Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

(Move Reviews)

****SPOILER WARNING********

****SPOILER WARNING********

****SPOILER WARNING********

****SPOILER WARNING********

After trying, and failing, to keep to my shorter review format, I've decided to just write this up as a long review.
To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, I would have written a shorter review, but I didn't have the time.

My Background With Star Wars

My Star Wars story is the same story as every other person my age.  

I was 5 years old when Return of the Jedi hit theaters in 1983.  And it absolutely blew my 5 year-old little mind.  (As was the experience of watching Star Wars on TV, also when I was 5 years old.)

I have since that time achieved cognitive maturity, but because of the power of nostalgia I will never be able to view Star Wars with any sort of objectivity.  Whenever I see these movies, I'm not seeing them through adult eyes.  Instead, I am remembering how they made me feel at 5 years old.  

In other words, these movies are not just ordinary movies to me.  And these characters are not just ordinary characters.

I haven't conducted any sort of scientific poll, but if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, and if the huge anticipation of this movie is anything to go by, most people of my generation feel exactly the same way.

I've always thought it was a mistake to identify Star Wars  as geek culture in the media.  Granted, I personally am a huge geek, but I know many people of my generation who aren't, and they're all huge Star Wars fans too.  Everyone in my elementary school playground was obsessed with Star Wars.  Everyone.  (Fredrik deBoer also recently made this point [LINK HERE] . Star Wars was a huge cultural behemoth which swept over everyone's childhood in the early 1980s.  The bullies as well as the nerds all loved Star Wars.   )

All this being said, there do seem to be limits to the appeal of Star Wars. At one point in my life, I thought everyone liked Star Wars.  But then I began to notice that  people who saw Star Wars for the first time as adults never really got the appeal of it. This confused me at first, but then I tried to view the movie through adult eyes.  Maybe it wasn't as good as I thought.
"Okay," I began saying.  "Maybe you have to see these movies when your 5 years old, or you can never really truly understand their impact on childhood."
I had to revise my opinion still further when I began getting reports from friends of mine, teachers, that kids these days just weren't that into Star Wars.  And I began to realize that maybe the special effects were dated.  And maybe the action scenes, which had seemed so amazing in 1983, were ordinary nowadays.  And maybe the whole pacing of the movie (the first Star Wars especially) was completely different to modern movies.

So, I revised my opinion yet again: "Okay, in order to truly understand how great these movies are, you had to see them when you were 5, and it had to be in the early 1980s," I said.

I've had in mind this year to write a post analyzing the original Star Wars trilogy, and discussing what about it exactly so captivated us as kids.  (I've made promises to write that post  here, here and here), but it was impossible to write.  I found myself trying to either put my finger on something that probably couldn't be pinned down exactly (why Star Wars was such a huge hit, but none of it's many imitators could ever duplicate it's success) or I found myself repeating what had already been said about Star Wars a million times already on the Internet (talking about the character arcs in the first Star Wars movie, for example).
And then, these movies were on TV the other day, and I was watching them, and I thought: You know, it's just self-evident that these movies would appeal to young kids in the early 1980s.  You don't need to write 1,000 words trying to explain it.  It's just obvious by looking at it that kids would love this movie.
I mean, you could write that post, if you were a real cinephile, and wanted to dissect exactly what makes a good movie good.  But you don't really need to explain it's appeal.  It's appeal is self-evident.  Five minutes into the movie, and I was like, "Oh yeah.  It's no wonder we all went nuts for these movies as children.  This is exactly the kind of movie kids would love."
This was especially true in the 1980s, when there really were no other movies like this around.  Admittedly, nowadays when big budget fantasy/action films are much more common, Star Wars wouldn't have made the same impact on today's generation.  But back in 1983, there were no other movie like this.
So, yeah, duh, no wonder everyone went nuts for them.  There's no more to be said.

