Star Wars

Episode III comes out tonight at midnight. (No, I’m not going. I’ll see it tomorrow night.) Ask any male nerd over 30 what was the most significant event in 1977 and you’ll get the same answer—he saw Star Wars. Who doesn’t remember hearing composer John Williams’s trumpet fanfare, watching the intro text roll, and then the little rebel ship whizzes by, harried by lasers. Two minutes into the film, we hadn’t seen any characters yet but we were already kind of into it. Then the Star Destroyer moves into the screen, flying over us. And it just keeps going, and going. Once we saw Darth Vader in his techno-armor and skull mask, we were absolutely hooked. Lightsabers? Wow! Sure the acting wasn’t great. We didn’t care. Star Wars became a phenomenon. It lit a fire that continues to burn today. I had lunch with my daughter at her school, and a nine-year old boy talked with me about Chewbacca. (As I type this entry (in Word) I notice with some amusement that the spell checker recognizes Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda. It does not recognize Wookee, Bantha, or Ewok.)

You have to understand that the biggest science-fiction movies before 1977 were Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey, both of which came out in 1968. People my age saw them on TV. Planet of the Apes was great but it had virtually no space action; everything was set on Earth. 2001 barely held my interest. Sure the opening was great. Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the monolith, the caveman war, all very cool. But when we jump into the future and see the space ships, it becomes slow, ponderous and cerebral. And the score? Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube? Ugh.

The last two Star Wars movies sucked, no doubt about that. Bad dialog, stupid character and planet names, Jar Jar Binks. A “scientific” explanation for the Force. I don’t know if it’s just that we’re older, or that the movie special effects have gone so far beyond what they were 30 years go, or what. Some say that George Lucas simply “lost it,” and that he should have handed the reins over to someone else. It sounds heretical, doesn’t it, to say that maybe the creator of an idea isn’t the best person to grow the story. After all, it was his vision that gave life to the characters so many of us grew up with. And then you see Phantom Menace and think to yourself, well…. It reminds me of when Gene Roddenberry kept an iron grip on Star Trek: Next Generation for the first season or so, and everyone hated it. Once Rick Berman and Michael Piller took creative control over the show it improved tremendously. In the early 1990s Timothy Zahn wrote a Star Wars trilogy set after Return of the Jedi in which Leia trained in the Force and had twins with Han. Luke briefly crossed over to the Dark Side and Leia brought him back. Now that sounds like a cool story. What to do? Leave it to Lucas or champion a usurper? It’s an interesting conundrum.