My first experiences at the movies were all disasters. I sat through The Wiz with my hands over my eyes. My mom and brother went to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind while I cowered at home. Toward the end of my first James Bond movie, Moonraker, I suffered a meltdown and my dad had to remove me from the theater.
So I didn't really know what I was getting into when we went to see The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. I was 6. I had missed out on the 1977 premiere of Star Wars, so I knew nothing about the lines-around-the-blockbuster. But just as well. At home was a disco album of Star Wars music and sound effects. Whenever Chewbacca growled, I ran away and covered my ears.
The movie screen glowed a hypnotic, chilling blue before the movie began, a perfect preamble for the cobalt melancholy of Episode V. I vividly remember the scene where Darth Vader appeared out of nowhere and bore down on Luke during their epic duel in the depths of Cloud City. His towering black frame filled the screen, and I almost couldn't watch. But I couldn't look away. The final flurry of their lightsabers on the gangplank overlooking the bottomless reactor was so real. When I got back home I wandered the yard of a neighbor across the street, alone and jittery with the terrible knowledge that Vader was Luke's father —but pleased I had survived.
Thus was I born into movies, and into Star Wars.
My parents put the kibosh on much of the merchandise—I never got the lunch boxes or the bedsheets, and I had only a few action figures. But I raced through the Star Wars novels every year or so until high school, and I consumed the dark and majestic double-album Empire soundtrack with the same single-minded devotion that others poured through Led Zeppelin. John Williams' fanfares of brass and steeply rising and falling staircases of strings uncorked my imagination. At first I dreamt up little action scenes and tried to line them up with the rhythm of the music; later my friends and I transformed basement crawl spaces into Millennium Falcon-like bridges. We staged huge mock battles with spaceships and planes culled from model plane sets, Star Wars toys, and anything else we could throw together. The face of one friend came to bear an unshakable resemblance to Yoda. At the same time, like many other padawans, I became inducted into the ways of Fandom. Starlog magazine became my one-stop shop for news on genre flicks. A few months before Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, I tried to read through a comic-book version of the movie without, you know, really reading through it.
Fans talk about these movies imprinting or encoding themselves into one's very DNA. This is accurate. Star Wars had, through a combination of skill and timing and luck, become hardwired into my young brain. Darth Vader wasn't merely an incarnation of the mythological dark prince—every similar figure who had come before was an incarnation of him. The Jedi were not modern-day Knights of the Roundtable, or samurai or gunslingers, but the reverse. They were the template. In the fuzzy space of my imagination, Star Wars had the stable weight of history, like it had all actually happened. The passing references to the Old Republic and the Clone Wars (it's amazing how few there are that they have spawned three new movies) suggested that the Star Wars back-story, incredibly, was even better than the story we were watching.
I guess it's fitting that I've done much more thinking and writing about Star Wars as an adult than I did as a kid. Back then, who needed to think about any of this? I've come to realize now that my moviegoing life over the last quarter century, and in particular my faithful attendance at Hollywood's blockbusters, has amounted to a simple, yet virtually impossible, quest. How do I return to Cloud City, where all the cinematic arts—sound, image, music, drama, performance, editing, lighting, composition—came together so sublimely?
If the lasting allure of Star Wars can be explained without much fuss—it was a hugely entertaining, visually audacious, fun, warm, skillfully crafted tale—then the subsequent 30 years of blockbuster moviemaking, which has given us mostly spectacular junk, should demonstrate the rarity of the achievement. As familiar as the movie is, there's a startling originality to seeing C-3PO and R2D2 wander the desert of Tattooine and bicker like a married couple, or that endearing radar dish on top of the Millennium Falcon, or Chewbacca's inexplicable but cool crossbow laser gun. Or Luke's speeder, or Vader's mask, or the brilliant names George Lucas gave his people and his planets.
Star Wars gave us all sorts of characters to root for, though it's ironic that in such a straightforward hero's quest, no one wanted to be Luke. That's no knock on Mark Hamill, who transformed from bratty farm boy to steely Jedi with plenty of heart. Still, he wasn't as cool as Harrison Ford's scoundrel mercenary, Han Solo, who got the great lines, hung out with a giant dog, wrote off the Force as a bunch of nonsense and even managed to flirt with Princess Leia seconds before being frozen in carbonite. It would be said of Solo now that he kept it real.
