The Movie That Ate Hollywood

Rating: 8/10 (16 June 2010)

The irony of George Lucas' career is that he started out making experimental avant-garde short films and became, not always of his own volition, the closest thing the modern film industry has to an authentic classic mogul. His key problem had always been his inhibiting bashfulness when dealing with people. However, his strongest distinction has always been his shrewdness. Fans of Lucas see his sovereign autonomy as a significant countermeasure to the supreme control of Hollywood, his idealized enterprise to spend (and make) his own money on new innovations and projects that have benefited the rest of the industry as something to be commended. Dissenters, nevertheless, lose hope in what they perceive as a dominating juvenilization of the American film industry in the wake of Star Wars---the watershed that proved that Jaws and Close Encounters were no flukes but the real thing---holding Lucas and Spielberg specially accountable for the gaudy spin-off merchandise-driven summer-blockbuster mentality that has steered the business for the past three decades.
I'm somewhere in the middle. More clearly, I'm guilty of ranting in favor of the dissenting argument on several occasions yet I'm aware of the validity of the former argument. I look at Star Wars now and see a film that barely holds a flame to at least a dozen or so other American films of its decade. I think what makes Star Wars, even as a stand-alone film, strike more thunder than virtually any other film in decades before or after it is its television series-scale mythological content. The fact that it was meant to be a saga spanning several films was something scarce even in a decade when Jaws 2's and French Connection II's were beginning to pop up here and there. The scope of Star Wars' story must've been as much of a shock to the system as the enormously ground-breaking FX.
It's basically one of the quintessential Good Vs. Evil Sagas. It's classic in that sense. What I like about its universe is that it depicts a civilization "a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," suggesting that we here on Earth were likely cavemen or conquistadors when they'd already spanned an interplanetary life-sustaining geography, had technology that not only begets robotic slaves and laser dogfights in space that mix the mass of a warboat and the agility of a fighter plane, but "weapons of mass destruction" that don't just "nuke" entire cities or countries but whole planets. The presumably "human" characters are able to speak languages spanning countless planets' worth of alien species. Lightsabers. Regardless, it's all on the verge of a cataclysmic struggle between a totalitarian regime and a rebel organization. The rebel organization is seemingly apt to be weaker without heroic figures who believe in an omnipresent energy that gives them purpose and power. The totalitarians, on the other hand, and more interestingly, use this omnipresent Force to motivate their evildoings. I wonder maybe if this Force is at the heart of the problem.
Nevertheless, civilization has consolidated into a clear-cut case of good, wearing white, and evil, wearing black, "May the Force be with you" and the Dark Side. As much as I love the concept of intelligent life in the universe far more advanced than us and sharing parallels, I feel like Good Vs. Evil is too archaic to be the general philosophy of everyman in a civilization that could possibly be millions of years more advanced than us. Then again, maybe that's the most significant clue: What if in a future far ahead, we're advancing technologically at the same rate as we are now, so life has expanded much further, yet we're still preoccupied with fighting over the same platitudes and ideologies as now? You can't help but quibble in your head over which religions would be the good guys and which ones would be on the Dark Side.
Or maybe that's just the classical sort of tale Lucas wanted to tell. After all, his supposed influences, some I've noticed and others I guess I trust, range from Kurosawa epics to John Ford westerns, from Buddhism to abstract metaphysical theories. These aren't bad sources of inspiration, and many share, to some degree, a sense of hero worship, feelings of power directed, to whatever extent, toward fighting evil. Regardless, no other Star Wars character holds a candle to its villain, Darth Vader. Yes, Obi-Wan comes in close, but we all know what happens to him and who does it.
There's still much more to say about the movie, but unfortunately it's limited by its low rank on one's priorities. Perhaps my real favorite character is the music, the immortal symphony we all know by heart. And my theory as to why the acting of Vader's generals, admirals and underlings tends to sound like a pub scene in a bad werewolf movie is because half of acting is who you're acting off of, and Vader's James Earl Jones voice is what gives him gravity, not whoever was under the actual helmet. As for the Special Edition additions, I don't know. Completely unnecessary Jabba the Hut scene, although it adds foreshadowing for Han Solo's arc. The world/creature details and CGI shots have a much different look than the comparatively realistic remaining film, making me more conscious of watching the movie than its story and immersive atmosphere. Lucas had great ideas and lots of unassuming pluck, but as the propeller of not only blockbuster but franchise mentality, sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, revisiting the 20th-anniversary tampering, the joke's somewhat on him.