There are a couple of lingering questions:
"Okay," you might say, "I'll grant that nostalgia can make you feel fondly for childhood movies.  Fair enough.  But come on!  There's being nostalgic for something, and then there's being completely obsessed with something."
This obsession with nostalgia seems to be unique to our generation.  I mean, when our parents were our age, they weren't obsessing about the movies from their childhood, were they?   (Or were they?) [This cartoon (LINK HERE) does a good job of pointing out the differences between adults of generations past, and adults of our generation.]
As I said in my previous post on generation blaming, there's no sense trying to blame generations for their unique characteristics.  The only thing you can do is look at the causes.  Is our generation obsessed with movie nostalgia because we were the first generation to be raised largely indoors?  Or is it just that there was never any phenomenon like Star Wars in our parents' generation to compare with?  Or is every generation nostalgic, and it's just that there just never was a big industry to cater to before now?
I don't know.

The other lingering question is exactly when the cut-off dates are for the Star Wars generation.  I'm pretty sure you have to see it in childhood, or you'll never be able to fully understand it's appeal.  This newspaper columnist [Link Here] for instance, was already an adult when Star Wars hits theaters, and writes intelligently on the generation gap between those who saw Star Wars as children, and those who were already cognitively mature when it first arrived.   For a while, I posited that 5 years old was the perfect age to see Star Wars, but Whisky Prajer was 12 when Star Wars hit theaters in 1977, and was also completely blown away by it [LINK HERE].  (I've also heard similar stories from some of my co-workers who are about 10 years older than me.)  So when is the cut off date?  Did you have to see it before you were 10?  12?  15?
And then there's also probably a cut-off date going the other direction as well: the younger generation, spoiled by movies with much better effects and much more adrenaline action sequences,  might not understand the appeal these movies had in the early 1980s. But again, the exact where cut-off age is, is difficult to pin down.  My younger co-workers (21 years old, some of them) were just as excited for this new Star Wars movie as I was.

Anyways, enough of my musings on nostalgia.  On to the main review:

Setting Expectations
Remember how excited you were when you heard that the whole cast of the original Star Wars had agreed to come back for the movie?
This was a minor miracle.  For years in interviews Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher had all consistently expressed reluctance to do another movie.  I didn't think it was possible to re-unite the old gang.  But they did it!  And we were all over the moon.  Another Star Wars movie featuring our childhood heroes?  This was too good to be true.

And then, gradually, we found out that the original cast would just be in supporting roles or cameo roles.  And our excitement began to die down again.

Look, I know the torch had to be passed to a new generation at some point.  The original cast is all in their 60s and 70s, after all.  But I would have loved just one last movie focusing on the original cast.  In the first movie, you could have had all the new characters in supporting roles, and the original cast in the main role, and then gradually switched the focus over the course of the trilogy.

That's really the movie I wanted to see.

Instead, most of the original cast gets reduced to supporting roles, or brief cameo appearances.
Han Solo and Chewbacca being the exceptions of course.  Those two admittedly get a lot of screen time.  But Luke, Leia, C3P0, and R2D2 are barely in the thing.
I mean, if you couldn't get all the original cast to agree to come back, I would have understood.  But having accomplished the miracle of getting everyone to agree to come back....well, it just seems like a waste to have them all in the movie, but not get to do much.

That's obviously not the direction J.J. Abrams decided to go in, however, so there's no sense harping on it.  As Roger Ebert used to say: "Review the movie you saw, not the movie you wanted to see."


And to be fair, once I accept that, I have to admit that this is a pretty amazing movie.

The Review

Absolutely wonderful.  J.J. Abrams really hit the ball out of the park with this one.
As much as I would have loved to spend more time with the original cast, I have to admit that the all of the new characters are completely charming.  I loved Finn, loved Poe, and loved Rey.
(I hate to kick Lucas when he's down, but...but it's hard to avoid comparisons with the prequel trilogy, and how wonderful and interesting and charming all these new characters are in a way that absolutely none of the prequels characters ever were.)

This movie has the perfect mix of action, mystery, and humor.

Also, how great was Harrison Ford?  He gave a spectacular performance as Han Solo, in which both he and the screenwriters perfectly re-captured his humor from the original movies.

There are certain movies where you are so thrilled by the experience that you don't really care about any of the flaws.  You know the flaws are there, but you just don't care--you're enjoying the movie too much to be bothered by them.

This was one of those movies for me.

