[Editor's note: May 27, 2026: The following is actual several unfinished blog posts on Star Wars that I wrote in the year of 2015. I wanted to write a comprehensive post that would encapsulate all of my thoughts on Star Wars, but kept finding it difficult to do, so I kept abandoning the post and starting over. Eventually I gave up on this, and wrote on December 15, 2015:
I've been talking about writing a post on Star Wars now for close to a year now .... , but I've got so many thoughts on the franchise that it's difficult for me to sort out my thoughts into anything approaching coherence.
However, when searching through my old blog posts this afternoon (searching for something unrelated), I came across these abandoned drafts. And I remembered how hard I had worked to express myself. Even if I didn't succeed in saying everything I wanted to say, I thought I should still publish these posts here.
Because these posts are still in rough draft form, they may read a little rough in places. Also, because I kept giving up on posts, and then restarting them, there is a lot of repetition between the various iterations of this post. But for whatever it's worth, here are my attempts at talking about Star Wars.]
Although I had watched these movies ad nauseum in childhood, this was the first time I had seen them in about 10 years, and it did inspire some new reflections.
...so there's that, and then, of course, there's the obvious fact that the new movie is coming out, and you can't open the Internet without reading something about it.
I've been talking about writing this post for a while now (here and here), but I had trouble sorting out my thoughts, and I procrastinated. But now we're just days away from the release of Episode VII, and I decided it was now or never. So I'm going to dive in here and try to write something up, and if it ends up being long-winded and disjointed...well, this is a blog after all. It's supposed to be a haven for long winded and disjointed thoughts.
Nostalgia, Nostalgia, Nostalgia
I suppose every Star Wars review written by someone of my generation has to take nostalgia into consideration. (And it's gotten to the point now where to even mention Star Wars and nostalgia in the same sentence is to sound cliched).
There's a funny thing that happens to most of us where somewhere along the line we lose the ability to be awed by movies. So even though the special effects have gotten better, and the action scenes more intense, movies now no longer really thrill me. They become, instead, more of a pleasant way to pass the time than an experience.
But the really funny thing is that, even though movies now can't really move me, when I re-watch a movie from childhood, I can still remember the original emotions it evoked in me, and to a certain extent even feel those emotions again.
So every time I see Star Wars, I am watching it through two different eyes. Part of me has my adult critical thinking abilities--I can appreciate this film now as part of a time piece from the 1970s--but I'm also at the same time feeling like I'm 5 years old all over again.
Star Wars wasn't the first movie I saw but, it was one of the first movies. Possibly in the first 5, I don't remember. I was about four or five years old when I saw it.
I was completely unfamiliar with the rules of film and the rules of the genre. I didn't yet know it was an unwritten rule of action films that the good guys always win, or that the main character wasn't going to die. I took nothing for granted, and so I was at the edge of my seat the whole time. When Luke got pulled under water by that creature in the garbage disposal, I thought there was a real possibility he might not emerge again. When the walls started closing in on the heroes, I wasn't sure they would actually make it out in time.
Another funny thing about kids is how emotionally invested they get in movies.
Seriously, watch any movie with young kids, and see watch how upset they can get about what happens in movies.
I don't believe I was any worse than a normal kid my age in this regard, but my mother would always get concerned when I would get too concerned about what was happening on the screen.
Whenever a character I liked was in any sort of peril, I used to get really concerned about whether they would make it out alive or not, and each time my mother would take it upon herself to check and make sure I knew the movie wasn't the same as real life.
I knew it wasn't real life, of course. Many times as a child I wanted to explain to my mother, "Yes, I know it's not real-real, but it's real in the context of this fictional world, and I've allowed myself to become immersed in this world, and emotionally attached to its characters, I have a sort of emotional investment in wanting to see them escape from the danger safely and succeed in their quest."
But at the time I lacked the meta-language to adequately express my thoughts on emotional investment in fictional stories, so I never was able to tell my mother why exactly it mattered to me so much that all of these characters make it through safely.
And so, because of this, when I first saw Star Wars, I spent the entire movie absolutely on the edge of my seat, with my heart racing the entire time.
And when I see this movie on TV again now, even though I've watched it 100 times since, and even though I'm a full-grown man approaching middle-age, each scene brings back flashbacks of that intense emotional experience I had when I was 5 years old.
Right from the opening scene: the space battle, the dramatic music, the way the rebel soldiers all lined up at the door, and camera cut to each of their faces. You could see how worried they were, as this strange clunking noise sounded--at five years old, I was absolutely horrified, and yet fascinated. And then the gun battle, and most of the rebel soldiers are immediately killed. Right from the beginning, this was clearly a movie in which no one would be safe, I thought. And then there was that scene of Darth Vader breaking the neck of the captain as he interrogated him, a scene that would haunt me many nights as I lay in bed.
Am I making this sound like an awful experience? Because I absolutely loved it, in the way that children like being just a little bit scared when they watch something.
A lot of the movie I didn't even fully understand. This was, again, partly just due to my ignorance of cinematic conventions.
For example, the scene in the Death Star when Darth Vader confronts Obi-Wan Kenobi: The movie shows Obi-Wan Kenobi walking down the hall. Then Obi-Wan stops. The shot cuts to Darth Vader standing at the end of the hall waiting for him. Then it cuts back to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s reaction. I remember watching this for the first time with my parents, and they said to me, “Oh, look at this, Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to meet Darth Vader now!” And I remember thinking: “How do you know they’re going to meet? The movie just clearly showed them in separate hallways.” I still had no idea of conventions of film making, and I didn’t know that these two establishing shots were meant to show Darth Vader at one end of the hallway, and Obi-Wan at the other.
The assault on the Death Star at the end completely confused me. I could tell that there were a lot of space ships shooting at stuff and a lot of ships blowing up, but it was a complete mystery to me trying to keep track of which pilots were alive and which were dead, and what the connection was between the shots of the cockpits and the shots of outer-space.
