1) It is hard to analyze it in any way that I see as fresh or unique
2) When you get right down to it, it’s not a very good movie
But, I will do what I can for the sake of art.
First off, we can’t discuss “Star Wars” without acknowledging that there is an incredibly deep and convoluted world that George Lucas created in his quest to be thorough with these films. 99% of that content never makes it into a “Star Wars” film. Because of this I cannot simply excuse or explain away certain shortcomings this movie has by saying “they explain it better in the book.” A good film adaptation should ALWAYS assume you haven’t read the source materials; especially when said source materials aren’t novels or even comic books but rather a bunch of technical manuals and graphic novels that came out years later.
A lavishly arranged orchestral arrangement (which will be crucial to the film’s entire feel) opens the movie, followed by scrolling text explaining the backstory for the audience. It is done in a descending font that looks almost 3D and seems to disappear into space as the words progress. This is a very interesting and apropos effect given the intergalactic setting of this film, however it is evident that this is just the first of many tactics this film employs simply for what the guys on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” would have referred to as “wow factor.” I’m not saying this to be jaded and critical, I’m saying it because everything that is explained in the 3 paragraphs of introduction are discussed at various points later in the movie. You could literally lift this introduction out altogether and not be any more or less confused than you are watching it in its true form. In fact, the introduction probably confused more people than it ever helped understand it given the fact that it inexplicably introduces the movie as “Episode IV” despite no pre-existing installments.
In many ways, “Star Wars” is simply a relocated spaghetti western. The first scenes featuring main characters like Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Darth Vader (David Prowse/James Earl Jones) hearken back to the days of hat color defining a person’s moral standing. Leia is clad in pure white robes, while Vader of course has the menacing black helmet and body armor. Even characters introduced later will adhere to this simplistic yet effective tool. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) wears white and the other bad guys in the evil Imperial Empire rely on emotional association to establish their position. Stormtroopers wear white uniforms with helmets that have thin eye holes not unlike KKK robes and Governor Tarkin (Peter Cushing) rocks an ensemble that clearly, CLEARLY looks like a Nazi dress uniform. We aren’t supposed to know for sure if Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is a good guy or a bad guy, so he wears black AND white. Clever.
I think that covers most of the major visual allegory, so I can comfortably move onto the plot. The Rebels are a well-funded group of militants who are attempting to overthrow the Empire, who are evil seemingly only for the purpose of being evil. Princess Leia, one of the highest leaders in the rebellion, has managed to get ahold of a full blueprint of the Death Star, a space station the Empire is hoping to use to intimidate any non-conformist planets into submission. Before having her starship boarded and being arrested for treason she is able to hide the blueprints in a robot R2-D2, who boards an escape pod with his mechanical life-partner C-3P0 and winds up on the desert planet Tatooine.
“Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought onboard.” (Princess Leia, “Star Wars”)
Thankfully it is apparently a remarkably small world because even though they wind up in the possession of Luke Skywalker, he happens to know Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), the guy Leia sent them to unrealistically hoping they would just find their way to him- so they do! As many flaws as I can find with this picture and particularly these Tatooine scenes, I also think the most artistically brilliant shot in the entire movie occurs here. There is no dialogue but Luke stares at the setting dual suns and encapsulates his whole character with his silent frustration. The symphony again kicks in and plays a short swell of music that compliments the scene perfectly. The two suns remind us that the film is set in outer space but the emptiness and wishing for something more Mark Hamill expresses immediately makes it relatable again.
Obi-Wan plants a seed (not in a creepy Noah Cross/Evelyn Cross in “Chinatown” kind of way) in Luke’s mind that he could help the ancient religion of Jedi make a comeback. There are only a few left after Darth Vader “helped hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights,” making Luke an obvious choice to revive the cause since his father was one of the most powerful Jedis ever as well as one of the ones Vader murdered ;) Luke knows he can’t go because his uncle not only looked down on Jedi-ism but needs him as slave labor on the family farm… what they are farming on a barren desert planet would have been nice to explain but whatevs. Storyline conveniently however, Luke’s uncle and aunt are killed, freeing him up to take off with this mysterious old hermit to join the rebellion.
The introduction of roguish space smuggler Han Solo is one of the film’s finest moments. Obi-Wan and Luke venture to Mos Eisley Spaceport where they search the bars looking for a pilot to take them to the Rebel base. The menagerie of strange creatures and beings they encounter there are really some of the only indicators of the vastness of the George Lucas universe. In a short musical montage a variety of beings both cute and creepy are flashed across the screen. I am not going to name every Snaggletooth, Mufftak and Ponda Baba introduced in this scene to appease Star Wars geeks, and besides most of those characters weren’t properly named until years down the road anyway, so their backstories are pretty irrelevant as it relates to this film, so please forward any complaints about my failure to properly recognize Garindan’s important contribution to the near apprehension of the good guys directly to the round file cabinet I keep under my desk. The other thing that makes this scene so great is the back-and-forth between Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness. The other young members of the cast are WAY out of their league in a movie with veteran stage actors like Guinness and Cushing, so to see one of the younger actors in the film exchange dialogue with one of the pros is a bright spot.
Luke begins to learn the ways of the Jedi, Obi-Wan is killed by Darth Vader- making Luke the last living hope for the Jedi, Luke and Han both rescue Leia and in the process develop a thing for her and Luke blows up the Death Star. Really it is all very simplistic and borrows heavily from many other previously existing genres; particularly westerns as I mentioned before given the well defined “good/evil” concept, the sheer number of shootouts and the mentality that the loners and anti-heroes are the ones who are going to save us all when the expected heroes fail. You don’t have to look very closely to see to see the rip-offs of previous works in “Star Wars.” The scene where Luke returns home to his slaughtered family is directly lifted from “The Searchers,” C-3PO looks suspiciously like Maria from “Metropolis” and there are even heavy allusions to numerous religions scattered all over the movie.
However, what “Star Wars” lacks in originality, it kind of makes up for in special effects pioneering. Contrary to popular belief this wasn’t the movie where all sci-fi stopped looking like “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” As much as I hate it “2001: A Space Odyssey” featured equally impressive space scenes and in terms of scope of the spacecrafts “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is equal to or greater than this film. What “Star Wars” did change though was detail. The intricacies of the surface of the Death Star, the underside of the Star Destroyer that chases Princess Leia and even the beams from the weapons are really what separate this movie from similar genre films.
And of course, the merchandising frenzy it was able to subsequently create. There is nothing wrong with saying that these films qualified for this list for reasons other than quality of content. “The Jazz Singer” was not a bad film, but there is no way it makes this list were it not for being the first talkie. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was nowhere near as good as “The Secret of NIMH” but it was the first feature-length animated film, so yeah, it belongs here. “Star Wars” came along at the right time and became a cultural phenomenon that very few books, movies or songs could ever dream of. But you’re dreaming if you think this movie is so highly regarded because it’s good.
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