And if Han wasn't your bag, you could pull for the elegant and iconic brutality of Darth Vader, who bursts into the all-white corridor of the Tantive IV in the opening minutes of Star Wars, and announces himself as one of the great movie villains. Ruthless and powerful, Vader looked great and sounded even better. After an Imperial bureaucrat chides the Dark Lord for his devotion to the "ancient religion" of the Force, an annoyed (and no doubt guilty) Vader tells him that he finds his lack of faith "disturbing" and force-chokes the guy near to death. A badass with dry wit to spare.
But for me no one was cooler then Obi-Wan Kenobi, exemplar of the Force, that enormously appealing, metaphysically empowering Zen pastiche. Be in the moment, conquer your fears, and, oh yeah, kick ass with lightsabers now and again. The brilliant juxtaposition of Eastern mysticism and Western technology remains a potent paradox for a society that wants to have its cake and eat it. Midichlorians aside, the Force anchored these films well because it was specific and vague, clear yet only dimly grasped. It required no magic book or sword or crystal. It just was. Who wouldn't want Kenobi's easy strength of character? Ben was relaxed and patient, wise, he could take a joke ... but he'd chop off an arm when he had to, and even lay down his life to help his friends.
The Jedi Knights were it, man. By comparison, the idea of superheroes seemed shrill.
There's a story I read many years ago that Sir Alec Guinness once shared an elevator with a young boy who was infatuated with Star Wars. The boy was ecstatic to be standing next to Obi Wan Kenobi himself! So when Guinness asked if the boy would do him a favor, he immediately consented. Guinness asked him never to watch the movies again. He was appalled at their pervasive influence on a generation of youngsters. The boy and his mother were naturally horrified.
So was I, for a minute, having never had much patience for the argument that Star Wars destroyed serious American cinema and, by extension, America itself. That's like blaming Mies van der Rohe for a generation of mediocre high-rise architecture. Still, Sir Alec is doubtless smiling in his grave, because the new prequel movies, which chart the transformation of kindhearted Anakin Skywalker into cold-blooded Darth Vader, have given moviegoers the blues. Despite their hefty returns at the box office, George Lucas' new movies have failed to capture the magic of the original trilogy, and have led many fans into rebellion of their own.
Few would disagree that Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies smoked the new prequel trilogy—and more or less bested the original trilogy, as well. Star Wars faithful had hoped that their new trilogy might tower over the pop-culture landscape, win accolades from audiences and critics, and tie us all together. Well, that's basically what LOTR did. And yet, such is the speed of today's pop culture that, despite the enormous financial and critical success of the movies, I don't think they'll be remembered in the same way as Star Wars. (Quick—what's your favorite line from any of the films?)
As for The Matrix movies, its first installment was the Star Wars of the Internet generation, a stunning grunge-anime-east-west-Asian-black synthesis that captured the edgy, polyglot tenor of '90s American pop culture. The second was a ragged but engrossing continuation—an essentially worthy sequel—while the third was so underwhelming, its narrative so out of whack, that it left me more baffled than angry. How could the brilliant Wachowski brothers fall so far? I imagine they suffered from what we might call Lucas Syndrome—the condition where not enough people are telling you that something is not quite right.
But Star Wars fans have proven to be nothing if not hopeful, absorbing the body blows of their disappointment over Episodes I and II. They wait apprehensively, and eagerly, one more time to see if Episode III: Revenge of the Sith can take away their pain.
Like most people, I despise hype —unless it's for something I'm pulling for. In the months before The Phantom Menace, the first of the new prequels, released in 1999, I wanted the hype to be as big as possible. I needed it. I had discovered many great films, across many genres, that inspired and enriched me. I found Hitchcock and Lean, Coppola and Lumet, Kubrick and Sergio Leone, and many others. But I'd had few Star Wars-caliber experiences at the movies, and Episode I looked loaded.
Lucas had financed and directed the movie himself. Hmmm, we fans thought. Couldn't he have found a better choice? The guy hasn't made a movie in 20 years, and no one has ever thought of him as a great director, even though we loved Star Wars and American Graffiti, and the more desperate told themselves that THX-1138 was kind of deep. Where was Irvin Kershner, who directed Empire? How about, say, Ridley Scott? Well, it'll be all right. We're not expecting Raging Bull or Citizen Kane. Just unsullied Star Wars and the daybreak of digital FX. Just the same quantum leap as the original. And, oh yeah, a duplicate of the experience many Gen-Xers had at 7 or 8 or 12 or whenever it was, in the hazy warmth of their childhoods. That would be good enough.
True, I found the title of the new movie, The Phantom Menace, a bit juvenile, but I let it go, for Star Wars was a juvenile title, too. Then rumors circulated that Jake Lloyd, the young actor playing Anakin Skywalker, was lousy in the movie. The director and former child star Ron Howard rushed to his defense, but Howard's on-the-record comments had the distinctly uncomfortable air of a master apologist trying to put out a fire. But no mind ...
Tickets went on sale a week before the film started, a first in all the years I'd been going to the movies. It felt like a concert. Great! Opening night was sold out, but the line for the second night was long, and the crowd was amped. Darth Vader was there, as well as a few Jedi, and Princess Leia showed up with a couple Storm Troopers. People fought each other with plastic lightsabers. The Force was with us.
Nevertheless, the dark side clouded everything. The national reviews had begun to trickle out a few days earlier, and it was clear many critics were bending over backward to like the movie but just couldn't. The sense was that the biggest movie opening in a generation would be a planet-obliterating letdown. It would not plant the flag atop Mt. Blockbuster; it would be just one more halfway decent film that we would consume and forget.
After an hour wait we packed the theater, the largest in town, and when at long last the Star Wars theme exploded around the room, our hardy applause was more than the warm welcome to an old friend we had been looking forward to seeing for so long. It was greeting a friend who we heard was ill or had turned mean. Our applause was a hedge against hating the film ourselves, a well-intended but doomed prop-job to save a movie that we suspected would not live up to the hype.
You might have said, "I've got a bad feeling about this."
A Wretched Hive of ... Well, No, They Weren't That Bad
Throughout the prequel trilogy, George Lucas has caught himself in a bind. He's made a series of (potentially) weighty dramas about the rise of tyranny, the fall of democracy, and the corruption of a great hero. This is grand and epic material, much more ambitious than the original films. Yet he's chosen to tell his stories with the same whizbang, '30s-serial style as the originals, a style that demands quick plot development and constant, cliffhanger action. It's hard to squeeze Edward Gibbon into a Cracker Jack box. The Saturday matinee format worked well with the early movies, which were about derring-do, rescuing princesses, blowing up Death Stars. But his new trilogy is about the obfuscation of politics, the inability to easily discern who is fighting whom and why, a story that calls for more nuance than Lucas can muster. Amid the visual fireworks of Episodes I through III, the politics come off as mostly exposition, a fumbling background conversation that intrudes upon dazzling set pieces.
The Phantom Menace suffers most from this dynamic. Although it has its pleasures, the movie lacked focus and direction. We looked in vain for a character to embrace—in a better-written script we would have found Liam Neeson's maverick Jedi Qui-Gon Jin, a symbol of Old Republic nobility. Instead we got Jar Jar Binks.
The visually gorgeous Attack of the Clones found something human to hold onto in the love-hate relationship of mentor Obi Wan Kenobi and his pupil, the talented but irascible Anakin Skywalker. Even the film's glaring weakness—the clumsy love affair between Anakin and Padmé, the future mother of Luke and Leia—is saved by John Williams's sumptuous love theme, which redeems the couple's artless words and gives the end of the film a kind of tragic romantic quality. (Plus, the appearance of a lightsaber-wielding Yoda at the climax brought the house down.)
There's no denying the earlier movies have a heart that the new films generally lack. It was obviously easier for the original actors to interact with real sets than it was for the current actors to make do with blue screens. And the new trilogy has been rightly shelled for its dry line readings and groaner dialogue—though veteran actors like Christopher Lee and the superb Ian McDiarmid, who plays the Emperor, delivered fabulous, oversized performances.
Still, the new movies suffer unfairly versus the old ones thanks to nostalgia. While fans view the clunky parts of Menace and Clones with contempt—Lucas' tin ear, his poor handling of actors— the clunky parts of the original are seen as endearments, a flashback to That '70s Era of wood paneling and tube socks with colored stripes. (Come on, the lightsaber rematch between Vader and Ben in Star Wars is weak! And Yoda seems to train Luke in Empire for little more than a long weekend.)