And much of the dialogue I had no idea what it meant. But this did not disturb me. When you're five years old, you're used to not understanding a lot of what you hear around you. Even today, when I watch this movie on TV, I can still mostly remember which parts of the dialogue I understood, and which parts of the movie I had no clue about, but could infer the character dynamics from the visuals and the emotions. The scene where Darth Vader choked that guy with the force, for example. I had no idea what anyone was saying up until "Enough of this. Vader, release him." That didn't stop me from following the visuals of the story, however.
***********************************
I was born after Star Wars.
Not that much after, admittedly. The original Star Wars hit theaters in May, 1977, only 11 months before I was born. But if something was before your time, it doesn't matter if it was 100 years before, or one day. The point is you missed it, so you can't truly understand what the world was like before it happened.
Star
Wars was one of the first movies I ever saw. I think I was 5
years old. It was on TV one
night, and my parents granted me and my sister the rare privilege of actually
staying up past our bedtimes to watch the movie.
I still remember many of my initial
impressions of that movie from my 5 year old perspective. For example, the scene in the Death Star when
Darth Vader confronts Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The movie shows Obi-Wan Kenobi walking down the hall. Then Obi-Wan stops. The shot cuts to Darth Vader standing at the
end of the hall waiting for him. Then it
cuts back to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s reaction.
I remember watching this for the first time with my parents, and they
said to me, “Oh, look at this, Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to meet Darth Vader
now!” And I remember
thinking: “How do you know they’re going to meet? The movie just clearly showed them in
separate hallways.” I still
had no idea of conventions of film making, and I didn’t know that these two
establishing shots were meant to show Darth Vader at one end of the hallway,
and Obi-Wan at the other. I assumed they
were in completely separate hallways. (Memories
like this remind us of how much of the knowledge we sometimes assume we were
innately born with actually had to be learned.
How to watch and understand movies, and understand the cuts between
different shots, is one of those things.
It’s actually a learned cultural knowledge, and not something we come
out of the womb with.)
For anyone who grew up with Star Wars (which nowadays is just about everyone under 40) it's very hard to try to give an accurate critique of Star Wars for two reasons.
The first reason is that, as with any classic film, it's hard to truly appreciate the innovations of the film if you're born after it. Any successful film gets imitated to death. Classic films seem cliche because they started the cliches that everyone else picked up on.
The second reason is that, as with any childhood film, it's hard to separate our childhood nostalgia from the objective merits of the film.
Even now, at the age of 36, when I re-watch Star Wars, I remember all the emotions the film produced in me at 5 years old. I remember how scary Darth Vader seemed when he choked Captain Antilles to death. I remember how that terrifying opening scene put me on the edge of my seat and set the tone for the entire rest of the movie—this was a movie where no one was safe, I thought. I remember the thrill of the Millennium Falcon escaping from Tatooine. And I remember how confused I was during the final Death Star battle. (All the quick cuts between the planes and fighter pilots completely threw me. I could tell a lot of people were dying, and a lot planes were getting blown up, but the reason a plane would burst into flames completely escaped me.)
When I was in elementary school, Star Wars was the greatest movie ever.
Except
saying now, as an adult, that something was a great movie doesn’t quite do
justice to a child’s view. As an adult, there
are several movies I enjoy, and I can quite happily watch them and then forget
about them and go on with my life. But
as a child, a movie was a completely magical event. You could spend weeks being excited about
seeing a movie, and after you saw it, you could spend weeks obsessing about how
wonderful it was. At that age, movies
had the power to completely thrill you in a way that is completely lost to
jaded adult sensibilities.
Watching
Star Wars was an event. Word
would get out at school that Star Wars was going to be on TV later on in
the week, and everyone at school would be looking forward to it all week, and
then talking about how great it was all the next week.This was all back in the days before VCRs became popular, and when it was a huge event in a kid’s life when a TV station showed a popular movie.
And
then our family got our first VCR. And
the next time the Star Wars movies were shown on TV, I recorded them
onto VHS. And I watched them over and
over and over again until I got sick of them.
The
wide availability of Star Wars cheapened the experience. It was no longer something you looked forward
to all week, it was something that was always there and could be watched
whenever you wanted. And consequently it
was no longer quite as special.
But
although I had gotten sick of Star Wars, everybody else hadn’t. And so all through middle school and high
school, Church youth group leaders would show Star Wars at youth group
retreats. School teachers would show Star
Wars at school parties. My high
school friends would organize Friday night sleep overs in which we would watch
all 3 movies in the trilogy back to back to back.
By the time I finished high school, I was more than sick of Star Wars. I was done with it. When Star Wars was re-released into the theaters in 1997 for the special editions, everyone else in my college dormitory was very excited about it. (Some people bought tickets weeks in advance.) But I initially refused to go. “I’ve seen that movie so many times, I don’t think you could pay to get me to see it again,” I told a dormmate. “I’m certainly not going to buy a theater ticket for it.” (Despite all my protesting, however, I eventually did give in to peer pressure, and the media hype, and went along to the theatrical re-release.)
But although it's impossible to separate yourself from childhood nostalgia completely, it is possible to get at least some critical distance with time. And that's what I've finally done.
Until recently, the last time I had seen the original Star Wars trilogy was back in 2007, 8 years ago.
But then a few months ago, I showed the original Star Wars trilogy to my students. (As regular readers of this blog already know. Following my decision to integrate movie watching into my ESL classroom, I have recently shown my students Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Because the term was coming to an end, we didn't have time to do worksheets for Return of the Jedi, but I did show it to my students on the last day of class.)
Watching these films for the first time in 8 years enabled me to get somewhat of an objective perspective on them, and to better understand what exactly worked about them, and what didn't work about them. In addition, introducing these films to my Cambodian teenage students (who had never seen Star Wars before) helped to give me at least somewhat of a perspective on how well the movies hold up to a new generation not brought up on Star Wars nostalgia.
So, I thought I'd write down a few thoughts here about what strikes me now about the original trilogy.
