless of course, but I can't see that kind of thing going over too well today in an age where you can buy a Wagner CD only if you're prepared to have the guy at the till look at you like you're a Nazi. The placing of magical/spiritual elements in science-fiction trappings is usually a risky gamble at best, but in Star Wars it makes perfect sense, seeing as how despite its setting, its story still makes room for knights, a kidnapped princess, an old wizard with a beard, and an evil wizard with black robes, and we haven't even met the REALLY evil wizard with black robes yet. The Force and the elements of the story that spring from it are the things which make a lot of hard-core SF fans (don't call it sci-fi, or they'll cry) look down on this movie and series. More serious than wooden acting or questionable plot developments is of course the fact that it's "not REAL science fiction". Myself, I've long grown tired of the windbag complaints of people who can't take their sci-fi (yeah, I'm calling it sci-fi) with some cream and sugar once in a while. Granted, because of this series, "once in a while" in the movies became "just about all the time", though sci-fi cinema before this wasn't exactly like every single movie was 2001: A Space Odyssey. I always keep two things in mind when I think of the Star Wars movies as sci-fi: one, that even the "hardest" of "hard" sci-fi (don't get them started on "hard" sci-fi vs. "soft" sci-fi either...I would not be the first person to suggest that they don't want science FICTION, they want science PORNOGRAPHY, complete with the dogmatic assurance that hard porn is always better than soft porn) is still, just fantasy. And besides, as soon as you introduce faster-than-light travel in a story like this, any pretensions of it being "hard" sci-fi go out the airlock. And two, Arthur Clarke's old maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic to those who don't understand it. I don't find it entirely inconceivable that one day, in the far future, humanity will have advanced to a point that certain members of it (though evolution or genetic manipulation) are able to harness and use forces we don't even know exist yet. And then, this just sets up the ages-old debate as to whether "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." means long ago and far away to us, in the present Milky Way, or to humanity in the far, far future. I've always entertained the possibility that "A long time ago" could mean, oh, maybe twenty-five years ("When did you go to high school?" "Oh, a long time ago."), and a galaxy far, far away would be pretty much ALL of them, including our own (it is, after all, 70,000 light-years across), so there's no real reason the New Republic couldn't be zipping along next door, right now. (I know, it's a stretch.) Of course, a movie like Star Wars is not going to be without its problems. Taking its inspiration from both "high" (Kurosawa & Ford films) and "low" (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers) sources, there's not really anything here that hasn't been seen before in one form or another - hell, some of it's even reportedly stolen from previous films that were never finished, like the aborted H.R. Giger-designed version of Dune! It's got the swing-over-the-chasm scene, it's got the dogfight-in-the-trench scene, it's got the trapped-in-a-room-with-the-walls-closing-in scene, it's got any number of other things, plot-wise, which are nothing new. It's the way it's all put together that's special, welded and screwed into a framework that's distinctly its own. Other movies would try to pull this off, but nothing's even come close to the Star Wars films for convincingly creating a galactic civilization, let alone managing to fill it with high adventure the way these do. The past 24 years have shown us a lot of ways in which technology could advance that we hadn't even really conceived of (at least in the movies) when this movie was made, but I for one am glad that the adventures in Star Wars aren't gummed up with...well, think of all the stuff that's made for adventure in more recent films and TV shows. Virtual reality, computer viruses, human viruses, holographic personalities...the list goes on for a long time, but Star Wars keeps this kind of thing simple. No fancy concepts, just a more or less modern (late 70's) way of life on a galactic scale. Instead of warships and aircraft carriers, there are Imperial Star Destroyers. Instead of big-rig trucks, they have private freighters. Instead of home appliances, they have droids. Not THAT much has changed, which is part of what makes this civilization so believable. Part of Lucas's intention in showing the nature of this civilization is to make sure that everything (except for the well-maintained Imperial stations and ships) looks like it's well-used, rusty, and dented; all these millennia of technological advancement does NOT allow most people to just conjure up a new spaceship or something every time they need one. The original trilogy mostly focuses on either poor or uninhabited planets, or the doing-the-best-they-can Rebel Alliance which can't afford to "drive new every two". Plot-wise, it mostly hangs together, though there are some bothersome details, like how there are a few references to how Luke's a pretty good pilot in his own right, but it doesn't SHOW us that until the climax of the film, when he picks up on flying an X-wing (outside of an atmosphere!) pretty handily. And the worst fault has to be when the Millennium Falcon flies straight to the rebel base without stopping off somewhere and transferring the plans to another ship, while they KNOW there's a tracking device on board! Or maybe they were counting on the Death Star following them so that they wouldn't have to go all the way to it in order to attack it...I dunno. And while C-3P0 already confused the hell out of me once with that inexplicable line, he's also stuck with this movie's other big head-scratcher, his claim that he doesn't know who Princess Leia is. I mean, he belonged to the captain of the ship which was captured for transporting the Princess on the most important mission of her life; you'd think he would've seen her around, and the remaining films in the "prequel" trilogy are not likely to make this hole any smaller. John Williams' score, like the movie around it, isn't terribly original (surprise, surprise - it's Holst