Star Wars: The Big Question

Seeing an advert in Metro for Star Wars Episode I 3D a while back, someone asked me “Do you like Star Wars?”  And I replied, “That’s a big question.”

Ten years ago, I would have described myself as a Star Wars fan, but not a Star Wars nerd.   I know the name of the alien that attacks Luke in the cantina in Star Wars; I don’t know its life story.

I don’t actually remember seeing the original films for a first time.  I vaguely remember not being sure if the Hoth battle was in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, but I’ve always had Star Wars in my life.  Growing up in a household of 3 brothers, we inevitable had a large collection Kenner action figures and vehicles – all decidedly worn and torn from use.  We had the films recorded off the telly and would watch them regularly.  We also had the wonderful Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back Mix or Match Storybook.  Star Wars was a powerful story full of excitement and danger and it shaped my life in a number of ways.  I think I have a strong moral compass and those original films with their distinct good and evil characters attributed to this significantly (not to diminish the part played by Mum and Dad).  It also shaped my sense of romance, burdening me with the misconception that I was Han Solo and I could find an unattached princess (but I did eventually).

The films were rereleased in 1997.  It was exciting to get see them at the cinema (the first time for many), but the special editions heralded the first signs of future woes.  CGI technology granted George Lucas the ability to create anything he could imagine and increase the scale and detail of many sequences.  But many of those additions add nothing to the story or worse, actually detract from it.

A major offender here is the scene between Han and Jabba the Hutt.  In the now defunct 1983 documentary ‘Making of a Saga’ Lucas clearly states his reasoning for dropping the sequence  from the 1977 release when it became clear the special effects needed for Jabba wouldn’t work.  It tells you nothing at all you don’t already know from the earlier scene with Greedo.  And it detracts from the moment when Luke first sees the Millennium Falcon and dubs it a ‘piece of junk’.  These are far more convincing reasons for leaving it out than restoring the sequence simply because it was possible to add a CGI Jabba (which looks crap in all its incarnations).  To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, they were so busy seeing if they could do something, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

At about this time I mistakenly studied “media” at college.  This involved a lot of studying narrative and film.  I gained a new appreciation of the saga that could be viewed as an archetypal myth filled with characters from Propp’s theory and elements from Norse, Greek and biblical legend.  My interest became in the story and how it was presented.

As well as marking the twentieth anniversary of Episode IV, the special editions also began the countdown to Episode I.  Before discussing The Phantom Menace, let’s consider how much it had to deliver.  Firstly it was a fourth instalment in the most successful and admired film franchise of all time.  It had to feel like a Star Wars film without looking like it was twenty years old.  It had to take a few oblique references across three films and meld them into the beginning of a coherent story.  The film needed to appeal to new, young audiences whilst simultaneously sating sixteen years of speculation.

On initial view, I didn’t hate The Phantom Menace; it was merely disappointing.  Aside from the brevity of Darth Maul’s screen time, the main problem was how frivolous it all seemed (yes I know it’s a film).  It wasted so much time – time that could have been spent exploring the Star Wars universe, with its new complexities of politics, slavery, corruption and formal jedi training.  But these opportunities were squandered on “comedy” droids, slap-stick sequences and too much pod-racing.  One new piece of detail, that the ability to use the force is dependent on your blood meant that rather than anyone being a potential jedi, it was something only a select minority could achieve.  And although the jedi were far more athletic than in the original trilogy, they were transformed into a centralised elite and their inability to foresee a future the prequels constantly foreshadow or detect the evil around them, makes them less than masterful.

It was only with subsequent viewings I really got annoyed with Jar-Jar Binks.  While I recognised that he served a function of bringing the Gungan Army on side for the final battle, he serves no function at all for the majority of his screen time, seemly created specifically to baby-sit youngsters through the film.  At times he detracts from the plot, ruining the scene when Anakin and Padme first meet, which could have quite touching if it hadn’t been for Jar-Jar’s “goofing” (and some horrendous lines).

Attack of the Clones initially looked like it would be a return to form; less Jar-Jar, no kids, guys in white armour and a guy who looked like Boba Fett.  Episode II wasn’t received much more favourably than its predecessor and suffers from most of the same faults.  The slapstick, provided by C-3PO, grates even more when the overall tone of the film is meant to be one of gathering darkness.  This sense of impending doom takes a heavy toll on the central character.  We know Anakin Skywalker will become Darth Vader.  The prequels signpost this rather than showing him as the good guy he apparently was pre-helmet.  Anakin from Episode I aside, he possesses little heroism and even less pathos, changing from wholesome all-American kid to stroppy teen to angry young man.  This makes the love story of the prequels rather hard to swallow.

While many wrote of the prequels off, this wasn’t when I fell out of love with Star Wars, mainly due to the restorative power of Episode III.  The opening space battle is visually stunning and gives us a glimpse of a heroic, if stubborn Anakin.  It also solidified the Star Wars galaxy, as Clones had hinted, as vast in scale with complex political manoeuvring involving brutal and dirty armed conflicts.  There is something powerful about watching the republic be destroyed from within.  If you watch it as a single film and mentally divorce it from its chronological predecessors or successors, Revenge of the Sith is great sci-fi /fantasy film about a noble society being corrupted into a dictatorship while the protagonist is simultaneously destroyed by his own inner demons.  When viewed as part of a six part saga, it breaks down due to the sheer amount of story needing to be told – most of the critical plot of the prequels occurs in the last two thirds of Sith.  Then Sith actually raises more questions than it answers and the prequels remain an unsuccessful experiment in telling a story back to front.

What ultimately undid my “fandom” was that post-Sith the admittedly already massive Star Wars marketing machine seemed to go into overdrive.  First there was the Clone Wars, which was bartered as being canonical but seems to be an exercise in recycling elements and characters from the films into more merchandise, at the expense of any plot points from the films.  It is inferred in Sith that Anakin and Count Dooku haven’t met since the duel at the end of previous film; in Clone Wars they seem to run into each other every week.

Also since the movies wrapped up, Lucasfilm seem to have become innately aware of the cultural status of Star Wars and there’s been an explosion of new licensed merchandise to cash-in on it.  Now this may seem rather naive – obviously the vintage action figures and even the Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back Mix or Match Storybook were also part of a prolonged marketing campaign, but either because I’m aware of it now, or because it appears to be an attempt to deflect attention from the short comings of the prequels, it’s more offensive.  The last few years has also seen Star Wars characters in commercials.  The worst example of this is the recent Vodafone advert with Yoda perusing lightsabres or “handsets”.  This advert, plastered on a giant hording, embodies the undoing of my Star Wars fandom.  Perhaps my tastes just changed; perhaps I want something more morally ambiguous, grittier and more complex from films these days.  But I think the commercials and the endless t-shirts emblazoned with weak gags and the over-priced toy lines were what did really did it.  Thinking of Star Wars as a mythic story for our time is troubling.  It’s depressing to think the Beowulf of my time isn’t an epic poem; it’s not a novel or even a film saga; it’s an enormous cash cow.