For example, before I went into this movie, I had heard that J.J. Abrams basically repeated all the same plot points from the original Star Wars movies.  (This Salon.com reviewer [LINK HERE], among others, tipped me off to what I was about to see.)  And I was all set to really hate this.
This repetitiveness has long been my least favorite thing about the Star Wars franchise.  I really hated that in the Star Wars prequels many scenes were just there purely for the purpose of reminding us of previous scenes.  And in my review of Star Trek Into Darkness, I wrote about how stupid I thought the whole idea of repetitive history was, and how I really hoped J.J. Abrams wouldn't do it in the new Star Wars.

Well, J.J. Abrams did exactly what I was hoping he wouldn't do, and yet...and yet I was so charmed by the overall movie experience, that I'm largely willing to forgive it.  Who cares if we've seen this same story before.  It was exciting, it was fun, it was thrilling, it was tense and suspenseful and funny in all the right places.

I don't know, maybe it should have bothered me more, but the movie was just so much fun I am willing to forgive a lot.

Similarly with the plot holes, coincidences, and macguffins--I know they're all there, but it this movie was so much fun, it didn't really bother me that much.

Also in a previous post, I complained that The Force was a really boring part of Star Wars, and expressed hope that the new movie would downplay that aspect of Star Wars.  This movie did not.  (The Force is a big part of the story.)  But I didn't mind.  It was well done.
The Force is still the most problematic part of the Star Wars universe (it's confusing and inconsistent), but in this movie, it was used as a way to build up the drama and the tension between the characters, and I found myself leaving the movie theatre without one complaint.

Well, okay, I do have a couple nitpicks:
I'm willing to forgive a lot of repetition if you can give me a fun movie, but that last part about blowing up the Death Star again was just a bit too on the nose.
If that part had been left out, I think most of the critics would have forgiven all the other repetitions.
And the pity is, the movie didn't need it.  You could have just canned that whole "blowing up the death star" bit, and it wouldn't really have affected the other plot lines that much.

Furthermore, the blowing up the Death Star scenes were perhaps the one part of this movie that suffered by comparison.  In both Star Wars and Return of the Jedi, there was a fair amount of suspense created in the space battles around the Death Star.  In Star Wars, for example, we could see the faces of all of the fighter pilots.  There was building tension as they all got picked off one by one.
Unfortunately, there was none of that in this movie. J.J. Abrams generally did a good job of creating interest and suspense in all of his other scenes, but the space battle scenes are the one part of the movie where he really dropped the ball.  All the more reason why this whole part of the movie should have been cut, and nothing would have been lost.

And One More Big Complaint...
So, everyone knows Han Solo had to die at some point.

All Star Wars geeks know the history--Harrison Ford had wanted Han Solo to die since the original trilogy.  He reportedly thought it would add a sense of sacrifice and loss which would heighten the drama and reality of the series.  And he reportedly argued bitterly with George Lucas about this, but ended up getting over-ruled by Lucas.
I strongly suspect that Harrison Ford only agreed to come back for new Star Wars movies on the condition that they finally give him that Han Solo death scene he'd always wanted.
So as much as I hated to see Han die, I knew it had to happen.

But here's the thing though--it shouldn't have happened the first movie back.  This scene should have been pushed back to the second movie.  (Assuming, that is, Harrison Ford could have been talked into delaying it for one more movie.)
For one thing, I think fans kind of deserved one movie just enjoying Han Solo again before they had to say good-bye to him.
I mean, I want to enjoy all that classic Han Solo wit and one-liners that are fully on display in this movie, but it's so bittersweet now, knowing that this is also the movie where I have to say good-bye to him.

Secondly, and more importantly, this movie can't handle the emotional impact of Han's death.  There's just no room in the movie for the impact of the death to register.  No sooner has Han died, then Rey and Finn rush out into the woods for the climatic scene with Kilo Ren.  And don't get me wrong, that final climatic scene is great--it's very emotionally strong in its own right, but the emotions of that scene over-shadow what happened in the previous scene.

Come on!  This is Han Solo.  HAN SOLO.  You don't just kill him off and then rush on with the rest of the movie.  If you're going to kill him off, at least give him the full scene.  Let the camera linger.  Have a scene where the characters (and the audience) get to absorb what has happened before rushing off to the next scene.

And that's the one thing that really bugs me about this movie.  This is what brings the movie down from a solid 10 out of 10 to a 9.

Rating
9 out of 10 stars

Other Notes
* So, by all reports, Billy Dee Williams would have been perfectly happy to come back for this movie if someone had just phoned him up and asked him.
I'm a little bit puzzled as to why he's not in it.  Granted, there wouldn't have been much for him to do in this script.  He would only have been a cameo character--but then C3P0, R2D2, and Leia were also pretty much also reduced to cameos, so why not have Lando Calrissian also just hanging around at the rebel base?
For the moment, I'm going to put this as another negative on the film's score card.  But if it turns out in episode 8 that they were saving Lando's reveal for something really cool (and there are hints of this on the Internet rumor board) then I'll go back and remove this negative.

* According to this Wired.com article, Disney not only has plans to do this trilogy, but to release one Star Wars film a year forever.  (Or as long as people keep buying tickets).
I was so charmed by this film that I'm giving it a complete pass on its recycled plot.  But going forward, I think there is now a real question of how many stories Star Wars is capable of telling.  Are we just going to get the same movie over and over again 40 times over the next 40 years?  Because if we are, at some point I'm going to stop forgiving that.

* I've already linked before to this Charlie Jane Anders piece on the confused politics of Star Wars. Lucas was of the generation that was traumatized by the Vietnam War, and originally the evil Galactic Empire and its scorched earth policies were supposed to represent how the United States had acted in Vietnam.  But because of the confused messages of Star Wars, and because it represented a Manichean (W) universe in which there is little room for moral ambiguity, the film was perceived by many Americans as a message about the importance of keeping a strong military so as to continue the fight against evil.
Matt Zoller Seitz (writing on Roger Ebert's old site) thinks he sees a continuation of the Vietnam War's influence on Star Wars in the new movie, and I don't think he's wrong.  He talks about the "My Lai-style massacre" in the beginning of the film, and also says:

Many film historians have noted the way Lucas's first film, which came out two years after the end of US involvement in Vietnam, flipped that war's script upside-down, making defeated Americans identify with “rebels” who were essentially Vietcong-like guerrillas, and root against an industrialized military whose literally-scorched-earth tactics were all too Western. A shot of a storm trooper roasting a hut with a flamethrower brings the original trilogy’s Vietnam obsession full-circle

I'm not entirely sure the Vietnamese appreciate this part of their history being played out for science-fiction fantasy on the big screen.
As it happens, I saw this movie at a theater in Vietnam, and when this scene was playing, it seemed to me that a ripple of discomfort went through the theater.
(Or I don't know--possibly I was just projecting out my own discomfort at being the only white guy in the theater during this scene.  But I thought I could feel something in the air.)

* For my other thoughts on Star Wars, I wrote once before on Star Wars nostalgia back in 2005 (in anticipation of the release of Revenge of the Sith).  And then I reviewed Revenge of the Sith when it came out.  And then there's this post from 2012, in which I first reacted to the news that Disney was planning to resurrect the Star Wars franchise.

Link of the Day
On Power and Ideology

I Really Hate "Last Christmas"

I don't remember this song growing up.

When it first came out (in 1984, according to Wikipedia), I was 6 years old, still too young to be fully aware of pop culture trends.

I don't remember it at all during my adolescent and teenage years in the 1990s.  It could be that I was just oblivious to it.  Or it could be (as this awl.com article posits) that the song underwent a resurgence in popularity about 2001ish when a bunch of other bands began covering it.   (Most probably, I was just oblivious to it.  I've been oblivious to a lot of stuff during my life.)

All I know is that I first became aware of the song when I was in Japan.  It was played constantly over the loudspeakers in all the shopping malls in Japan.

My first thought was that this was some sort of Japanese song with English lyrics.  Sometimes J-Pop artists will attempt to do English version of songs, and this song seemed like it had J-Pop written all over it.  The slow, saccharine melody sounded like it would be right at home in J-Pop, plus the lyrics sounded distinctly like someone who was writing in English as a non-native speaker.  There seemed to be no awareness of the way English poetry or song lines normally work--instead of having identifiable song lines in the music, with identifiable beats or rhythms or stresses or rhymes,  the singer would just would just ramble on until the music got to a pause, and then just take a break and continue right where he left off.

