More Star Wars Reviews.
Director: George Lucas
Writer: George Lucas
Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, David Prowse, James Earl Jones
Runtime: 121 mins.
1977
It is physically, emotionally, and spiritually impossible for me to be objective about Star Wars. In fact, nobody can come to this movie without baggage anymore, whether it be I have seen this 50 times or I have been chastised my entire life for never having seen it. For my part, I cannot remember a time when the original trilogy was not already ground into the fibers of my being. Star Wars isn't my personal favorite or most beloved franchise, but it is one of the franchises that I dipped into over and over and over again as a child.
Coming at the film for the purposes of a review was a tricky exercise that involved a lot of hopping around trying to find the right angle of inquiry, rather than just letting the movie slide comfortably through familiar patterns already etched in my brain. To see Star Wars with fresh eyes is to force the perspective that this is a weird and cheesy sci-fi movie from the '70s, a movie that would have been good no matter what, but could easily have gone the way of The Last Starfighter: a cult classic with good and bad elements that never quite sparked a cultural brushfire. We are all living in the wake of the unparalleled Star Wars cultural brushfire, and peering beyond the flames is difficult.
Trying to view Star Wars as a standalone artifact rather than a cog in an eternal capitalist mechanism is a strange experience. You start to notice the minimalism of the first movie compared to our conception of it. Minimalism is a strange term to describe a melodramatic space opera with cutting edge special effects and a plot that surrounds the destruction of a planet-sized weapon wielded by a galactic empire, but we're working on a gradient scale here. The film only takes us to two planets, spending significant time on just one of those. The Force is talked up, but only used sparingly--at no point does anybody even move anything with the Force, unless you count that imperial goon's windpipe. Finally, there is only one lightsaber battle, and it is a glacial and pensive fight. Intense, to be sure, but it reads more as two old hands sizing each other up than a display of technique or skill.
I found myself wondering how much of the mythology was in place before Star Wars became an unexpected breakaway hit. Not even touching the massive canon bunglefest of the prequels, there are plenty of weird moments for people who know the whole story, like Obi-Wan calling Vader "Darth" as if it is his first name. Then there's the matter of the awkwardly sketched central love triangle that feels like a weird misstep in light of the future revelation of Luke and Leia's siblinghood. Additionally, Darth Vader's interactions with his two kids don't make much sense if he knows he is their father, although he does spend a stretch of the movie looming behind Leia with a possessive hand on her shoulder.
But these quibbles are neither here nor there, non-factors if we are trying to isolate the movie from its influence. Star Wars in a bubble is a mixed experience.
These are some of the most iconic characters in cinema, in great part due to their straightforward earnestness. There is nothing complex about any of the main three, at least in how they are characterized in this first film. I was reading a blogger who put it rather succinctly: If you're going to appreciate Star Wars at all, you have to accept that perfect strangers can become the best of friends immediately after meeting each other. The screenplay takes major shortcuts in the relationship-building department, presuming that if you almost die in someone's presence, you are granted deep knowledge of them as a person, and can have all sorts of expectations issuing from that knowledge.
Of course, these shortcuts add to the pulpy atmosphere, and are almost certainly the right choice. I have little doubt that if Lucas tried to be more deliberate about scripting these characters' growth together, it would have been atrocious. The dialogue in Star Wars is rough. Our ears are acclimated to Lucas's world, so it's easy to gloss over the verbiage, but every so often lines jump out at you as if to provide a reminder that Lucas doesn't know how people talk no matter what galaxy they occupy. For me, the biggest groaner was Han's desperation-fueled quip in the trash compacter: "One thing's for sure, we're all gonna be a lot thinner." Oof. Then there's the matter of a certain Tosche station and some certain power converters.
Which brings me to the other egg on this movie's face: Mark Hamill is bad in Star Wars. Having made that claim, let me dial it back. I have nothing but the utmost respect and affection for Hamill. Part of the joy of the original trilogy is watching his marked improvement as an actor as we watch the marked complication of Luke's character. Hamill may not have been destined to be a movie star, but he has since found an incredible niche for himself in voiceover work (his Joker is, of course, legendary, and I have recently been enjoying him as Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar). Even in the first Star Wars, he isn't a hunk of meat like so many other young pretty boy actors. He has great moments, and most importantly he captures Luke's central character trait: a yearning for a world beyond his own. Hamill's finest moment in this movie is his longing gaze at Tatooine's binary sunset, one of the great tone-setting iconic scenes in blockbuster history.
But come on, he does not perform well here. Carrie Fisher is pretty rough around the edges too. Harrison Ford comes closest to nailing his character right off the bad, and his schtick even gets a bit grating after a while. The real stars of this movie are Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, and Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. The vague Jedi mythology of the Star Wars universe is sold almost entirely on Guinness's utterly convincing line readings. The look he gives the denizens of the cantina after he cuts a thug's arm off is an all-timer.
Of course, there's also James Earl Jones voicing cinema's most iconic villain. The great thing about Darth Vader is that the movie doesn't feel the need to explain anything about him. Not his backstory, or his goals, or even why he's in an enormous black mechanistic outfit with a breathing apparatus. He just exists, slicing through the narrative like a primal force, an ancient fury embodied and decked out in sci-fi paraphernalia. The first and foremost failing of Lucas's prequels was the need to provide just such a detailed and monotonous backstory, but here Vader is pure malice.
Having covered the movie's shortcomings, Vader's potency brings us to the first of the three tremendous successes of Star Wars: the production design. The screenplay problems pale in comparison to the sheer amount of story and imagination generated by John Barry and his design team. Every single frame of this film is stuffed to the brim with unfamiliar and fascinating creatures and doodads. Sometimes we learn the names and functions of what we see; mostly we don't. But always we are entranced. The cantina scene is the most obvious example of this, with cut after cut overwhelming us with visions of aliens whose weird bodies and languages are clearly steeped in a history that we are not privy to. Even before that, the inside of the Jawas' massive scavenging vehicle is a fever dream of detritus. Star Wars achieves the sci-fi holy grail of alluding to the existence of systems without feeling the need to explain every little dirty detail to convince us that they are real and functional. It makes absolute sense that Star Wars would be ground zero for the modern blockbuster formula; every imagination-capturing detail offered the perfect opportunity for the franchise to both widen the universe into sequels, but also deepen the universe with toys and books and games that flesh out all of the movie's tangential figures. If everything we see onscreen in Star Wars was cut and dry, we sure as hell wouldn't be talking about this movie nearly forty years later.*
*A special shoutout must also be given to sound designer Ben Burtt, whose laser blasts and lightsaber noises have been lovingly replicated by every child, and many adults, for the past four decades.
Yet all that brilliant production design would surely have gone to waste if it were not displayed skillfully. Part of that comes from Lucas's camerawork, but a great deal of it comes from the film's incredibly talented editing team, consisting of Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch, and Marcia Lucas. You wouldn't be off base for speculating that Marcia Lucas saved her husband's movie. The editing of Star Wars is exactly as brisk as it needs to be. Every sloppy story beat and ugly line of dialogue is smoothed over by a rapid shift to something new and exciting, while every little tangible detail in the environment is lingered on exactly long enough for it to make an impression. Star Wars is a great movie to study editing technique, especially when stacked up against the vast majority of cheesy sci-fi. Think of how every awful sci-fi movie you've seen trudges through its material artlessly. Even imaginative worlds can feel like a slog if the editing isn't crisp. I've been bored out of my skull at movies that barely cross the hour mark, but Star Wars zips by at a healthy two hours. Most movies that long begin to feel bloated, but not so here.
The final aspect of the trifecta of brilliance that has made Star Wars a global phenomenon is not the special effects, though they are stupendous (and, frankly, have aged better than the effects in the prequels). No, even more instrumental in making us believe the world is the all-time great John Williams score. How many movie soundtracks can everybody you know hum every song from? I don't believe there is any movie music more iconic than Williams' work on Star Wars, with very good reason. If the editing team is responsible for grabbing the audience's hand and guiding them through the experience, Williams is right there gripping the other hand. Williams understands better than anyone that Star Wars, as a mythological story of good and evil, must cast subtlety out the window and blast you away with the emotions of any given scene. Everything messy about the movie is salvaged by the score, and everything good is accentuated. To get an idea of just how much work the soundtrack is doing, watch the final scene without the triumphant fanfare.
A lesser composer really could have tanked this movie.
That's all I have to say about Star Wars. Every flaw in writing and performance is made up for tenfold by the talented folks Lucas had the foresight to surround himself with. Lucas has gotten into the habit of taking creative credit for the entirety of this franchise, but I can't offhand think of a movie that was better elevated by the power of collaboration on all fronts. Of course, that's a silly thing to say as all films are collaborative efforts. That is part of what makes a successful movie so magical; when Luke's X-Wing dives down the Death Star trench, we are seeing the results of hundreds of people working in tandem, and thanks to their synergy billions of lives have been impacted. Star Wars may not be perfect, but it sure works.
4 / 5 BLOBS
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