Star Wars, behind and in front of the camera, is largely about technology, its promises and limitations, its potential and danger, so it makes sense that the weakness of the prequel trilogy—a woodenness caused by its overreliance on digital effects—is also its strength. Forget the caterwauling about phony viedogame computer graphics (like the trench sequence in Star Wars wasn't a video game, too?); the worlds summoned up in these movies are astounding. Frame after frame is stuffed with all manner of motion and intricate detail. If the actors often feel like machines, the digital performers, Yoda especially, feel real.
Lucas' tale is full of such technological incongruities. It uses a massive arsenal of special effects to implore us to trust our feelings. Yet Lucas, like Anakin, is most comfortable tinkering with machines— he'd rather be building his movie in the editing suite than directing actors on the set. If you listen to the commentary tracks of the prequel movies, one fundamental theme emerges about Lucas' artistic priority. It's not telling the story of a good kid turned bad. It's not dramatizing the betrayal of close, meaningful friendships and relationships. It's not even staging these awesome FX battles he'd been dreaming about for 30 years. It's his almost mechanistic devotion to plot. In Lucas' recent movies, scenes seem to exist primarily to convey information needed for the next scene, and only secondarily (if at all) to engage us with the people onscreen.
Consequently, we no longer identify with Lucas as Luke, the maverick filmmaker with the unruly black hair and thick beard taking on Hollywood's Evil Empire with his high-tech fairy tale. Age has turned his hair silver, and he has put on weight; there is a bit of Jabba the Hutt in Lucas' physiognomy. Now he is the Empire, or Darth Vader, easily seduced by the awesome digital power at his disposal. He tinkers around with Star Wars, inserting foolish scenes that detract from his creation. (And when Greedo fires first he fires 3 feet above Han Solo's head. Terrible!) Lucas may be motivated partly by greed. He can count on fans rushing out to own each new "version" of the saga. But I think he tinkers mainly because he can't help himself.
There's a great moment on the Menace DVD where editor and sound-effects guru Ben Burtt is talking about editing the movie. He and Lucas are cobbling together a scene from two takes, which requires them to digitally change one of the actors to make it go. You sense Burtt finds the whole thing uncomfortable. He sounds like he is just on the verge of expressing his distaste, and you lean forward to catch him dissing the master. But then he cops out, he catches himself, and he's like, "Man, it's really amazing what we can do ..."
The difference between George Lucas and his fans is that the fans love the shopworn flavor of Star Wars, and Lucas has spent 30 years trying to develop better technology to eradicate it. We want the guys in rubber suits, and Lucas has been going in the opposite direction all along. On the commentary track to Star Wars, he explains in almost embarrassed fashion how he had to dress up an elephant to look like a Bantha to get a shot. On screen the illusion is convincing and you smile and think, "What a clever solution." Now, George would have animators at ILM, his visual-effects company, just draw the creature up on computers, and it would look more amazing. And, perhaps, less.
Still, the fans are a curious bunch. We want to be 6 again and feel the rush of Han Solo coming out of nowhere to tell Luke he's got a clear shot to blow this thing and go home. And yet, we expend our capital of surprise to consume as much of the movies as possible before we've seen them. We watch the trailers and the Web documentaries. We troll the Internet, and we read the books and download the screenplay and snag the sound track off a bit-torrent file weeks before the movie comes out, so the faithful are not exactly the innocents who can joke, as they so often do online, about how Lucas has raped their childhoods with his inferior mass-marketed prequels. We buy the video games, and even the video games have spoilers, apparently. Of course there's a real pleasure in watching these movies before you watch them—the capital spent does buy a lot of anticipation, and that's pleasant, but anticipation is a different sort of aesthetic experience. If Star Wars came out now, we'd all know that Han comes back at the end to save the day. We'd know Ben dies on the Death Star. And it wouldn't be the same.
The online chat forums are particularly heated. The protestations of love are powerful, and the "It SUCKS!" are so visceral that something more than the movies is at stake. It's a worldview, maybe. The prequels have a legion of critics, but few of the fans can be described as tepid—the surest sign the movies no longer meant anything to them. The phoniest forum comments come from the folks who take the time to write in with a message of casual indifference.
Who loves Star Wars more? The prequel-haters who so wanted to love the new movies but just couldn't, but at least can be honest about it? Or the apologists who think the prequels rock and risk coming across as blind (and probably deaf, too)? Better, who's grown up more? The haters have cast themselves as the idealists, basically, who can't reconcile their vision of what Star Wars is versus what Lucas has done to it. The defenders are the pragmatists, who are more willing to say, "Hey, they're just movies." Just go spend your $10, have a fun two hours and get on with your day.
