May the 4th Be With You!

Rating: Null/10 (4 May 2014)

George Lucas' fairy tale has had more of an impact on me than any other film that I have ever seen. It was the first film I remember seeing, it stayed with me through my childhood and infused me with a passion for film that has never left me. To this day, I am a Star Wars fan and probably well remain forever after.
Star Wars is a film that offers up a science fiction extravaganza containing elements we already know. Lucas offers a story that we can easily get comfortable with. He offers character types and gives them bold personalities: The callow youth, the hot-shot, the wise old wizard, the beautiful princess (in need of rescue, of course) and the loyal support of the muscle and the bickering comic relief. He offers a villainous enterprise not a million miles removed from the Nazi regime. He places his heroes in the path of overwhelming odds so that tiniest dot in the universe ends up making a dent in the villain's evil plan.
For better and for worse, Star Wars would change the direction of American cinema. The decade had been ushered in by a new breed of rebel filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg who made personal films, small intimate films that didn't need a large budget. But when Jaws and Star Wars both became a box office triumph, Hollywood saw the box office potential and turned their intentions toward a large scale entertainment.
What Lucas had that other filmmakers in this genre did not was an eye for detail. It is easy to hammer together a series of cardboard sets and have actors stand in front of them but to create a desert town populated by humans, aliens, creatures and droids packed into the background so that entire frame feels populated was something unheard of. He also created what has been called the "used future", realizing that automobiles in his fantasy world should look used and rusted and aged, not sleek and looking as it if were created before the camera was turned on. Note Luke Skywalker's Landspeeder which has a thick coat of rust and grime and a paint job that suggests it has spent it's entire existence sitting in the hot sun. Also note Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, a rusty hulk that seems hammered together from spare parts (the in-joke of the film is that the heroes keep noting how shoddy it looks even as it's saving their skins).
As with all landmark films Star Wars was the right movie for the right time. It came along in the mid-seventies, in the midst of a wave of personal and gritty films like Taxi Driver, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, movies that were born out of the decade after the production codes had collapsed and filmmakers were free to tell real stories without persecution and nullifying censorship. It was Star Wars that put that kind of film out to pasture and in it's wake came the era of the blockbuster, when films for profit became the mainstay. For well and for ill, it changed the Hollywood mindset and moved the industry toward more fantasy oriented fare, an era we are still experiencing.
For Lucas, making the film was an uphill battle because, at the time, science fiction was considered box office poison. The most prominent sci-fi was Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that had more detractors then fans. The studio feared that the same reaction would meet Star Wars and had so little confidence in it's success that they set up a tax shelter for when the film flopped. The distributor couldn't get theaters to buy the film unless they sold it as a package deal with a movie that they thought was destined to be a blockbuster - The Other Side of Midnight - Heard of it? Me neither.
Yet the film did succeed, mostly due in part to Lucas' decision to make the film his own way. He broke the rules by eliminating traditional opening credits (he paid a fine for this and then dropped out of the Director's Guild). He announces that the story takes place in the past but look like the future. He starts in the middle of the series (this is Episode IV) progresses his saga forward then turns back and tells the preceding story up to the point where this film begins. By starting in the middle he develops a story that already has a rich history with characters that are fleshed out to the point that we are always interested in their relationships. He develops a warrior spirit that is passed on from one generation to the next, from an old wizard Ben Kenobi, who is the keeper of a dying zen religion - The Force - that favors patience and a clear-head over mindless violence. He imparts it upon the young Luke Skywalker, a callow youth hungry for adventure that we only slowly understand is the one who will bring about the end of the Nazi-like Galactic Empire. The friends he takes along on his journey start as bold character types (a hotshot loner, a loyal dog-like companion, a feisty revolutionary and a pair of bickering robot who provide the comedy relief) but eventually their personality become more refined and we care about their journey. Lucas was generous in these details.
Star Wars is a pure movie-going experience, a red-blooded adventure that takes the elements of it's genre seriously. Many films have matched it's success in dollar amounts but none has had the cultural impact. It has become part of our language. Like The Wizard of Oz, it propels us on a journey of such joy and imagination and has worked it's way so firmly into our popular imagination that we can hardly imagine our culture without them.