My New Thoughts on the Original 1977 Star Wars
I guess the biggest thing that surprised me upon re-watching this movie is:
It's totally not an action film.
And this surprised me, because if you had asked me as a kid what I thought was so great about Star Wars, I would have said that it was so cool because the action was so great.
But my nostalgia coated memory had been playing me false. There's barely any action in the first movie.
The movie starts out with a very brief laser gun battle. And then, in terms of action sequences or fight sequences, there’s really not a lot for the next solid hour. (Aside from very brief encounters—the sand creature attacking Luke for example, but certainly no long extended action sequences.) Then, with over half the film’s running time over, they finally get to the Death Star.
And yes, there are some laser gun fights with the storm troopers on the Death Star, but a couple things struck me. First of all, these scenes were very brief. There's one brief shoot-out in the detention center, and one more after getting out of the garbage masher, and that’s pretty much all there is for action.
The second thing to note is that gun battles, the kind of battles where people just hold guns and point them and pull the trigger, have always been the lamest kind of action scenes ever. There's no choreography, no athletics, no test of strength against agility, or any of that. It's just pointing a gun and pressing a trigger. (Somehow we as a movie going audience have been tricked into thinking gun battles are exciting, but they're not really.)
Now I know that with every generation action sequences always have to get bigger and longer and better, so it's unfair to judge the 1977 Star Wars by the standards of today's action. But even back in the day it appears to have struck contemporaries as very tame in the action department. Roger Ebert wrote in back in 1977: “What makes the ‘Star Wars’ experience unique, though, is that it happens on such an innocent and often funny level. It’s usually violence that draws me so deeply into a movie—violence ranging from the psychological torment of a Bergman character to the mindless crunch of a shark’s jaws. Maybe movies that scare us find the most direct route to our imaginations. But there’s hardly any violence at all in ‘Star Wars’ (and even then it’s presented as essentially bloodless swashbuckling). Instead, there’s entertainment so direct and simple that all of the complications of the modern movie seem to vaporize.” [LINK HERE]
The action does increase with each installment. The Empire Strikes Back does have some slightly longer fight scenes. And then when we get to the last film, Return of the Jedi, then at this point the film is an all out action film. But Return of the Jedi is the only film that really qualifies as an action film.
But, Star Wars was a huge hit back in it's day, and not just with impressionable little 5 year old kids like me, but with everybody. So what was it that actually made this film so spectacular if it didn't have any action sequences to speak of?
Watching the film with my Cambodian students, who were seeing it for the first time, helped me see the film a little bit through the eyes of a new-comer, and it struck me how brilliant the story-telling was.
One of the interesting things in Star Wars is how the first hour of the movie really keeps you guessing as to where the story is going. Eventually you find out that Han and Luke are on a quest to rescue the Princess, but this plot doesn't firm up until one hour in already.
First you have this battle up in outer space. You don't know who any of these people are at first, but of course it's very easy to tell that Princess Leia is good and that Darth Vader is bad. But just when you're getting established with Princess Leia, then the action switches to follow the droids, and you follow their adventures going to Tatooine, arguing and then splitting up, and then getting captured by Jawas.
It seems briefly like the droids are going to be our main protagonists of the movie, because we don't even get introduced Luke Skywalker until the movie is about 15 minutes in. Even after it becomes obvious that the movie is going to be all about Luke, his quest doesn't even materialize until the movie is half over.
First Luke has to find out about his past from Obi-Wan, then he is reluctant to go on the mission until his family get killed by the stormtroopers. Even after he agrees to go with Obi-Wan, however, their mission was not originally to rescue the princess--their original mission was just to get the plans in R2D2 to Leia's father. It wasn't until they accidentally stumbled upon the Death Star, and got trapped inside, that the movie became about rescuing the Princess.
It's a risky move to delay setting up the actual plot of the movie for so long. This is not exactly screenwriting 101. And yet, even though the script takes a while to get where it's going, it's worth noting that it's not meandering. Everything is building up on one everything else. The audience might not know exactly where the film is going, but it's obvious that it's going somewhere.
The other thing which really jumped out at me is how little fat there is on this script. Despite the fact that it takes the first half of the film to set everything up, everything is set up very cleanly and with no wasted words. There's a real economy here--we know immediately what kind of a person Darth Vader is, and what he wants within a couple minutes of his entering the screen. Likewise with Princess Leia. Likewise with Luke, who we know within minutes what his problem is (he's stuck on the farm long after all his friends have left for adventure) and what he wants. And the same thing with Han Solo's problems and wants.
The other thing is just how brilliant the visuals and the music is. This is obvious right from the beginning, with the iconic Star Wars opening scene. The huge ship swallowing up the tiny ship. Darth Vader entering the film for the first time, a huge scary guy in a completely black suit, who towers over everyone else. (Although James Earl Jones did the voice, the actual guy inside the suit was a huge body builder, specifically cast just so he could have that towering look). And then there's the sounds: the heavy breathing, plus the ominous sounding John Williams's music.
I'm just getting warmed up over here. I could probably go on and on about how great this movie is. I haven't even gotten around to talking about the brilliant blend of fantasy with science fiction, the archetypal characters, Joseph Campbell and Kurosawa, and....
...but no, I'll stop here. Let's face it, the Internet is already filled with single males my age writing about how great Star Wars is. The last thing the Internet needs is another geek trying to explain to everyone how great Star Wars is.
So why am I writing this at all then? I guess the main things I wanted to express our as follows:
1). It's not just your nostalgia glasses talking--Star Wars really is a fantastic movie. Take it from someone who got sick of it, and then didn't watch it for several years, and then watched it again and noticed how brilliant this movie is.
2). To tell everyone that my teenage students (11-15) really seemed to dig the movie, so I to still hold up pretty well with the younger generation as well
***********************
In other hands, this kind of meandering story telling would be a recipe for disaster. But it's so well done in Star Wars, the fantasy world is so imaginative, the visuals are so captivating.
Until recently, the last time I had seen the original Star Wars trilogy was back in 2007, 8 years ago.
