Sunday, September 21, 2014

Movie – Star Wars (1977)

Science fiction films are sometimes referred to as “space operas”, not unlike westerns sometimes being called “horse operas”.  The reason is that there are often similarities in the kind of stories being told; it’s only the setting that is different.  I wrote in the parent post for this category, “Consider the following story: farm boy from the boondocks meets an old gunslinger who shows him the ropes.  After riding into town where all the bad guys and action are they join up with a disreputable criminal with a heart of gold and later a fancy woman out of her element.  Farm boy wants to get revenge on the man who killed his father.  And that man is the former protégé of the old gunslinger who was once very close to him until the protégé betrayed him.  If that’s not a western, I don’t know what is.  If you haven’t figured it out already, I just described Star Wars.”

I’ve sometimes seen people try to claim that Star Wars is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s film The Hidden Fortress (1958), but that is not really correct.  I’ve seen it.  Yes, it has a story of a man trying to save a princess, but that kind of tale has been around for thousands of years.  The biggest influence it had on Star Wars was the comic relief characters – a pair of peasants, one thin and one fat.  Sound like any Star Wars characters you are familiar with?

I was 12 years old when Star Wars opened in May of 1977, but turned 13 before I saw it.  One of the things I’d like to do is dispel the rumor that it immediately took the country by storm, with everyone raving about the movie.  The truth is that not one single kid in my entire school ever even mentioned the movie the last few weeks of that school year after it opened. 

In fact, the first time I can ever remember seeing or hearing anything connected to it was a comedy skit on TV sometime later when a coach was having a new football player arrive.  In walks who I now know as Darth Vader, but at the time I didn’t have a clue why they were making such a big deal about his breathing.  Just when the coach is incredibly excited about his new player, in runs a dwarf in a football uniform (I think it was actually Billy Barty).  It turns out that the Darth Vader character is just his sports agent.

One of the major things that was different then about movies in theaters is that if they were popular then they played for far longer than they do now.  It wasn’t until either August or September that my older sister took me and we both went to see Star Wars.  I think it might have been September because when school resumed that fall there were some kids with Star Wars lunchboxes and that made me curious about what it was.

Yes, I did love the film on first viewing.  It was full of adventure, and funny characters, and good beating evil.  I wanted to see Luke and Leia end up together, and the “kiss for luck” was exciting.  (Remember, this was before Lucas bizarrely decided to make them brother and sister.)  I was scared by the trash compactor and the monster that lived in it.  I thought Han Solo was cool.  I had no idea who Alec Guinness was, but I thought the old guy playing Obi-Wan Kenobi was someone I’d like as a teacher.

Just to check my memory on the summer and fall of Star Wars I did look up some things.  As it turns out the studio thought it was going to be a flop and only opened it in a small number of theaters.  It later expanded, but never had a massive weekend like movies do now.  Instead, it kept pulling in 10-12 million dollars week after week after week.  It was still playing theaters in November when it became, at the time, the highest grossing movie in film history (not adjusted for inflation, of course.)

By the time Oscar season rolled around it achieved something no other science fiction film ever had – it was nominated for Best Picture.  In fact, it received a total of 10 Oscar nominations, including Director, Original Screenplay, and Supporting Actor.  It won six Oscars in technical categories.  It also received a Special Achievement Award from the Academy for the creation of the alien and robot voices.

After Kevin Smith did Clerks (1994) where his characters had several conversations about the Star Wars films and declared that The Empire Strikes Back (my review) was the best because of its downer ending, it became more and more fashionable for people to parrot this and say the same thing in real life.  And while there were certainly people who felt that way prior to 1994, the opinion became far more prevalent afterwards.

Well, I’m old school.  For me the original movie is the best of all the Star Wars films that have been produced.  Sure it’s a simplistic story, and the bumbling droid sidekicks for comic relief are kind of dumb (the same thing Lucas would later be excoriated for with Jar Jar Binks, by the way), but this was also a leap forward not just in sci-fi movies, but movies in general.  Jaws (1975) may have invented the summer blockbuster, but Star Wars cemented it in place.  I even did two categories of science fiction film reviews and the dividing line I used was Before Star Wars and After Star Wars.

The film has continued to be a big part of pop culture even though two more generations of kids have been born since it came out.  One of the most enjoyable Star Wars tie-ins I experienced recently was the book William Shakespeare’s Star Wars.  The story was re-written as if it were a Shakespearean play, complete with 16th century style illustrations.  I reviewed that book here, if you are interested.

At this point, everyone reading this has very likely already seen Star Wars, which is why I decided to talk about what it was like to experience it in the months following its release, rather than talk about the plot.  If you’ve somehow never seen it I’d almost think that’s by choice, rather than by circumstance.  If you’ve been avoiding it for some reason, I still highly recommend you see this film.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

14 comments:

  1. This fits really well in your theme. I think Lucas said he took inspiration from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and Kurosawa was famously inspired by John Ford.

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    1. Lucas definitely was a big fan of Kurosawa, which is what led to the story about The Hidden Fortress. And Kurosawa was definitely inspired by American westerns when he was doing his samurai films.

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  2. I certainly agree that Star Wars fits into the Western genre. In an undergraduate English class, my lecturer said that Star Wars was a medieval 'romance,' in that it was a knight's quest story (which is what romance originally meant.) That is one of the reasons it resonates so much, it uses tropes from other narrative styles that were wildly popular.

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    1. I agree. In my review of the book William Shakespeare's Star Wars I discussed how Lucas referred to Campbell's analysis of heroic archetypes, many of which were based on much older tales, including those of Shakespeare.

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  3. I'm thinking of doing a Star Wars marathon next year just to celebrate the release of Episode VII as it would be fun to re-watch the original trilogy... in its original form and ponder why the prequels didn't work.

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    1. I never have sat down and watched all six films in numerical order. I thought briefly about doing it for "Star Wars Day" (May 4th), but decided I didn't have the time. I will do it someday.

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    2. Here's a fun and incredibly ingenious re-ordering of the Star Wars films to watch on your next go-through, as well as to introduce new youngin's to the franchise in the best way possible (storytelling-wise); watch them in this order: 4,5,2,3,6, without 1 at all. The guy who thought it up coined it Machete Order after his blog, and he has a whole post about why this is arguably the best way to watch the Star Wars films; it's amazingly convincing.

      http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/11/11/the-star-wars-saga-suggested-viewing-order/

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    3. Thanks for the link. They actually mentioned this in an episode of The Big Bang Theory last year. Looks like the original guy got his wish with it going viral.

      While I understand where he is coming from, the ultimate source of all of this is "I hate episode 1 and don't want to watch it." I've never felt that the prequels (even episode 1) were the crime against humanity that so many others seem to based on the sheer level of hate sent their way.

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  4. This is not a film I can be objective about. My childhood is far too tied up in this movie. I love it and I always will, and I don't care what that says about me.

    Seriously, just thinking about Star Wars makes me happy.

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    1. I get that completely. From my childhood that's the original version of The Parent Trap. I can look at it now and see how childish many of the jokes are, or how broad they are, and how Hayley Mills was at best an average actress in it, but I don't care. I first saw it at a particular time in my life and it had a huge impact on me. I literally thought about it every single day for at least a month after I saw it. And to this day I still get a warm feeling inside when I think about it.

      In a similar vein the Charlie Brown Christmas special is poorly animated, but I don't care about that, either. If I happen to know it's coming on I will still sit down and watch it for the umpteenth time.

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  5. Thank you for a very personal take on the Star Wars film. I envy you that you experienced the release personally. I was 4 at the time and only experienced the toys at a time when it was already on the way out. My son on the other hand is 4 as well and a big big fan of Star Wars. Except that his focus is the LEGO version of it. He even insisted on going to Legoland to see their exhibitíon. When I hear him humming the Star Wars theme I cannot help wondering how it must have been back then at the release in 1977. I wish I had Star Wars toys when I was 4.

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  6. You're welcome. For what it's worth, I never had any Star Wars toys. My mom didn't have the money. I did get some tie-in books, such as Splinter of the Mind's Eye which nowadays would cause a stir because in it Luke and Leia almost have sex. It was before they became siblings. It was also long before midichlorians because part of the plot is the two of them trying to beat Darth Vader to an enormous jewel that contains a huge concentration of the Force in it.

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  7. Good review, you touched on many interesting aspects about the film. I'd go with Empire Strikes Back as my favorite of the original trilogy, it only beats Star Wars by a whisker though.
    I think part of the appeal is Luke Skywalker starts out as the everyman, he has the same insecurities and fears as we do. And most young boys wanted to fly the millenium falcon and use a lightsaber.
    I remember reading that when shooting began on the first film, many figured the project to be a sci-fi flop. Crew members stood around laughing at a man in a dog suit. How wrong they were! Interesting that Star Wars didn't take your school by storm, as that's the common (exaggerated) perception today.

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    1. Just to clarify - there were about three weeks of school left when Star Wars opened. In that time it didn't take people by storm. By the time we returned to school in September (almost 3.5 months after it opened) it was a big deal.

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