Movie: Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
I had never seen it before! Annie Hall will always eat its lunch, but it's real good. Calling something a 'space opera' will quickly turn me into another direction, while few things sound more appealing than a hangout movie taking place over the course of a single night. American Graffiti was always the Lucas classic that had my priority and after intensely dislking that (the cheekily cynical end title cards were the final nail in its coffin) my interest in Star Wars waned even further. That was also connected to Star Wars seemingly becoming more a business property than a piece of entertainment. I was put off by its seemingly eternal inescapability, obnoxiously finding its way into every corner of pop culture, forever. In doing so, it basically became the model for current Hollywood blockbuster cinema which, led by Marvel, has turned movies into content generators perfectly designed to make profits and not do much else interesting.
The Hollywood business practices influneced/enabled by Star Wars still deserve criticsm, but having seen it now, it's hard to blame people for craving and creating ever more Star Wars content. It's the result of the film's greatest artistic achievment; its world and creature design is simply spectacular. The sequence at spaceport Mos Eisley in particular is astonishing in how matter-of-factly it presents strange life forms of different shapes, sizes, colors and organisms, most of whom can not be (and are not) identified by any recognisable category. We learn of course that Chewbacca is a wookie, but have no idea what that is, what it can do, or what the other creatures we meet are. Yet they are all designed with great attention to specificity and detail, and presented as fully functioning residents of this world, who speak to each other using strange sounds we can hardly identify or understand. There are no rules established to this world, no explanation given to its existence. It is just a fully realised completely alien world, not beholden to any constraints. It's easy to imagine a limitless amount of different stories happenning in it.
It's at Mos Eisley that we first meet Han Solo. As played by Harrison Ford, that's another aspect of Star Wars that fully lives up to its reputation. I have sometimes found Ford a stuffy and dull actor, but his brashy laconic confidence as Han Solo (it absolutely helps that this, and Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader are just fantastic character names) is pretty much iconic from his first frame. Ford, like Alec Guinness, hated his dialogue, but it's worth noting that he gets some really good lines that are both exquisite zingers and build up his character without tiresome backstories. It's a good example of how good dialogue is also about what is not being said. We get to know The Force similarly to how we learn about Han Solo. There is no major explanation for why and how Jedi have access to it, or what it exactly is. We (like the characters themselves) are simply asked to have faith that it's some sort of special power that gives them special abilities. That too separates Star Wars positively from modern superhero blockbusters, which go to great lengths to establish why and how Iron Man, Thor or Captain America obtained the powers they did, creating very specific rules and circumstances for what makes them special. That limits the imagination of what's possible rather then expanding it.
Star Wars is unfortunately a bit less successful in its action scenes. In particular the climactic destruction of the Death Star takes too long, and consists of shots of green lasers coming out of airships, exterior shots of the planes flying through an extremely narrow walled path, and interior shots of the pilots excited frenzy as they are flying their planes towards their destination The whole sequence repetitively cuts between a version of these three shots, and fails to build any momentum or tension. It doesn't help that Mark Hamill doesn't have the charisma and screen presence of Ford and Guinness (neither does Carrie Fisher). For the most part though, that doesn't matter too much. Ford and Guinness are so good they manage to lift their co-actors up whenever they share the screen together. The final, joyously happy, hug, between Han, Leia and Luke makes you immediately want to see their next adventure together.
I have actually seen The Force Awakens and the Last Jedi (as well as The Phantom Menace, when I was very young at a friend's birthday in the cinema. I remember really liking it). I am eager to see The Empire Strikes back and can understand some of the criticism of the latest trilogy for failing to reunite Ford, Fisher and Hamill. The bigger problem is that I don't see how any modern Star Wars film can recreate the magic of the first film/trilogy. Even now that you know eveything that came after, Star Wars, the actual 1977 film, plays as the little movie that could. Annie Hall is now maybe an underdog, but it's easy to see how in real time a film about neurotic intellectual New Yorkers discussiong their love lives, childhoods and worldviews, featuring cameos by Marshall McLuhan and Truman Capote was a more obvious Oscar winner, a more obvious choice of the establishment, than a film that starts with anthropomorphised scrap making weird sounds as it walks through a desert. The sweetly corny ethos of that opening sequence is maintained throughout the rest of the film. The Americans went to the moon with rusted metal and Swiss Army knives and it looks like that may have inspired Lucas. Many of the sets deliberately look like they are held together by duct tape, with doors and walls that are visibly scratched, and technology that looks secondhand, giving the film a DYI look and feel, even when deploying the most expensive special effects to that point in film history.
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