Even once I figured out that this song was by a genuine American native speaker, the fact that it was extremely popular in Japan did not immediately make me think it was some sort of Christmas classic I had missed out on.  Sometimes strange little pieces of American culture, things that get completely forgotten about back home, become extremely popular abroad and end up taking on new lives overseas.  (The most popular American music group in Japan are The Carpenters.)

The one thing I knew for sure, though, was that I absolutely hated this song.  It was one of those songs that was guaranteed to give me a headache from the first few notes.  When I got together with other foreigners, I complained about the prevalence of this song in Japan, but I always just attributed this to the fact that Japanese people have funny tastes in English music.

But in recent years, I've been discovering that a lot of people like this song.  And not just Japanese people, but Americans, Brits, Australians--even people I used to respect.

In Cambodia, I once caught a co-worker of mine, an Australian, using this song in his English classes.  He had designed a gap-fill song sheet for the students to complete, and he accidentally left one of his copies in the copy machine.  When I saw the song-sheet, I confronted him about it.
"I can't believe you're making your students listen to this!" I said, throwing the song-sheet down on his desk angrily.
Rather than have the decency to act sheepish about it, or to apologize for his actions, he actually seemed confused as to why I was upset.  "What?" he said.  "It's a good song."

At my new job in Vietnam, I was recently at a company work shop in which this song was given as an example of a good Christmas song to do with the students.  Of course, I immediately protested that this was the worst song ever, only to find, much to my amazement, that I was the only one in the room who felt that way.

I used to assume everyone was in agreement with me about how horrible this song was, and that I didn't actually need to explain it to them.  For example, whenever the song came on the loudspeakers, I thought I could just be like, "Oh, this again.  This is the worst song ever!  Right guys?"  And everyone would be like, "Yeah, you said it!"
But more and more, I'm finding that people are actually resisting me on this, and not simply agreeing that it's a bad song, but challenging me on it.  "Why do you hate this song so much?" I get asked.

Have you ever had to explain why a song was good or bad?  It's very difficult to articulate into words, and I find myself just sputtering incoherently and saying things like, "What?  But don't you--?  I mean, can't you just hear it?  Doesn't it--?  Are you telling me you don't have a huge headache right now just listening to it?"

While, this may be an exercise in futility, but I thought I would try, as best I could, to put into words exactly why this song sucks so much:

First, the melody.  What is this?  It's just like the same two notes going back and forth painfully slowly, and then speeding up a little bit at the end.
And the music doesn't have any sort of hook, or punches, or any sort of punctuation to let you know when you've gotten to the end of a line.  It's just like the notes meander for a while like they're lost and don't know where the song is going, and then it just stops.  And then it repeats.

And it's so painfully slow.  It's only got a couple of notes, but each one is just held way too long.

And then there's the singer's voice--it's whiny.  He just whines his way through the whole song.  You want to slap him, and say, "nobody likes to hear people whine.  If you can't say it nicely, then you'll have to go to your room until you're ready to speak like an adult."

And the words...what is up with those words?  Are those supposed to be verses?  There's no meter, there's no rhythm, there's no attempts at any of the things that traditionally define lyrics in English.  The singer just whines about something for a while, and then just pauses when the music pauses, and starts whining again.

The words are essentially meaningless.  ("Gave you my heart"--what does that even mean?).  But when so much of popular music is based off of meaningless lyrics,  I guess you can't fault this song too much for that.
But man, does it take forever for the singer to say what he wants to say.  Every word is held out for a long time over a slow moving note.  If it's two syllables (Christ--mas) it's broken down into two slow notes.  The whole thing sounds like the singer is undergoing a stroke, and is just barely able to get out the words he wants to say.  "Laaaast Chriissst-mmasss I gave you myyyy heaaart..."  And I just want to scream, "Come on already!  Just say it!!!"

Last word on the whole matter goes to David Mitchell:

So this post I wrote about Ajimu Town back in 2007...
...ended up inspiring someone to write a whole novel about the place.  And to do her own travels through Ajimu, to see the place for herself.

Thoughts on Star Wars

[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.]

So, I've been meaning to write some version of this post now for almost a year.  Originally, it was inspired by my re-viewing of the original Star Wars trilogy.  (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.)
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.)

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 50^th 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.

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.

***********************

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 50^th 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.