As I like to point out, though I know it wasn’t my first trip to the movie theater, Star Wars is the first time I remember going to the movies. This is one of two films, Pulp Fiction being the other, that made me the film buff I am today. Back when I did Star Wars for the AFI Countdown, I noted that, well, anything I had to say about Star Wars was something I had probably already said who knows how many times over in other places. I had rules for myself for that challenge. One was if I was discussing a film with sequels, I would only discuss the film in question. That greatly limits what can be said about Star Wars for a lot of people. But for the Stacker Challenge, I also want to say something different from what I said about the film before.
So, this time, I think I will address the legacy of Star Wars.
So, I think it’s safe to say, of all the films on the Stacker list, Star Wars might be the one that requires the least amount of discussion aimed at recounting the plot. Even if you haven’t seen Star Wars, and some people haven’t, cultural osmosis means you probably know at least a little bit about it. The original trilogy were some of the biggest films of their era, something that fans like a very young me couldn’t wait to see. And even if the films stopped coming after Return of the Jedi, that doesn’t mean there weren’t other ways to get more of a Star Wars fix. There were always toys, cartoons, ill-conceived holiday specials, Ewok made-for-TV movies, video games, comics, an extended universe of novels, and the fan’s imagination. This is a franchise that, even today with Disney’s wallet bankrolling more films and TV shows, the people behind the current Star Wars production aren’t above asking help from, say, the 501st Stormtrooper Legion, a fan group, for some extra work if they can bring their own costumes.
That said, there’s a part of me that wonders what George Lucas would have done if he’d never made Star Wars.
Now, I don’t want to assume Lucas regrets his biggest and most famous creation, but let’s face it: his life was more or less set upon the successful release of the original film. He had a vision he wanted to make, something of a mishmash of Flash Gordon, samurai films, Eastern philosophy, and old Westerns, all tossed into a blender and resulting in the original Star Wars, and only he seemed to be able to really see what he was up to at the time. Many of the executives at 20th Century Fox were extremely wary of the project and only agreed to let Lucas make the film if Lucas took as part of his pay a cut of the merchandising, a deal that only seems foolish in retrospective. Lucas has also said that he ran an early cut of the film for some of his director friends, and only Steven Spielberg saw the film’s potential. Brian De Palma actually volunteered to edit the film’s opening crawl to something much more manageable. Essentially, no one had faith in Star Wars until it came out and blew everyone’s expectations away in more ways than one.
It’s not hard to see why. John Williams’s score is among the most memorable he ever composed over his long career. The opening shot of the Star Destroyer chasing down a smaller ship will tell the audience immediately what kind of film they are watching. Darth Vader may only have less than twenty minutes of screentime, but his look, voice, and actions made him easily one of the most memorable villains in cinematic history. The story itself is bright, cheerful, and family friendly, with fun and memorable characters, including a couple who can’t even speak English. I mean, it took me years of watching and rewatching this film to realize Chewbacca doesn’t actually do much beyond follow Han around like the loyal dog that inspired Lucas to create the character.
That dog’s name was “Indiana,” by the way.
But not only was this film one of the biggest hits in its era, one that led to many more, and something that made George Lucas (and Alec Guinness, another who saw the film’s potential but likewise wanted nothing to do with the film’s promotion or, afterwards, the fans) richer than he’d ever hoped to be. This is a film that changed, well, everything. Toy lines for sci-fi films (even R-rated ones!) became more of a regular thing when before the best some films might have hoped for was a line of Pez dispensers. Studios just wanted their own blockbusters, and not every attempt was a successful one obviously. On the Star Wars end of things, Lucas himself became more of a background figure, the man behind the throne, so to speak, using his success to improve special effects in films and eventually going back to the franchise he started with the prequels that, well, maybe weren’t as well-received at the time they came out. I mean, I don’t like them very much, but that’s neither here nor there. I have met people who grew up with the prequels who like them a whole lot more, but there’s a possibility (I am not sure) that fan backlash to the prequels sapped Lucas of whatever fun he had with Star Wars, leading to the Disney sale.
And let’s face it: given the gap between films when the prequels started, there was no way anything Lucas made would have been as good as the stories playing in the heads of every fan.
And that’s where I want to say why Lucas might have been happier if he’d never made Star Wars. He had made other films before Star Wars, and heck, American Graffiti is a classic in its own right and it has nothing remotely sci-fi in it. But as I was rewatching Star Wars on Disney+, and it’s the one Lucas tinkered with to give it new scenes and special effects years after the fact, I couldn’t help but notice something about the original film: it’s actually kinda beautiful in its own way.
In 1977, there was no CGI. Everything that appears in the film (that wasn’t added later) had to be practical. Stormtrooper armor, the corridors of ships, the inside of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s house on Tatooine, these were all sets and costume pieces that someone had to build. And while I am not crediting Lucas with personally designing these things, compare the original shots with the computer generated stuff Lucas added in later, most of which doesn’t really add anything to the film and exists just to exist. Aside from a brief scene where Luke Skywalker meets up with his childhood friend Biggs just before the attack on the Death Star, these additions look pretty and that’s about it. But what’s more, they’re smooth and clean. Lucas originally wanted a lived-in universe. Clothing and the like had to look practical. The Rebel Alliance has their own ships, but they’re not as sharp-looking at the Empire’s own TIE fighters. There’s dust and dirt in places. The characters may look silly compared to a more straightlaced sort of film’s cast, but there’s not much on display here that doesn’t at least look like something people actually use. There’s no weird stuff in the middle of a room just to remind the audience that this is a sci-fi story. There isn’t any need to.
Now compare the films Lucas made, even the prequels, to the ones Disney has produced. Disney has all of the Star Wars playground to play around in, and what do they do? They keep going back to Lucas’s sandbox to try and recreate the wheel. Not always. Rogue One, and by extension the streaming TV series Andor, are pretty darn unique. But the rest of the Disney era stuff has, for the most part, looked awfully familiar. Even The Mandalorian was trading off the character’s initial resemblance to Boba Fett to draw an audience. The Last Jedi at least tried to be different even while still telling another story in the “Skywalker Saga,” but backlash from some fans meant backtracking on whatever new ideas it tossed out. And I’m not even saying what Disney has done has been bad. I’ve enjoyed a good deal of it. It just looks so much like what Lucas had already done.
Because say what you will about the six films George Lucas made before he sold the rights to Disney: each of those films is basically a different story. They might have echoes of one another, but they’re all at least somewhat unique. Most of those films travel to new and different worlds, the plots are generally different, or least they only have that echo because Lucas wanted to see how different characters would react to the same situations, i.e. how Anakin Skywalker leapt at the chance to leave home and become a Jedi while his son Luke is initially reluctant to do so before fate forces his hand. But then take a look at J.J. Abrams’s The Force Awakens. It’s a fun film, and the only one of the sequel trilogy I have watched more than once though that is due to the fact that I rarely watch anything more than once these days unless I have a reason to do so like I do with the Stacker Challenge. But it is, beat for beat, pretty much a retelling of the original Star Wars, and George Lucas himself was actually disappointed in it because it didn’t say anything new, either technically or narratively.
So, really, would Lucas have been happier if he hadn’t made the first film? I’m glad he did. I just wonder if he is.
NEXT: Let’s go from a film I have seen many, many times to one I have never seen before, the 2020 international production about a massacre in Bosnia, Quo Vadis, Aida?
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