Yeah. Right.
Either way, Star Wars fans remain part of one big family, and just like a real-life parent or sibling, their view of the films is both more merciless and more forgiving.
Lucas owns Star Wars, and yet no other franchise has been laid claim to more by its fans. It's as if the fans believe the copyright to Star Wars expired years ago, and the franchise belongs to them. They can't sue Lucas, but now that technology has caught up to their imagination, they can try to outdo him. The Web is full of Star Wars rip-offs, and phantom edits. Some are hilarious—witness the Cops spin-off featuring Stormtroopers, or the short where a kid gets a lightsaber for Christmas and accidentally cuts his Grandma in half. For the rest of us, we turn to new Star Wars novels or video games, or to our own daydreams to cobble forth a better version of the story, to create everything Lucas forgot to. Call it the open source approach to watching movies. For most moviegoers this is crazy. They rightly go to a movie and expect the filmmakers will have provided everything they need for the enjoyment of the film. The faithful may be delusional, but I can't say I blame them for trying.
Kids know that the best art exists at a point between the mind of the viewer and the work itself. That's why objective appraisals of the series' strengths and weaknesses are, while legitimate, also irrelevant—they do not, cannot, intrude upon this shared third space. In the days before the final installment debuts, I don't find myself hoping the movie is good. I'm pretty confident I will enjoy it. What I find myself hoping for most is that everyone else likes the movie—the same way you hope your friends like your spouse, or your parents. It's that sort of collective spirit of the first trilogy I miss, even though I didn't catch all of it. Let's say it's the promise of a collective spirit. Sure, everybody loved Lord of the Rings, but that sort of felt like a parade was being held for your neighbors across the street. You like them and you're happy for them, but you'd rather the parade was held for your family.
And so it ends, at the beginning. In my case, in a press screening of Revenge of the Sith, which means some fans, for sure, but a strong scent of professional detachment in the air. The good news is that in Revenge of the Sith, there's grandeur aplenty. Grandeur to make Return of the Jedi look sniffling, to make Star Wars look broken down, even enough to turn Empire into a relatively quiet, modest fable. The movie shoots all barrels at you for two and a half hours, taking us from the swashbuckling fun of the original movie to a truly unsettling finale as Anakin becomes Darth Vader, and it proves too much to absorb in one viewing. Lucas has so much at his disposal that characters, whole story lines, get lost in the shuffle. The villainous droid leader General Greivous could power a movie by himself; instead he is reduced to a sidekick role, coughing around for a few minutes, then going away. A battle begins to unfold on the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk but is over a moment later. Even the intricately orchestrated score of John Williams simply can't keep up with the audio-visual maelstrom.
Still, if the movie is, in total, not as clean as Star Wars or Empire, it throws so much at you, with such intensity and urgency (and desperation), that it accrues a real dark potency. The Emperor lays out a fairly compelling defense of embracing the Dark Side, and the differences between the sides come into focus. The Sith embrace. The Jedi shun. And when push comes to shove, the Emperor is the only one who provides Anakin an encouraging ear. The heretofore noble Jedi are too severe, too dogmatic, too confident and complacent to see the darkness engulfing them.
Anakin's final fate evokes a surprising amount of pity. As Vader is placed in his suit it's like he's being entombed, trapped, forever. And everything he loved is gone. When he asks for Padme, you feel the presence of the boy trapped in the monster man's suit.
Times have changed. Movies come in a roar of marketing, make their money and vanish. You can't blame Lucas for thinking that audiences want more, bigger, faster, louder. They do. More and more the appeal of the original Star Wars movies can be found in their quiet moments, their clean shots. Star Wars is at its best on Tatooine when Luke stares at setting suns, yearning for a life of adventure. And those are the moments that work here, as well. Before Anakin makes his fateful decision he sits in the Jedi Council, thinking, looking out across the city toward Padmé, who is staring back from her apartment toward the temple, as fate closes in on them both. The new movie is no masterpiece—and I suppose, neither is the saga in whole. And, no, it does not transport me back to Cloud City—perhaps no movie can. But Sith works as gripping tragedy and gives us a vision of hell, a place that proves to be nearly as fascinating.