again! And Mahler, and Korngold...) but does what a good pastiche score should do; take the elements that work well and have fun with them, elements from a diverse selection of sources that are tweaked into a seamless whole. It even spawned something of a top-40 disco hit, God help us. Like so many things in this trilogy, he wouldn't be at his best yet for one more film, but this one is one of those rare scores I like all the way through without skipping over anything. Probably the strangest thing about Star Wars, and any of its sequels and prequels, is the wealth of information BEHIND the story. Nobody ever mentions that Greedo is a Rodian, but that's what he is. There is mention made of Han having dumped a shipment when confronted with Imperial trouble, but they don't say it was a SPICE shipment (long-time sci-fi shorthand for "drugs"; Nancy Reagan would've loved that, but she wouldn't be the First Lady for another several years). The idea of a "Lord of the Sith" wouldn't be mentioned in any of the movies until the first prequel in 1999, but Vader is often referred to as such in other resources. The relationship between Kenobi and Owen is old news to the fans. Any hard-core Star Wars fan will tell you that the Rebel Alliance trained Luke on simulators for the Death Star run, because that's in the radio production and the novelization (credit to George Lucas, unsurprisingly ghost-written by Alan Dead Foster). Don't get these guys started on what is or isn't "canon". It's also fun to watch this movie with the events of the sequels and prequel firmly in mind, even if you hated them; for example, it becomes quite obvious now that Kenobi isn't being forthcoming with Luke about the fate of his father, and his failure to remember R2D2 speaks more about his attitude towards droids than his failing memory. And Uncle Owen's "That's what I'm afraid of" line loses its ambiguity...or does it? How many people know who Darth Vader really is? Sometimes I wonder if Star Wars isn't kind of a summer-movie Halloween; great at what it is, but having a detrimental long-term effect on the genre. But I don't worry about it too much; eventually, a movie like Star Wars had to happen, and I'm just glad it was as good as it was. Besides, the success of Star Wars spared us (indirectly) from a second Star Trek series...without Spock! (ideas for the series would go on to be hammered into the first of the Star Trek movies) I don't know about you, but for my money, Captain Kirk without Mr. Spock is like a peanut-butter sandwich without the milk to wash it down with. In 1997, George Lucas made the questionable decision to re-release all three films theatrically, tweaked in some places. Many people have criticized this decision; myself, I find the whole thing rather scattershot. For Star Wars, it's interesting but generally doesn't improve things. There are a number of FX (and new FX shots) added to flesh out Mos Eisley as a bustling little metropolis, and to beef up the climactic Death Star run (which as I said, ran a shade too long already). All this is good, and I also liked the inclusion of a cut scene where Luke is reunited with his old friend Biggs (otherwise, he gets in one offhand mention of Biggs back on Tattooine, and Biggs is referred to once by name during the climax, and one would be hard-pressed to remember the connection). But not all of the new stuff works; a deleted scene where Han talks with Jabba the Hutt (originally played by a fur-clad Scotsman, with the intention of superimposing a stop-motion creature in his place) manages to work in two great, originally unintended laughs (it would be years before the design of Jabba would be decided on, so when the scene was written and filmed, nobody knew he was going to be a giant slug with a long tail) but doesn't add anything that hadn't just passed between Han and Greedo. And don't get me started on this "Greedo shoots first" shit. It goes without saying that Star Wars was a mega-success the likes of which hadn't been seen since Gone With The Wind, causing many Fox executives (who didn't think it would be a success at all) to sigh with relief and many other studios to flagellate themselves for passing over this oft-rejected script. I still can't get a straight answer out of what Lucas REALLY intended in the first place; many have said that his "I've always envisioned it as a trilogy!" claim only came up after it was in theaters for a little while and it became obvious that he had a massive hit on his hands. In support of this, the original print of the film didn't call this one "Episode IV: A New Hope", and producer Gary Kurtz has stated that the notion of further films didn't come up until Star Wars was released to great success. But on the other hand, the obviously troubled way Ben talks about Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader clearly sets up more plot threads for later on down the road, the bad guy gets away at the end, the bad guy's boss is scarcely mentioned, and there's still a hell of a big Empire out there. It seems fairly clear that Lucas intended there to be something more. Whether it was a trilogy of films, two trilogies of films (as is now coming to pass) or THREE trilogies of films (as was reportedly the plan for a while; God knows that's all my friends and I could talk about for a while as kids, little knowing that we'd be 25 by the time we saw any of them), seems to have changed a lot over the years. As you have probably figured by now, Star Wars is one of those movies that I absolutely, unconditionally love, and any complaints about Hamill's iffy acting, the strange plot/dialogue holes, and the not-exactly-state-of-the-art-sci-fi nature of the story are gonna ring hollow to me. Star Wars was never "just a movie" to me as a child, it was the coolest thing on the planet, worthy of endless discussions and playtime fantasy situations. As an adult, it's still a lot of fun, and it's impossible to overlook the effect it had on me and my tastes in movies, books, and music. It's impossible to duplicate the effect on an adult that this movie had on me as a child, so I know that nothing like it is ever coming along for me again (the closest thing was my discovery of metal music in the late 80's, and even that doesn't come close) which only makes it that much more precious. In summation: Star Wars is cool. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE