Wait,
Monica Bellucci? On Line Two?
Quick, how do I get to Line Two?
I just watched my VHS copy of
Star Wars last night. You know what? It's AWESOME. Lucas is a gifted cinematic story-teller. I mean it. Just think of the opening shot. It tells you everything you need to know, it makes your jaw drop straight into your lap, and it's utterly thrilling from the get-go. And it's like nothing ever seen before.
I think we forget what a shock
Star Wars was when it first appeared. There'd never been ANYTHING like it. So much in that film is so astoundingly original, even as it's all being ripped off from old-time serials and Akira Kurosawa's classic adventure films. So much is now stuff that's passed into our modern lexicon, we forget that
Star Wars is the first place we ever saw it. Did a hero ever walk into a bar full of bizarre aliens before? Did a sword ever flash and glow on screen before? Was there ever a space battle like the struggle above the Death Star? An idea like the Force guiding heroes? Tractor beams and blasters and space smugglers and Jedi mind tricks and Star Destroyers and the good Rebellion agains the Evil Empire...
Did ANYTHING ever sound like a frickin' TIE fighter before?
Sure, it was all a pastiche of zillions of sources. But the cinematic storytelling of it -- you can turn off the sound of
Star Wars it's nearly as exciting -- you don't need to hear the dialog to understand what's happening. Likewise, you can just listen to it and it's exciting -- the soundtrack is so amazing, so detailed and so unique it carries you along with it. It's amazing, it really is.
Star Wars was a work of genius every bit as surely as was
The Seven Samurai. But whereas Kurosawa kept pulling up new ideas and new images and new ways of telling stories, Lucas has been content to simply milk this one cow for the rest of his career, continually diluting any content that might be slightest bit offensive.
Consider: In
Star Wars, Princess Leia is TORTURED by a giant black floating nightmare ball with a HUGE NEEDLE, Darth Vader kills a guy in a conference room just for being uppity (after we've watched him murder a Rebel commander for a similar reason), dozens of Rebel soldiers die painful, horrible deaths on screen, as do dozens of stormtroopers (many with smoking holes burned through their bodies), a barfly gets his arm hacked off (with blood all over the floor), a greedy alien gets blown away by a cocky pilot (who shot first), our hero's foster parents are shown as black, smoking corpses twisted in their death agonies, dozens of bodies of innocent Jawas are heaped on a smouldering fire, Rebel pilots scream in agony as they are enveloped in flames, and an entire planet (which are led to believe is prosperous and well-populated) is destroyed by the bad guys -- which, far from being glossed over, is pointed out specifically as involving millions of souls crying out and being extinguished.
You just don't get bad guys like that anymore. Jabba the Hutt? Spare me. Darth Maul? Whatever. Until he kills Qui-Gon (in what looks to me like a pretty fair fight, considering he's outnumbered), Maul doesn't do anything all that bad. Neither does anyone else these days. Oh, except Sebulba. Boy, there's a villain. Even the Emperor in the old movies never accomplished what Grand Moff Tarkin did as a villain. Tarkin and Vader were the ultimate bad guys. Vader was never really the same afterwards. Sort of like Simon and Garfunkel.
NONE of the following movies accomplished anything like what the first does, artistically, and that's largely because Lucas got more and more and more cautious.
Empire is pretty good, and has MUCH better dialog, but it lacks the mythic beauty of the original. People like it better because of the superior dialog and the great work Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford do of pretending they're in a romantic comedy.
Jedi has little to recommend it, and the later films even less.
I kind of liked TPM when it first came out. MacGregor and Neeson tried really hard, and their friendship rings true. And Portman worked for me -- I see a queen in her performance, though maybe it's just those freaky costumes she's wearing. Those rocked. But on repeat viewings, the creakiness of the plot and the lack of any emotional cost to the heroes make it worthless.
And you know, you can see this trend even in the first film -- in the landing after the Death Star battle and the subsequent throne room scene, there's no sense that any cost has been paid to purchase this victory. Nobody mourns the fallen, nobody is wondering if it was worth it in the end.
Compare that with Kurosawa's endings --
The Seven Samurai with the graves and the singing farmers,
The Hidden Fortress with the terror of Tahei and Matsushichi and their subsequent reformation,
Yojimbo with the lone samurai still on his way. Kurosawa is superior because he makes grand adventure tales that nevertheless acknowledge the price paid by the heroes. Lucas' growing unwillingness to portray the real cost of the struggle is robbing his films of their power.
Says me.