But then a few months ago, I showed the original Star Wars trilogy to my students. (As regular readers of this blog already know. Following my decision to integrate movie watching into my ESL classroom, I have recently shown my students Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Because the term was coming to an end, we didn't have time to do worksheets for Return of the Jedi, but I did show it to my students on the last day of class.)
Watching these films for the first time in 8 years enabled me to get somewhat of an objective perspective on them, and to better understand what exactly worked about them, and what didn't work about them. In addition, introducing these films to my Cambodian teenage students (who had never seen Star Wars before) helped to give me at least somewhat of a perspective on how well the movies hold up to a new generation not brought up on Star Wars nostalgia.
So, I thought I'd write down a few thoughts here about what strikes me now about the original trilogy.
My New Thoughts on the Original 1977 Star Wars
I guess the biggest thing that surprised me upon re-watching this movie is:
It's totally not an action film.
And this surprised me, because if you had asked me as a kid what I thought was so great about Star Wars, I would have said that it was so cool because the action was so great.
But my nostalgia coated memory had been playing me false. There's barely any action in the first movie.
The movie starts out with a very brief laser gun battle. And then, in terms of action sequences or fight sequences, there’s really not a lot for the next solid hour. (Aside from very brief encounters—the sand creature attacking Luke for example, but certainly no long extended action sequences.) Then, with over half the film’s running time over, they finally get to the Death Star.
And yes, there are some laser gun fights with the storm troopers on the Death Star, but a couple things struck me. First of all, these scenes were very brief. There's one brief shoot-out in the detention center, and one more after getting out of the garbage masher, and that’s pretty much all there is for action.
The second thing to note is that gun battles, the kind of battles where people just hold guns and point them and pull the trigger, have always been the lamest kind of action scenes ever. There's no choreography, no athletics, no test of strength against agility, or any of that. It's just pointing a gun and pressing a trigger. (Somehow we as a movie going audience have been tricked into thinking gun battles are exciting, but they're not really.)
Now I know that with every generation action sequences always have to get bigger and longer and better, so it's unfair to judge the 1977 Star Wars by the standards of today's action. But even back in the day it appears to have struck contemporaries as very tame in the action department. Roger Ebert wrote in back in 1977: “What makes the ‘Star Wars’ experience unique, though, is that it happens on such an innocent and often funny level. It’s usually violence that draws me so deeply into a movie—violence ranging from the psychological torment of a Bergman character to the mindless crunch of a shark’s jaws. Maybe movies that scare us find the most direct route to our imaginations. But there’s hardly any violence at all in ‘Star Wars’ (and even then it’s presented as essentially bloodless swashbuckling). Instead, there’s entertainment so direct and simple that all of the complications of the modern movie seem to vaporize.” [LINK HERE]
The action does increase with each installment. The Empire Strikes Back does have some slightly longer fight scenes. And then when we get to the last film, Return of the Jedi, then at this point the film is an all out action film. But Return of the Jedi is the only film that really qualifies as an action film.
But, Star Wars was a huge hit back in it's day, and not just with impressionable little 5 year old kids like me, but with everybody. So what was it that actually made this film so spectacular if it didn't have any action sequences to speak of?
Watching the film with my Cambodian students, who were seeing it for the first time, helped me see the film a little bit through the eyes of a new-comer, and it struck me how brilliant the story-telling was.
One of the interesting things in Star Wars is how the first hour of the movie really keeps you guessing as to where the story is going. Eventually you find out that Han and Luke are on a quest to rescue the Princess, but this plot doesn't firm up until one hour in already.
First you have this battle up in outer space. You don't know who any of these people are at first, but of course it's very easy to tell that Princess Leia is good and that Darth Vader is bad. But just when you're getting established with Princess Leia, then the action switches to follow the droids, and you follow their adventures going to Tatooine, arguing and then splitting up, and then getting captured by Jawas.
It seems briefly like the droids are going to be our main protagonists of the movie, because we don't even get introduced Luke Skywalker until the movie is about 15 minutes in. Even after it becomes obvious that the movie is going to be all about Luke, his quest doesn't even materialize until the movie is half over.
First Luke has to find out about his past from Obi-Wan, then he is reluctant to go on the mission until his family get killed by the stormtroopers. Even after he agrees to go with Obi-Wan, however, their mission was not originally to rescue the princess--their original mission was just to get the plans in R2D2 to Leia's father. It wasn't until they accidentally stumbled upon the Death Star, and got trapped inside, that the movie became about rescuing the Princess.
It's a risky move to delay setting up the actual plot of the movie for so long. This is not exactly screenwriting 101. And yet, even though the script takes a while to get where it's going, it's worth noting that it's not meandering. Everything is building up on one everything else. The audience might not know exactly where the film is going, but it's obvious that it's going somewhere.
The other thing which really jumped out at me is how little fat there is on this script. Despite the fact that it takes the first half of the film to set everything up, everything is set up very cleanly and with no wasted words. There's a real economy here--we know immediately what kind of a person Darth Vader is, and what he wants within a couple minutes of his entering the screen. Likewise with Princess Leia. Likewise with Luke, who we know within minutes what his problem is (he's stuck on the farm long after all his friends have left for adventure) and what he wants. And the same thing with Han Solo's problems and wants.
The other thing is just how brilliant the visuals and the music is. This is obvious right from the beginning, with the iconic Star Wars opening scene. The huge ship swallowing up the tiny ship. Darth Vader entering the film for the first time, a huge scary guy in a completely black suit, who towers over everyone else. (Although James Earl Jones did the voice, the actual guy inside the suit was a huge body builder, specifically cast just so he could have that towering look). And then there's the sounds: the heavy breathing, plus the ominous sounding John Williams's music.
I'm just getting warmed up over here. I could probably go on and on about how great this movie is. I haven't even gotten around to talking about the brilliant blend of fantasy with science fiction, the archetypal characters, Joseph Campbell and Kurosawa, and....
