Reviews
Star Wars (1977) IMDb
Categorization |
Adventure blending The Dam Busters (1955) and The Hidden Fortress (1958) with added escapism, supernatural fantasy and the trappings of space opera. |
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Commentary |
Zac Bertschy once observed that Darth Vader’s helmet is as ubiquitous, as recognized and as void of meaning as Hello Kitty (ANNCast, September 16th, 2011). Star Wars has attained a level of mainstream popularity that goes beyond association with the films. What George Lucas created here is genuinely very good but remembered for something other than its quality. It is a goldmine for research into modern culture. I attribute the film’s initial success to four roughly equal factors: The timing, the landmark work at ILM, the rest of the stagecraft—primarily the editing—and the deliberate emptiness of the script. The most moving scene in The Hidden Fortress is that of the heroes coming upon an amoral Shintō ritual of purifying destruction, in which Yuki—the model for Leia—connects with a crowd of ordinary people as her gold melts to slag. She is wiser for it. Compare the panhuman hotchpotch of religions that went into the Jedi Warriors. The apparent pacifism of these Jedi is clearly not the message of the film. War is the selling point, right there in the title. What the Jedi actually believe is barely implied and has no explanatory value. Their rituals, if any, are not shown. Compare A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) where the beliefs of peaceful wizards are explored and society is consequently at peace. Lucas inverted Le Guin’s approach, deliberately eschewing cultural specificity, historical or invented, beyond melodramatic moral dualism. If it hadn’t been for producer Gary Kurtz, who actually knew something about religion, Lucas would have kept a “Kiber Crystal” MacGuffin in the shooting script as an even more shallow symbol of all human spirituality. The crystal has survived in the broader canon as a lightsaber component. Where J. R. R. Tolkien invented cultures, including rich non-human cultures, Lucas instead applied the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) as a recipe for commercial success. The book was his manual. Crucially, he never made the effort to support its Proppian framework diegetically. By design, there is almost nothing beneath the surface in Star Wars. Like the unexamined, superficial biological diversity of the Rebel Alliance, and the princess fighting for democracy, the description of the Jedi as philosophical or religious or both is just one tool for directing audience alignment. Obi-Wan is a hollow version of Baslim the Cripple from Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), named after a belt. Lucas counted on the audience’s general pro-religious bias to build support for Obi-Wan. He intended for Campbell’s and his own simple tokens to raise the viewer’s sympathy by association in the context of a short spectacle. The result is intuitive, unobjectionable and lifeless. Lucas used the same technique once before, to create the blandness that makes THX-1138 (1971) an effective dystopia. Star Wars has that blandness. The Dam Busters at least shows German factory workers escaping by ladder, a tiny concession to the idea of the enemy’s own diversity, autonomy and value. None of that here, just faceless, incompetent stormtroopers. The Dam Busters is open with the fact that its heroes are defending the British empire. Star Wars instead pretends that a minority of anti-fascists without external support are sure to prevail if they simply use force and Force against their galaxy-controlling oppressors, an apparently legitimate regime with vast resources. No rebels talk about what kind of society they want to build, or how. They don’t drum up support, they just blow up the Death Star. It’s purposefully naïve, loaded with sugary wishful thinking. Such emptiness is not always well received, but the timing was right. While US audiences struggled to respond to Watergate, the oil crises, defeat in Vietnam and urban decay, they got science fiction like Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Dark Star (1974), A Boy and His Dog (1975) and Logan’s Run (1976). Not all SF was so dark, but the brighter, family-friendly films were not as well crafted because the genre had been marginalized by the Z-list productions mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988). The most celebrated literary SF from 1977 is A Scanner Darkly, a black eulogy to a generation whose lives and ideals were destroyed by drugs. The fantasy spectacle racket was certainly weak; star Mark Hamill was also in Wizards (1977). In retrospect, it seems like the timing was good for an escapist Campbellian epic with a higher budget and convincing special effects. The revolution in marketing that followed the lesson of Jaws (1975) made it likely that one such film would be a blockbuster around this time. It happened to be Star Wars. The trilogy became the prime example of mainstream SF with universal name recognition throughout the West, displacing the cheaper and nerdier Star Trek (1966). Ironically, neither franchise has any relationship with scientific methods. If George Lucas had not been first to combine the new advances, history could have taken a different turn in that respect. Instead of deliberately shallow space opera where the fights are patterned after WW1 aerial engagements because WW2 planes were too quick for Lucas, the first modern SF blockbuster could have been hard science fiction with ideas, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or A Clockwork Orange (1971). The director of those films, Stanley Kubrick, was already processing scripts for what eventually became the insipid A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). If that had gotten produced under Kubrick in 1977, instead of Star Wars, the vernacular definition of science fiction could have evolved differently. If that alternate history is too drastic, imagine a smaller change. In Roger Ebert’s review he singled out the cantina as a