Star Wars sucks. There, we said it.

One day in the 1970s, George Lucas screened a rough cut of his new movie, Star Wars, for his influential Hollywood friends. And almost none of them liked it. The plot seemed incomprehensible, the made-up fantasy names absurd. Director Brian De Palma, who had just had a big hit with Carrie, made fun of everything about the film, including Princess Leia’s hairstyle: “Hey, George, what were those Danish rolls doing in the princess’s ears?”

Almost 40 years later, De Palma is mostly making low-budget movies, and the most-anticipated ﬁlm of the year is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first Star Wars movie since Lucas sold the franchise to Disney. In June, Empire magazine published its “500 greatest ﬁlms of all time” list, chosen by a poll of 250,000 readers; the winner was the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, with the original also making the Top 10. You won’t hear people today making fun of Leia’s hair or Luke Skywalker’s disco haircut.

Instead, we have The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams, who quit the Star Trek movies to defect to the franchise he’s always loved more. “Star Wars is probably the most influential film of my generation,” he said in 2006. “Everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films.” This would have surprised Alec Guinness, who wrote to a friend from the set of the first movie: “New rubbish dialogue reaches me every day, and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable.”

It would also have surprised earlier generations of critics, who were raising doubts about George Lucas’s talent even before his second trilogy of Star Wars films proved them right. While the first Star Wars got mostly respectful reviews and even an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, the bloom was mostly off the rose by the time The Empire Strikes Back came out. With its heavy tone and the implausible plot twist that the bad guy is the hero’s father, the movie was widely dismissed as a money-making machine that had lost the ﬁrst film’s charm: “The Force is with us, indeed, and a lot of it is hot air,” wrote the New York Times’ powerful critic, Vincent Canby. “The Empire Strikes Back is about as personal as a Christmas card from a bank.”

By the time Lucas re-released the first Star Wars in 1997, many critics were willing to point out that even the original film didn’t hold up. “What’s stunning is simply how bad it is,” wrote Salon film critic Charles Taylor, while The New Yorker writer John Seabrook suggested it was “a film with comic-book characters, an unbelievable story, no political or social commentary, lousy acting, preposterous dialogue, and a ridiculously simplistic morality. In other words, a bad movie.”

Even if you liked the movies, you might not have liked what they were doing to moviemaking around the world. Alex Leadbeater, editor of the film site What Culture, wrote an article earlier this year on how Star Wars negatively affected cinema. He says it was one of the films, along with Jaws, that “led to the introduction of the blockbuster model and the weakening of the auteur model,” making studios less willing to take chances on Lucas’s edgier director friends such as De Palma and Martin Scorsese. That’s become such an unpopular sentiment to express, one forgets that mainstream film books used to say the same thing, but more meanly; film critic Glenn Kenny points to Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as a proponent of what he calls “the ‘Star Wars ruined everything’ line”; the book never misses a chance to portray Lucas as a sellout and Star Wars as a silly children’s film.

But today, you can barely criticize Star Wars at all. Actor and writer Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) made a mild attempt this year when he argued that Star Wars might have killed off “gritty, amoral art films” and resulted in us “consuming very childish things.” The Internet attacked immediately, with Gawker’s pop-culture site i09 asking, “Is he trolling, or has he really gotten so little out of years of science fiction?”

And don’t even think about an artistic criticism: when Joss Whedon (The Avengers) criticized The Empire Strikes Back for not having a clear ending, his remarks stirred up the kind of Internet outrage usually reserved for people who make racist jokes. There was a time when even fans could be critical; today, the debate is not over whether those first two films are great, but just how great they are.

There has even been a shift in the way fictional characters react to Star Wars. In popular culture, being a fan of the trilogy used to mark a character as being nerdy, even behind the times. On the 1990s sitcom NewsRadio, the lead character (The Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley) was mocked by the other characters for loving Star Wars. His ability to identify Boba Fett, the intergalactic bounty hunter from The Empire Strikes Back, marked him as having very different interests from everyone around him. Today, Star Wars is used in pop culture in the exact opposite way, as a cultural touchstone almost every sympathetic character loves. Liz Lemon on 30 Rock was a Star Wars fan; so were the characters on How I Met Your Mother (a woman who jilted the hero at the altar was a Star Wars hater). If a character likes Star Wars, you know he or she has good taste.

So what happened to change the way we looked at these movies? Leadbeater, who critizes the franchise’s influence, but admits the first two movies are among his favourites of all time—“I love Star Wars,” he says—thinks the changing reputation of the franchise is partly about generational change: “That shift came when those who grew up with the series came of age. They became a more vocal voice in the media, which shapes perceptions in many ways.” For filmmakers and critics of Lucas’s own generation, the movies were recognizably bigger, more expensive versions of things they had outgrown, like old serials; even the cliffhanger ending of The Empire Strikes Back, now seen as daring, just seemed like a ploy out of a Flash Gordon serial.

Younger critics and filmmakers not only grew up with Star Wars; they are less likely to view this kind of movie as inherently immature. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael dismissed Lucas as “hooked on the crap of his childhood,” but people used to say the same thing about filmmakers who made Westerns, or samurai movies. An earlier generation of critics—including Vincent Canby—wound up giving more serious consideration to those genres. Today, we’ve done the same for the kid-friendly fantasy of Star Wars or superhero comics.

Star Wars is also benefiting from a new trend in pop culture criticism: an increased willingness to like popular things, and hope they’ll turn out well. Entertainment Weekly declared a wave of “pro-franchise optimism,” and, with Star Wars, in particular, it’s uncool to be too cynical; David Sims of The Atlantic wrote that people who complain about the prequels sound like “bitter Gen X-ers upset that their childhoods are receding further into the distance.” In an era when it’s almost obligatory to praise Beyoncé and other pop entertainers, bashing Star Wars doesn’t make you look refined, as it did in the 1980s.

Besides, there are many other things for critics to bash. Hollywood blockbuster movies have become so big that Lucas’s films seem charming by comparison. “As tent-pole movies have gotten ever more frenetic,” Kenny says, “the near-classical styling of [Star Wars:] A New Hope and the sobriety of Empire look more and more old-school and respectable.” One of the ways Abrams has encouraged fan optimism is to promise that the new ﬁlm will use less computer-generated imagery than is the norm for modern movies, and more practical effects, miniatures and puppets. Star Wars films were once criticized for their overreliance on special effects; now, they’re from a more artistic and craftsmanlike time.

Could there be another Star Wars backlash? Maybe not. Kenny, who thinks Biskind’s criticisms were overblown, admits: “If you’re a fan of things like non-franchise, non-superhero movies, it’s kind of difficult now not to see Star Wars as a culturally corrosive influence.” But all the things people used to dislike about Lucas’s filmmaking—the New Age faux-religiosity, the overdependence on technology—are now inescapably part of every movie being made for mass audiences. Which means that, even if Star Wars: The Force Awakens disappoints, the original movies will just keep looking better. After all, as Kenny and others point out, Lucas’s visual language and storytelling in Star Wars were inspired by Akira Kurosawa. Today’s blockbusters have the disadvantage of being inspired by George Lucas.

So Jews are unwelcome in conservatism.

I stated those of no Faith. Jews have a Faith, largely with a great overlap of the moral underpinnings as Christianity. You would do well to cut the nonsense with that snarky "interesting" business.

Jonah Goldberg wrote an excellent article the other day, where he explores what conservatism means. His best quotation (from Yuval Levin) described conservatism

To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

, that is compatible with Christianity, Judaism and William F. Buckley, but not so much with Atheism, Occultism, or Ayn Rand. Kirk's longer definition, earlier in the article, even less so. (Requires belief in a transcendent order).

You would do well not to assume you know what other people believe.

The point was the the myth of [G]god[s] with children, virgin births, and all manner of other stories are common in the mythology of mankind -- and they are hardly "all but forgotten." Only an ignoramus doesn't know the story of Athena springing, fully formed, from the mind of Zeus, or of Perseus born to a virgin from a shower of gold.

That myths common on Earth might be repeated in galaxies long ago and far away is not in the least bit blasphemous. It is, as J.R.R. Tolkien would have said, "one of the ingredients in the pot."

Jews believe something. One of the things they believe is that the idea of [G]god[s] having children by virgin birth was common in the ancient, pagan world. It is one of their reasons for rejecting Christianity, and is hardly "all but forgotten."

My point was not at all touched by your point. My point being that myths having some elements in common does not mean that all events that have that element is a myth. I am aware of the Greek/Roman myth about Athena, etc. But no one to my knowledge, holds them today, which is part of the reason we can use these characters as symbols and brand names. There might be a stray Zoroastrian around, if one should pop n the board I will try not to offend him needlessly.

You describe yourself as a skeptic on religious matters in your well done profile. I am not. We are different kinds of conservatives, and you are certainly no newbie and you offer many contributnh posts. I am going to continue offering my opinion of what constitutes borderline blashemy, and will not take a correction from someone who offers a specious argument about ancient, all but forgotten myths as if they were 1:1 comparable. Frankly, you should be indifferent to it.

But according to later tradition, Zoroaster's mother, Dughdova, was a virgin when she conceived Zoroaster by a shaft of light. [Egyptian mythology, Lorenz, London, 2000]

Mithra is kind of a problem, because he enters Zoroastrianism later and as an ahura, so as far as Zoroastrianism is concerned, Mithra's "predating" may be chronologically true in another tradition, but it is logically dubious. I certainly was not confusing the two. I'm not aware that in the Indric tradition he was anything but a god ... not born of a virgin. The Greek and Roman variations, which most people mean when they refer to Mithraism were all over the place.