...but no, I'll stop here. Let's face it, the Internet is already filled with single males my age writing about how great Star Wars is. The last thing the Internet needs is another geek trying to explain to everyone how great Star Wars is.
So why am I writing this at all then? I guess the main things I wanted to express our as follows:
1). It's not just your nostalgia glasses talking--Star Wars really is a fantastic movie. Take it from someone who got sick of it, and then didn't watch it for several years, and then watched it again and noticed how brilliant this movie is.
2). To tell everyone that my teenage students (11-15) really seemed to dig the movie, so I to still hold up pretty well with the younger generation as well
***********************
In other hands, this kind of meandering story telling would be a recipe for disaster. But it's so well done in Star Wars, the fantasy world is so imaginative, the visuals are so captivating.
***********************
The original Star Wars hit theaters hit theaters 11 months before I was born. My story is a common one for someone of my generation.
So, following my decision to integrate movie watching into my ESL classroom, I have recently shown my students Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. (Because the term was coming to an end, we didn't have time to do worksheets for Return of the Jedi, but I did show it to my students on the last day of class.)
Star Wars absolutely blew me away as a kid, but then I was born in 1978, and I wasn't sure how my young students (mostly born after the year 2000) would react to it.
[It's an interesting thought experiment to compare any relatively recent action movie to the movies we grew up on in the 1980s. Even the completely forgettable, substandard action movies of today have action sequences that just blow the 1980s out of the water. It's an obvious observation, I know, but I remember the first time this hit me, in 2007. I was watching the Fantastic Four 2 (a completely forgettable substandard action movie) after having been on a nostalgia kick all that week in which I had been re-watching Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Superman. And I realized for the first time how much action movies had changed, and just how much action was packed into today's movies compared to how comparatively little action was in the movies of my childhood. And that's just for a completely forgettable movie like Fantastic Four 2.
Star
Wars was not the first movie I ever saw (that was Disney’s Bambi). But it was one of the first. I saw it for the first time when I was 5
years old at the time. It was on TV on
night, and my parents granted me and my sister the rare privilege of actually
staying up past our bedtimes to watch the movie.
I still remember many of my initial
impressions of that movie from my 5 year old perspective. One example: the scene in the Death Star when
Darth Vader confronts Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The movies shows Obi-Wan Kenobi walking down the hall. Then Obi-Wan stops. The shot cuts to Darth Vader standing at the
end of the hall waiting for him. Then it
cuts back to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s reaction.
I remember watching this for the first time with my parents, and they
said to me, “Oh, look at this, Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to meet Darth Vader
now!”
And I remember
thinking: “How do you know they’re going to meet? The movie just clearly showed them in
separate hallways.”
I still
had no idea of conventions of film making, and I didn’t know that these two
establishing shots were meant to show Darth Vader at one end of the hallway,
and Obi-Wan at the other. I assumed they
were in completely separate hallways. (Memories
like this remind us of how much of the knowledge we sometimes assume we were
innately born with actually had to be learned.
How to watch and understand movies, and understand the cuts between
different shots, is one of those things.
It’s actually a learned cultural knowledge, and not something we come
out of the womb with.)
Even
now, at the age of 36, when I re-watch Star Wars, I remember all the
emotions the film produced in me at 5 years old. I remember how scary Darth Vader seemed when
he choked Captain Antilles to death. I
remember how that terrifying opening scene put me on the edge of my seat and
set the tone for the entire rest of the movie—this was a movie where no one was
safe, I thought.
I remember the thrill of the Millennium
Falcon escaping from Tatooine. And I
remember how confused I was during the final Death Star battle. (All the quick cuts between the planes and
fighter pilots completely threw me. I
could tell a lot of people were dying, and a lot planes were getting blown up,
but the reason a plane would burst into flames completely escaped me.)
These
vivid childhood memories always come back to me every time I re-watch Star
Wars, and they always get in the way of my more sophisticated adult
sensibilities. Which makes it very hard
to judge the film objectively. Is Star
Wars actually a good film, or am I just a victim of my own childhood
nostalgia?
Nevertheless,
despite this overwhelming childhood nostalgia, my attitude towards Star Wars
has undergone a number of metamorphoses over the years.
When I
was in elementary school, Star Wars was the greatest movie ever.
Except
saying now, as an adult, that something was a great movie doesn’t quite do
justice to a child’s view. As an adult, there
are several movies I enjoy, and I can quite happily watch them and then forget
about them and go on with my life. But
as a child, a movie was a completely magical event. You could spend weeks being excited about
seeing a movie, and after you saw it, you could spend weeks obsessing about how
wonderful it was. At that age, movies
had the power to completely thrill you in a way that is completely lost to
jaded adult sensibilities.
Watching
Star Wars was an event. Word
would get out at school that Star Wars was going to be on TV later on in
the week, and everyone at school would be looking forward to it all week, and
then talking about how great it was all the next week.
And as
cynical as we are all now about the massive toy empire that Star Wars became,
and that George Lucas sold his soul to, at the time, those toys were also part
of the experience. The Ewok Village
wasn’t something you just watched for a couple hours and then forgot about, it
was a whole toy set which you could return over and over again to for more and
more adventures.
This
was all back in the days before VCRs became popular, and when it was a huge
event in a kid’s life when a TV station showed a popular movie.
And
then our family got our first VCR. And
the next time the Star Wars movies were shown on TV, I recorded them
onto VHS. And I watched them over and
over and over again until I got sick of them.
The
wide availability of Star Wars cheapened the experience. It was no longer something you looked forward
to all week, it was something that was always there and could be watched
whenever you wanted. And consequently it
was no longer quite as special.
But
although I had gotten sick of Star Wars, everybody else hadn’t. And so all through middle school and high
school, Church youth group leaders would show Star Wars at youth group
retreats. School teachers would show Star
Wars at school parties. My high
school friends would organize Friday night sleep overs in which we would watch
all 3 movies in the trilogy back to back to back.
By the
time I finished high school, I was more than sick of Star Wars. I was done with it. When Star Wars was re-released into
the theaters in 1997 for the special editions, everyone else in my college
dormitory was very excited about it. (Some
people bought tickets weeks in advance.)
But I initially refused to go.
“I’ve seen that movie so many times, I don’t think you could pay to get
me to see it again,” I told a dormmate.
“I’m certainly not going to buy a theater ticket for it.” (Despite all my protesting, however, I
eventually did give in to peer pressure, and the media hype, and went along to
the theatrical re-release.)
As
brilliant a cinematic tour-de-force as Star Wars is, it doesn’t hold up
all that well to repeated viewings. The
first time you see it, you’re so enraptured in the story that you don’t have
time to notice the flaws. But the 50th
time you see it, you know exactly where the story is going, and you’re no
longer caught up in the momentum of it, and then you start to notice how maybe
Mark Hamill’s acting isn’t really that great after all, or how cheesy a lot of
the dialogue is, or how it doesn’t make any sense to have a princess in the
story, because there’s clearly no sort of hereditary monarchy in the rebel
alliance.
It’s
rare to find someone of my generation who made it all the way through childhood
without seeing Star Wars, but I know at least a couple people. When they finally saw the movie as adults,
none of them were impressed. And, in
light of their experiences, I re-evaluated the movie once again. “I guess you just had to see it when you were
5 years old to appreciate it,” I started saying. “Perhaps, if you don’t have the lens of
childhood nostalgia to look back on it with, it’s probably not that great of a
movie after all, objectively speaking.”
At one
point, my at the time Japanese girlfriend became briefly interested in Star
Wars when a Japanese news program did a retrospective feature on the huge
cultural impact Star Wars had had in America. (For whatever reason, Star Wars was
never as popular in Japan as it was in America, so the same cultural phenomenon
never existed in Japan. But this
Japanese news show tried to explain how huge Star Wars had been in
America.) Her interest sparked by this
reporting, she expressed a desire to watch the movie, and I rented it from the
local video store.
She got
so bored with the movie she turned it off halfway through, without evening
finishing it.
Sometime
around 2007ish, I started to get reports from colleagues who worked with
children, or worked in primary schools, that Star Wars wasn’t that
popular with today’s children.
This
was a shock to me when I first heard it.
I knew that I personally was sick of Star Wars, but that was just
because of over-exposure. I never
thought that it would go out of fashion with a whole generation of
children. (This was also one of those
inevitable life moments when you realize you are getting old. I knew movies from my parent’s generation
seemed dated to me, but before this moment I never dreamed something from my
own childhood would seem dated to the next generation. At least not yet. Am I that old already?)
The
next time I watched Star Wars, I began to see it less as a timeless
classic, and more as something constrained by its time. The film did have kind of a 1970s look to
it. The action sequences actually
weren’t all that impressive, compared to all the incredible action films that
are coming out nowadays.
I don’t
remember exactly when I last saw Star Wars, but I think it was back
somewhere around 2009ish. The point is,
I hadn’t seen it for several years, until I recently brought it into the
classroom to show my students .
It had been long enough between viewings that I was now able to view it
with relatively fresh eyes, so I thought I’d jot down some thoughts.
This...film…is…absolutely…amazing!
I had
perhaps never before in my life truly appreciated the genius of this film. I mean, I loved this film as a 5 year old,
but I didn’t have the critical faculties to realize why this film was so
wonderful—I was just transported away by the experience. And then as I got older, over-exposure had
dulled the magic of the film.
But it
struck me now how incredibly brilliant the whole film was.
I take
back everything I said before. It hasn’t
lost any of its appeal with time. It’s
still as absolutely amazing as it was when it was first released in 1977. And it’s still an absolutely amazing film no
matter what age you first encounter it at.
And I
know plenty of people who can’t dig it, and that’s fine. We don’t all have to like the same
stuff. It probably does appeal more to
male adolescent fantasies than to female sensibilities. So, girls, if you don’t like to watch all the
space battles and explosions, fair enough!
And even among my male friends, I have a couple people who just never
got into it because they don’t like science fiction. Fair enough.
It’s a genre film. If you don’t
like the genre, you don’t have to like this.
But,
for those of us who like fantasy/action/adventure movies—this movie is
absolutely amazing.
It’s
worth pausing for a couple minutes maybe to consider what makes Star Wars
so great. It’s a tough thing to put your
finger on exactly. I mean, we all love
this movie, but how do you dissect exactly what it is about it that makes it so
awesome?
To
illustrate how difficult it is to identify and re-create the successful
elements in Star Wars, one need only look at the absolutely awful
prequel movies George Lucas made later. The complete awfulness of those movies shows
that not even George Lucas, the person who created Star Wars, had a full
understanding of what made those movies great.
Since
the disaster of the prequels, there’s been a lot of revisionist history of
George Lucas’s genius. It turns out, we
are now finding out from numerous sources, that his original version for Star
Wars was a disaster, and numerous people had to re-work his original script
for him. And if Lucas had had a
completely free hand back in 1977, as he did with the prequel movies, then the
original Star Wars may well have sucked just as hard as those prequels
did.
But
whether Lucas was an idiot or a genius, it still has to be admitted that the
original Star Wars, whoever was responsible for it, had a magic that no
one else was able to duplicate.
I mean,
it’s tempting to look at the failure of the Star Wars prequels and
think: If only they had spent more time on the script. Or if only they had gotten in some better
writers in here. Or if only the people
involved with this movie had cared a bit more.
And
this is now the optimism for the new upcoming Disney movie. George Lucas is finally out of the director’s
chair. New talent is in. They care!
They really want to make this movie a success. Disney needs to have this new movie be
a success in order to justify the huge franchise plans they have built around
it. They are going to take care to make
sure this time around it doesn’t suck!
But if
just wanting a movie to be successful was enough, or just working hard enough
on a movie was enough, than every other movie studio back in the late 1970s and
early 1980s would have jumped onto Lucas’s success and made their own Star
Wars clones.
