Happy Birthday!
Posted on 05/25/2007 5:23:44 AM PDT by Rummyfan
George Lucas' blockbuster celebrates its thirtieth birthday this week, and, if it's a significant enough anniversary for James Lileks to mark, that's good enough for us. Over the weekend, we'll round up the rest of the series, but here's what I had to say in The Spectator in 1997 when the original Star Wars was re-released:
From a galaxy far far away - the summer of 1977 - Star Wars is back with a facelift in a technologically enhanced ‘special edition’, digitally remastered, with additional computer-generated inserts. So I suppose, in order to replicate the experience, the world's George Lucas anoraks should take along their original dates, technologically enhanced with additional silicone-generated implants, collagen lips, etc. Oh, wait, can Star Wars anoraks get any dates? I couldn't, so I went to see the re-issue on my own and, finding myself at a loose end, wound up watching the movie. In a flash, it all came flooding back. There’s that guy with the bucket on his head, there’s the dog with the stick-on moustache, and that wheelie-bin — what’s he called? RU-1-2? No, hang on, R2-D2 — and there’s Princess Wossname with a cinnamon Danish glued to each ear, an indestructible Seventies coiffure apparently immune to all digital enhancement. So, too, is the amazing Beige-O-Vision in which 90 per cent of the movie appears to have been shot.
Star Wars is the most successful movie ever; merchandising spin-offs alone have made George Lucas $4 billion; in America, on the first few days of its reissue, it out-grossed all five of this year’s Best Picture nominees’ entire take to date — combined. It’s supposed to be ‘epic’ and ‘primal’, but, if so, it beats me. Fred Zinnemann, who died a few days ago, made a film that takes place in real time — 90 minutes — on one dusty monochrome main street lined with plywood house fronts and whose only special effect is Tex Ritter’s plaintive rendition of the title song. Yet the forces that drive High Noon are truly primal and epic: it’s big at its core. Star Wars, it seems to me, is epic only in the sense that the telephone book is epic.
If anything, it’s the world’s first video game: there are goodies and there are baddies, but, aside from the fact that their roles have been pre-assigned, there’s little else motivating them. Alec Guinness as the retired Jedi knight Girlfrom-Ip Anema — sorry, Obi-Wan Kenobi — harks fondly back to the ‘old Republic, before the Empire’, but, although this would seem to cast the film as an intergalactic version of a straightforward colonial liberation struggle, the Republican rebels are led by a Royal Family.
Cunningly, Lucas begins the film like a comic book or radio serial that’s already been running ten years. Most movies are concerned to simplify — eliminate this character, combine those two — but Lucas hooked his Star Wars groupies with a Tolkienesque multitude of creatures, most of whom are entirely superfluous. For this ‘special edition’, he’s inserted Pizza the Action — sorry Jabba the Hutt, a sort of giant computerised cowpat — into a scene with Harrison Ford, but for no particular reason. Every background now teems with computer-generated Jurassic Park dinosaurs, out for a stroll, retrieving newspapers, looking for Jurassic lamp-posts. Though distracting, they complete the sense that this is a film constructed wholly from bits of other films. There’s a Tin Man — the droid C-3P0, though he comes over like a gold-plated John Inman — and a Cowardly Lion — Chewbacca the Wookie; there’s a bearded, robed Biblical sage — Obi-Wan; there’s a Bogart figure, Han Solo, a strictly-cash-terms cynic played by Harrison Ford. ‘I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anybody,’ muses Princess Leia, though the fact that Han Solo sounds like a euphemism for masturbation should have been the first clue to his self-absorption. Late in the movie, Lucas suddenly remembers he’s forgotten to introduce the hero’s best pal, so belatedly shoves in Luke Skywalker’s chum Biggs Darklighter purely for the purpose of killing him off two minutes later.
If the characters are generic, the dialogue barely makes that grade: at the height of battle, Luke’s squadron commander instructs him, ‘Stabilise your rear deflectors.’ I’ve been trying to stabilise mine for years, but even as sci-fi techno babble that barely passes muster.
Nothing dates quicker than futuristic visions, and today Lucas’s alternative universe seems almost quaint: Luke’s Shaun Cassidy hairdo, the soi-disant Stormtroopers looking like members of the Young Generation accompanying Lulu in a particularly vigorous dance number. At the time, some critics reckoned the acting came in somewhere around the level of a Monogram B-western. But that’s unfair to B-westerns: the clunky banter between Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill is more like the badly dubbed chat-up scenes of a Swedish porn film. ‘Either I'm gonna kill her or I’m beginning to like her,’ says Ford, as if he’s been practising the line in front of the mirror all night and is now offering it for dictation to his stenographer. From, respectively, the ‘like her’ and the ‘kill her’, I think we’re meant to deduce that this is what they call a love/hate relationship.
Ford’s acting improved over the years; for Fisher and Hamill, this was as good as it got. Such acting honours as there are here go to our own Peter Cushing as Grand Muff Divin’ — sorry, Grand Moff Tarkin — and Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan. In that sense at least, the Empire strikes back.
Happy Birthday!
That was the only movie I ever stood in line for hours waiting to get in.
I think I’m the only person left in the US who has NEVER seen a Star Wars movie....oh well, someone has to do it!
Weirdo.
You’re not the only one. :)
ping
If Steyn doesn’t like the first Star Wars movie, I’m gonna have to re-evaluate the esteem in which I hold him...
Okay, it’s the 30th Anniversary, but I want a proper DVD transfer of the ORIGINAL films (cleaned up, mind you) without all the “fixes” and additions. I want the films I saw a kid. The crappy laserdisc transfers with their lousy artifacting is just plain disrespectful.
Oh yeah, Han Solo shot Greedo first...
your confession has prompted me. I never saw E.T. There, I said it.
Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
I recommend you rent them, in the original if you can find them (just the original 3). They really are a part of the cultural background now, and deserve some recognition for that if nothing else. If you do get them, try to watch Star Wars with a mindset that up to that point, every piece of equipment or vehicle in a space movie looked like it had been purchased brand new moments before it appeared on the screen. Try to see the revolutionary ideas for what they were in 1977. Also, enjoy The Empire Strikes Back as probably the best of all the movies, for tension, strong plot, and the “Twist” that at the time really was a big shock, even if it is a cliche now.
I’ll go along with you with one exception. Leave in the enhanced Death Star battle from the first movie. To that end, someone needs to go back to the cutting room floor, and add back the tiny scrap of footage from the first movie of Luke looking up at the sky through his binoculars at the battle between the Blockade Runner and the Star Destroyer (used in a television commercial for the movie, and never on the screen), and restore the footage of Luke recovering from his injury in the second movie where the water tank he is in still has all the pink slime (Bacta) in it. They have the tank, but cut out the part where the slime was still visible.
Going by Steyn you should keep holding out longer. :) The best trashings of Star Wars I ever read were by the former movie critic of the National Review...John Simon.
Clintons are Trash:
....but DON’T rent or watch the prequels first. Watch the ones from 1977-1983. The new ones will only confuse you until after you’ve watched the originals...and make sure you don’t rent the “Special Edition” ones. You want the effect of the spirit of the firsts.
Then if you feel up for it, watch the others.
Personally, I’m not fond of the prequels. They’re a mess, and thick with Lucas’ confused liberal mindset and lack of narrative focus.
If it wasn’t for Star Wars there would be no SPACE BALLS.
At a drive-in.
It was raining.
I had just started college in 1976, and was walking by the school bookstore, and they had a cardboard rack of Star Wars paperbacks outside. (I'm pretty sure it was the Fall of '76.)
I read the back, and was immediately put off, for some reason. That alone killed any desire to see it.
A coworker dragged me see the next, and the third was a department "Let's take a couple of hours off to go see it" kind of thing.
I may have caught parts of any subsequent releases on tv, now and then.
Just musing - perhaps one reason the reason the movie was so popular was that at the time we were suffering through the Jimmah Carter presidency? Just a thought.
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