None of this matters to my original point. Human mythology is full of these stories. You can take the position that C.S. Lewis did: that God inspired these ideas all over the ancient world in order to "prep the landing zone" for Jesus Christ, or that, created in His Image we intuitively would anticipate such a thing in the collective unconscious, or that Christians simply expropriated these elements from existing traditions.

Whatever the case, there is nothing blasphemous about Lucas putting this story element from the common religious tradition of mankind in Star Wars. He doesn't claim, for example, that after three days Darth Vader rose from the dead in fulfillment of the scriptures. J.J. Abrams might. But we shall see...

I do agree with you that human mythology, and there is no blasphemy involved in Star Wars; that’s my view too.

To expand on my previous points:

Haven’t read the source you cite, though the title “Egyptian mythology” makes me wonder. I was referring to purely Iranian or Aryan tradition, not “Egyptian mythology”.

Zoroaster based on what is available historically, and in the Gathas (the language used in those old hymns), is most definitely believed, by most scholars who have studied him & the Gathas, to be ethnically of Aryan origins (in his case related to Iran, or more specifically today’s Tajikistan, not Egypt or even India).

There is no current or traditional belief, among practicing Zoroastrian-Iranians that Zoroaster’s mother was literally a virgin, or that he was conceived by a shaft of light.

Interestingly, the word “virgin” that we use in English, in Z tradition & old Persian is usually used to indicate ‘purity’ (not necessarily & only physical purity, but also spiritually).

If by Indric you mean related to India or Hindus, Zoroaster didn’t gain popularity in India during his time. The Zoroastrian-Parsees who live in India immigrated there post Islamic invasion of Iran. They are originally Persians, not Indians.

Mithra was An Aryan god/deity. Indians are considered Aryans ethnically as well; but, their traditions differ in many ways to those of Zoroastrian-Iranians, and Hindus still have & worship many gods.

In Iranian and Zoroastrian traditions, Mithra is not the same as “Ahura Mazda”. Mithra or Mitra (also known in Persian as “Mehr”) was a sun-god. Ahura Mazda has the main attribute of Wisdom. Zoroaster was teaching and preaching eschatological monotheism (Ahura Mazda), and cosmogonic dualism (good vs evil, or light vs. darkness).

Yes, understood after reading your previous post again.

This isn’t the thread for it, though it is all very fascinating, so let me add a final explanation.

In both Indic (vedic) and Iranian traditions, Mithra is not only known as the sun-god, but also represents ‘contracts & treaties’. The other name for mithra (mitra) being “mehr” in persian means ‘friendship or mercy’ among warriors in particular. It’s the same pre-zoroastrian deity.

Mithra (mitra/mehr) later, post-zoroaster, became known as a ‘saint’ or ‘angel’ in the Zoroastrian scripture. He was seen as the patron saint of warriors/soldiers, a guardian & ‘a messenger’ too if you will.

To date, the Zs don’t worship fire, but fire symbolically represents purity.

I’d say the closest analogy to Mithra or Mehr, for specific qualities associated with him (sun, fire, positive energy, protection), in Christian Angelology, and I believe in Judaism too, is Archangel St Michael.

So, although neither Mithraism nor Zoroastrianism are classified as Abrahamic religions, they influenced each other in some core beliefs at least.

I went to see 2001, with some friends, when I was a teenager. IMHO, it stunk. I didn't mind the music, but the plot made no sense to me and the visual effects made me feel like I did before I'd get carsick. I walked out into the lobby and chatted with one of the ushers until the thing was over.

I like Star Wars although I have to agree that Anakin having no Dad made me a bit uncomfortable, too. And, I got upset that Lucas sold out to Disney- the evil empire- for the last trilogy. And I cry at the end when Luke sees his Anakin, Yoda, and Obi-wan again. Which is why I've never had the nerve to watch, "Old Yeller!" 😭 (((sniffle)))

To a Christian, especially a Catholic, that Virgin Birth is not a myth. It’s a reality that our present society likes to step on, so we get a little wary. That part of the story made me kind of uncomfortable, too... As a whole though, I think there are a lot of things that are good in there- I like to watch them when they’re on- and Lando turned out to be a hero! Guess I’m a bit of a nerd myself...

Funny you should say that, because the first Star Wars movie actually WAS promoting Marxism. Don’t forget, George Lucas planned to have Star Wars be an allegorical criticism to American involvement in the Vietnam War since at LEAST 1973, and specifically envisioned the Empire as being us Americans, and the Rebel Alliance as the Vietcong. George Lucas made this very clear, and in case you, for understandable reasons, don’t believe him any more than the boy who cried wolf, his friends can back that up.

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