And
remember they tried. There was The
Last Starfighter, Krull, Tron, The Black Hole,
Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
All of these movies tried to emulate the success of Star Wars and
none of them could do it.
So
it’s very difficult to go back to the original Star Wars and define in
concrete terms what exactly made the film a success. If you could do this, then you could identify
a formula, and if you could identify a formula, every other studio would have
successfully copied it by now. The fact
that now one has been able to match this success, and that George Lucas himself
couldn’t even duplicate his own success, indicates the magic of the film is
locked away in a je ne sais quoi quality.
Nevertheless,
there are several things that Star Wars fans and film critics have long
ago noticed about this film.
At this late date in Star Wars criticism,
after people have been gushing about the magic of Star Wars for almost
40 years, it’s probably going to be needlessly redundant for me to point out
the positive points of the film. But
just as a personally little essay, talking about what struck me personally
about the film’s genius, I’ll jot down a few points now.
As a kid I always thought I loved Star
Wars as an action franchise. But
watching it now, I realize how little action is in the movie. The movie starts out with a very brief laser
gun battle. And then, in terms of action
sequences or fight sequences, there’s really not a lot for the next solid
hour. (Aside from very brief
encounters—the sand creature attacking Luke for example, but certainly no long
extended action sequences.) Then, with
over half the film’s running time over, they finally get to the Death Star and
start to fight storm troopers. There are
a couple of scenes of people yelling and shooting laser guns, but as action
scenes go, these aren’t very well choreographed. (Gun fighting actions scenes have got to be
the most boring of all action scenes—no athletics, no drama, no acrobatics,
just people holding pieces of metal and pressing the trigger.) And even these scenes don’t go on very
long. One brief shoot-out in the
detention center, and one more after getting out of the garbage masher, and
that’s pretty much all there is for action.
Even making allowances for the
standards of the time, Star Wars had hardly any real solid action in
it. Roger Ebert wrote in a contemporary
review back in 1977: “What makes the
‘Star Wars’ experience unique, though, is that it happens on such an innocent
and often funny level. It’s usually
violence that draws me so deeply into a movie—violence ranging from the
psychological torment of a Bergman character to the mindless crunch of a
shark’s jaws. Maybe movies that scare us
find the most direct route to our imaginations.
But there’s hardly any violence at all in ‘Star Wars’ (and even then
it’s presented as essentially bloodless swashbuckling). Instead, there’s entertainment so direct and
simple that all of the complications of the modern movie seem to vaporize.”
So whatever it was that so
captivated us as kids, it wasn’t the incredible action scenes in these
movies. It was actually the story and
the characters that must have captivated us.
Everyone else has already pointed
this out, but I was struck re-watching Star Wars how genius all the
characters were. They were all archetype
characters from the fantasy/mythology genre: the princess in danger, the young
farm boy yearning for adventure, the old wise mentor character, the
pirate-scoundrel character. The
archetypes were all there already before Star Wars got them, but there’s
a real genius in how they are mixed together.
And
then there’s how perfectly the whole thing is plotted—how we start out
initially seeing the whole world not through the eyes of the main protagonists,
but through the eyes of the droids—the minor characters. (Again, it’s not completely original. Star Wars borrowed this storytelling
technique and much of its frame plot from the Kurosawa film The Hidden
Fortress. But like
everything else it borrows, Star Wars uses it brilliantly.) The droids are sent off on this weird
adventure before the audience has any idea what kind of story we are in
for. Only when they eventually end up
with Luke Skywalker (almost 20 minutes into the movie) do we finally have some
idea of who are main character is going to be.
And then from there the twists and turns keep coming, until we end up
with the mentor, the pirate, and the flight out of Tatooine.
And
then there’s Darth Vader. On the one
hand, he is another archetypal fantasy character: the former protégé turned evil. (Another character Star Wars didn’t
create, but used for brilliant effect here.)
But with Darth Vader, the visuals are what completely make the
character—he looks completely terrifying.
He’s huge (played by a body-builder, he towers over all the other
characters). His black helmet and black
cape make him look dark and horrifying.
His deep breathing sounds make him sound terrifying. And then his deep booming voice completes the
character.
The whole character is a complete
work of genius.
Visuals and sound are a large part
of movie magic, and Star Wars has them down perfectly. It’s difficult to articulate in printed words
how incredible the visuals of the movie are, but they’re there on the screen
for anyone to see. The visual magic is
there right from the opening shot with the small little ship trying to flee,
followed by the huge space ship which completely fills up the whole movie
screen.
And then the music. Sometimes I think John Williams, and not
George Lucas, should be credited with being the real genius behind Star Wars. The music isn’t just a nice addition to this
movie—the music is really what makes this movie. There are a lot of scenes in the original Star
Wars which may have been completely forgettable if it weren’t for the
incredible musical score. The music
always sounded epic, and so it always made you think you were watching
something epic.
The first Star Wars movie is
so expertly plotted and executed, that there was always very little room for a
successful sequel. They farm boy had
already completed his hero’s journey, the princess had already been rescued,
and the scoundrel had already redeemed himself.
The original quest was over, and the heroes had completed their journey. There was nowhere really to go from here.
According to the Wikipedia page for The Empire Strikes Back, this problem seems to have
been very acutely realized by the filmmakers at the time. Which is why initially Irvin Kershner
initially refused to direct the film—no sequel to Star Wars could possibly
meet expectations. This is also why
script went through development hell with multiple writings and re-writings.
[According to Wikipedia, it appears
that some of George Lucas’s comments about Star Wars always having been
planned as a longer story weren’t completely true. In the original Star Wars movie, there
was never any plan to make Darth Vader into Luke’s father. This was a plot idea that only came out
during one of the multiple drafts for The Empire Strikes Back. Which of course makes perfect sense. It’s why Obi-Wan Kenobi never told this to
Luke directly in the first movie, and they had to go back and awkwardly cover
this up in the second two movies by Obi-Wan Kenobi giving his lame “point of
view” speech. According to Wikipedia, it
was only after this plot detail had been decided in the process of writing The
Empire Strikes Back that Lucas decided Star Wars was in fact really
episode IV, and that there were 3 prequel films that had to be made telling the
back story of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s relationship with Anakin Skywalker. And it was only in subsequent re-releases of Star
Wars that the episode IV got tacked on.