high point, noting that Lucas “so slyly” has the clientele “exhibit characteristics that were universally human”. In other words, Lucas made sure to harness immediacy, intuitiveness, familiarity and humanity where he could have used literally alien stuff. Take the example of Chewbacca, inspired by Lucas’s dog and named after the Russian word for dog. Chewbacca is a mix of dog and man. Without the excellent costume, acting and sound, he would have been like an anthropomorphic cartoon character in a Disney movie: A live-action Pluto with Ebert’s “universally human” characteristics. Despite the first-class execution, Chewbacca is ultimately just a denatured servant to human interests. He could so easily have had depth. For example, he could have been more like Speaker-to-Animals from Ringworld (1970): Animalistic, huge, intimidating, humanoid and able to make itself understood like Lucas’s Chewbacca but also capable of pursuing its own agenda according to a specific alien culture. Such an alternative would have been harder for children and jaded film critics to understand and appreciate at first glance, but it would have made a lot more sense than a human dog. Lucas invited his audiences to overlook all complexity and shun the unfamiliar. They did. They elected Reagan the actor. They reheated the Cold War, abdicating world leadership to be rebels against the paper tiger of the Soviet Union. While Reagan’s implausible missile defence system got the nickname “Star Wars”, the film got fans outside the mainstream. These people missed the invitation to forget. In the hard core, deeper meanings are invented, controlled and defended. With its sequels, Star Wars achieved a critical mass that lets its geeks live almost entirely on the franchise the way zealots live on holy writ, many as Jenkins’s textual poachers with a vibrant and terrible “fan film” culture. As a student I briefly described the Imperium of Man to a fellow game club member who immediately assumed the idea came from Star Wars as opposed to any of the thousands of earlier works describing an interstellar empire. The franchise, by virtue of its entrenched visibility, gets more credit than it deserves. The interest is reproduced generationally, obscuring the original’s context and resetting culture. I first saw it on VHS tapes my parents brought home when I had practically no experience of earlier space opera. The resetting of culture is mirrored within the franchise. Its creator has replaced and added special effects in several waves, even going back to the original when one change symbolically unmaking Han Solo as an antihero was poorly received, matching neither nostalgia nor the audience’s turbulent desires for realism and power fantasy. The “controversy” triggered multiple labour-intensive fan demakes. In 2014, a huge amount of licensed material that had been semi-canon as the “Expanded Universe” was thrown out, retconned to make room for more spin-offs and sequels. The franchise has no foundation. Success has prompted analysis from many more angles: fairytale (lack of a mother, shades of Arthur), allegory (names like Greedo and Solo), history (Rome), Oedipus Rex (kill your father, hit on your sister), 19th-century melodramatic formulae, cinematographic inspiration from Riefenstahl inviting comparison to the Frankfurt school’s idea that modern popular culture repeats Nazi social engineering methods (by telling accident, spin-off novel Leia, Princess of Alderaan (2017) repeats “Strength through joy” as a venerable philosophical maxim), the explosion of merchandising in film, Lucas’s studio-independent funding as bizarro auteurism, the nostalgic reconstitution of pre-TV serial aesthetics (this film being “Episode IV”), and pleasant Kurosawa influences on clothing and terminology (時代 → Jedi). The work itself cannot be disentangled from its sprawling superstructure, but I like that mess. Unlike the movie, the mess says something about humanity. |
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References here: Nerd argues about distinction between fantasy and science fiction, Alien (1979), Urusei Yatsura (1981), Fang of the Sun Dougram (1981), Lensman (1984), The Last Starfighter (1984), “Jumping” (1984), Gall Force: Eternal Story (1986), Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1988), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory (1991), Golden Wings (1992), MythBusters (2003), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), “Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible” (2010), The Untold History of the United States (2012), The Lego Movie (2014), “Robot on the Road” (2015), “Cassette Girl” (2015), The Legend of the Galactic Heroes: The New Thesis - Encounter (2018). |
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Sequel: The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) IMDb
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Sequel: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) IMDb
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Sequel: Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) IMDb
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Fan film: “Troops” (1997) IMDb |
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Prequel: Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) IMDb
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Prequel: Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) IMDb
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Parody: “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars” (2002) IMDb |
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Documentary: Empire of Dreams: The Story of the ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy (2004) IMDb
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Prequel: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) IMDb
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Fan film: “TIE Fighter” (2015) IMDb
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Sequel: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) IMDb
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