What I’m trying to say is, despite what Lucas has said in the years
since, when the original Star Wars came out in 1977, they didn’t have a
plan for what they were going to do for a sequel yet.]
By all rights, the sequel to Star
Wars should have been a disappointment.
Most sequels usually are, and the original Star Wars had left the
sequel writers very little to work with in terms of further character
development. But amazingly, against all
odds, they pulled out a sequel that worked.
And they did it by resisting the urge to try to recreate the original. Instead of sending Han, Luke and Leia on
another successful quest, they created a movie in which Han, Luke, and Leia are
on their backfoots the whole time. The
movie starts out with the Empire’s destruction of the Rebel Base (something the
Empire had never succeeded in doing in the original Star Wars), and then
shows our heroes fleeing the Empire, barely keeping one step ahead of them the
whole movie, only to end up defeated by the Empire at the end.
In the annals of movie history, it
goes down as perhaps the best sequel ever.
And yet…and yet for all that, they
didn’t quite capture the magic of the original.
It was good, but it wasn’t as perfect as Star Wars. The pacing of the movie is all wrong. It starts out with a bang, it finishes with a
bang, but there’s a big drag in the middle where not much happens. It doesn’t have the same classic story
telling forward momentum of the original, in which characters and their
respective story arcs are so clearly introduced and so clearly being pulled
forward.
Which isn’t to say The Empire
Strikes Back is a bad film by any means.
But it is to say you can’t expect lightening to strike twice, and it
didn’t. It’s a solid film, but they
couldn’t duplicate the magic of the original story.
And then there’s Return of the
Jedi. I loved Return of the Jedi
as a kid. (It was the only one of the original
Star Wars trilogy that I was old enough to see in the theaters. My dad brought me and my sister when I was
5.)
But it is clear by Return of the
Jedi that they were just out of ideas by this point. Another Death Star? That they have to blow up again with another
huge space battle? That again just has
one magic weak point that has to be hit exactly right?
Fortunately, Return of the Jedi
turns up the volume on the special effects and really increases all the action
scenes. So you don’t mind that you’re
essentially just repeating the climax from the first movie.
…but, in retrospect, it was a bad
sign of things to come. It demonstrated
that Lucas was out of ideas, and we would see this clearly years later in the
prequel trilogy, when Lucas would just try to repeat every iconic moment from
the original trilogy over and over again.
Lucas was under the mistaken
assumption that recycling plot points from earlier movies is artistic. “It’s like poetry, the stanzas rhyme,” George
Lucas infamously said at one point to explain why just about every scene in The
Phantom Menace is ripping off something from the original Star
Wars. It was perhaps an interesting
idea—deliberately plagiarizing yourself not as an act of laziness, but as an
artistic endeavor to “rhyme” your movies.
But it failed. Audiences don’t
want to see the same story repeated again and again and again. They want familiar characters, yes, but they
want these characters to go on new stories—stories that will completely blow
them away with originality, not bore them to death with repetition.
I hope, with the failure of the Star
Wars prequels (critical failures at least, if not commercial failures) that
the lesson has been learned, and the new Disney Star Wars movies will
not attempt to mimic the structure of the original Star Wars and call it
rhyming. (But if you read the Internet
rumors, there are some hints that there may be some scenes in the new prequels
that are deliberately designed to parallel the structure of the original Star
Wars. If this is true, it’s a
mistake in my opinion.)
As a child, I didn’t fully
appreciate that the entertainment I liked didn’t spring out of the earth fully
formed. When I liked a TV show, or movie
franchise, I assumed there was some inherent quality in the franchise that was
awesome. I didn’t fully realize that
there was no such thing as Star Wars, but that Star Wars was only
as good as the people who happened to be working on it at the time. And that these people might have only one
good idea in them, and then might never fully re-capture the magic of their
original idea. Or worse yet, just repeat
the same idea over and over and over again.
When I heard, in the mid 90s, that
George Lucas was finally making the long awaited Star Wars prequels, I,
and everyone else of my generation was over the moon. This was going to be awesome because it
was Star Wars. How could it not
be? It was Star Wars. We didn’t appreciate that simply sticking the
Star Wars logo on something didn’t inherently make it awesome. And we perhaps didn’t realize that the
original success of Star Wars would be very hard to duplicate. (If it could have been duplicated, then all
those other movie studios would have done so a long time ago.)
**************************************
I've had some version of this post rattling around in my brain now for about a year, but just couldn't seem to sort out my various contradictory thoughts.
A co-worker of mine in Cambodia once pointed out to me that during the various staff-room water cooler conversations, I had managed to contradicted myself wildly on Star Wars over the course of the year.
I had at one point argued that Star Wars mania was a time-period piece, and that if you hadn't seen Star Wars as a 5 year old in the 1980s, you might as well not bother, because you needed to see it in the early 1980s, and you needed to be 5 years old, or you could never truly understand it's impact.
I had, slightly less than a year later, argued that Star Wars was a timeless classic that was just as impressive to kids today as it was back in the 1977.
Until I truly make up my mind on which one it was, I'm not going to be able to write anything approaching a coherent analysis of the Star Wars phenomenon.
It's almost impossible to analyze Star Wars anyway. I know there's tons of geek red ink spilled all over the Internet attempting to do just that, but at a certain level, it's impossible to analyze why something is good.
It's possible to debate whether Star Wars is good objectively, or if it was just good at cynically manipulating audiences and selling them toys. But there's no doubt that it was successful.
Part of this is no doubt because we as human beings understand so little of ourselves, and can't rationally explain why we like what we like. Why do I like watching men people fight on a video screen? I couldn't attempt to give you a logical answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment