What exactly do you think Lucas was mocking? And in what way was he trying to make a joke?
I believe Lucas had genuine conviction in his subject matter. I think he believed in it truly, the way a kid with a great imagination believes in the stories he makes up. This is why the movie appealed to kids.
I don’t think it was supposed to be a mockery of anything.
The old Republic serials, as mentioned above?
Maybe “mocking” is a bit strong for how he felt originally, but I do think in the decades since, he’s come to despise his creation and the universe of fandom that’s grown around it.
Well, I wouldn’t call it bad, maybe unpolished, but not bad. After all, Fischer, Harrison and Hamil were rookies, and it showed next to Guiness and Cushing. Remember the scene in ANH when Solo says he’s made the Kessel run in less than ‘12 parsecs’ and Kenobi just leans back and gives him a look that says ‘listen son, do I look like I just fell off a Bantha wagon yesterday’ without saying a word? Or Cushing, so underated, ‘I grow tired of asking this, so it’ll be the last time,’ ‘you’re far too trusting, my dear,’ or ‘I’m taking an awful chance here, Vader,’ perfect timing, ‘this had better work.’
Personally, I’d criticize the scriptwriting over the acting.
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I don’t think he did a bad job. But I just wasn’t convinced by him as the Jedi knight. Not his fault, though. He needed to physically age, and even the best actors would have a hard time.
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Well now I’m with you there, Luke never really got out of the punk stage as far as I’m concerned, but I still think that’s more of a writing issue.
I’m with Argent on this. The dialogue was admittedly very clunky (but very much keeping in spirit with the serials that Lucas was acknowledging), but the actors in the original trilogy did a pretty damn good job acting it out. I think it’s especially funny that much of the criticism focuses on Mark Hamill’s performance in reciting his lines, when he’s turned out to be one of the best voice actors in the last few decades. There’s a reason he keeps coming up as a candidate for “definitive Joker” whenever people discuss Batman adaptations. He can sell a role simply through voice. His “whining” in the original trilogy is what teenagers do (as noted by earlier posters).
People in real-life situations rarely have a clever, well-spoken bon mot to spew; real life dialogue is very clunky, hesitant, and mundane. People usually say stupid shit, they don’t wax poetic. When Lucas’s dialogue falls flat in the original trilogy, I find that it comes across as “real” rather than just being poorly written, because it may be stupid, but it’s not ponderous. It’s the kind of dumb stuff you’d expect to hear, so it fits the scene. It fits with the weathered, crappy machinery that populates that original SW universe; spaceships that break down, heroes that don’t have clever come backs, situations that have no neat endings. Brilliant stuff at the time… all of a sudden, we could sympathize with what it would be like to be in that world, instead of just sitting there being mesmerized. The prequel trilogy? Stupid and ponderous dialogue, shiny machinery that never breaks down, and so on.
I don’t think either of these examples prove anything. Or rather, they prove something about Lucas at very different points in his life. George Lucas in 1973 - fresh out of film school, and focused entirely on making a career for himself in film - could get good performances out of actors. George Lucas in 1999 - who hadn’t directed a film in over twenty years, and had spent most of the intervening decades as an executive producer/corporate CEO - could not. Being a director, it seems, is a learned skill, and if it’s not exercised regularly, it can atrophy. What he had when he made American Graffiti, he had evidently lost by Phantom Menace. Although Revenge of the Sith showed that he was, perhaps, starting to pick it up again. Too little, too late, unfortunately, and it appears he’s not doing anything to keep those skills up post-prequels, so it’s likely that we won’t ever see the Lucas who made American Graffiti and the original Star Wars again.
For a start he has one of the most hideous fake laughs in cinema history. There’s a line about Han being a pirate that irritates the tits off of me in how it is performed as well.
I fully expect Lucas to direct at least one more really great film. The thing about the Star Wars franchise is that it made him the most successful independent filmmaker in history - he succeeded in securing the means of production where his friend Francis Ford Coppola failed. He is going to work on securing his legacy.
Sigh Bring on the hate…
I think the whole thing is a bag of cheese with bad dialogue and bad acting. True I think most of the bad acting is due to the bad dialogue.
I thought Harrison was good for most of the movie and Guinness but the thing that those two actors have that I think some of the others didn’t was presence. Even if they knew deep down that the lines were crap they had absolute confidence in their character and that sold it. Hammill and Fisher didn’t have that presence. When you put a movie in a world we’ve never seen, the actors have to believe that they grew up there, they know nothing else, this is their home. In other words, they have to act. I just didn’t feel like Hammill and Fisher believed in the words that were coming out of their mouths.
You’re all forgetting who had the most presence in the Star Wars Trilogy:
James Earl Jones.
Who else could have delivered those campy lines with such power and menace? The voice of Darth Vader made the Star Wars Trilogy, in my opinion. (No offense to the greatness of Guinness and Cushing.)
“Two fighters against a Star Destroyer?” Worst line read in the trilogy. Watch it, you’ll see.
How could we possibly ever forget what the films are “based on” when fanboys have been using the “But it’s based on Saturday serials…” defense for everything? Don’t like the acting? Based on Saturday serials, so it’s okay. Don’t like the stupidity of the script? Based on Saturday serials, so it’s okay. Don’t like the overall stupidity of the plot? Based on Saturday serials, so it’s okay. Don’t like how trite and tedious it is? Based on Saturday serials, so it’s okay.
It appears that you could put out any level of shit, and claim it as an homage to something else that’s shitty, and there’s a certain segment of the population who will gladly play along with that. Not only play along with it, but actively embrace it and cling to it for 30 years or so.
At any rate, I think the acting in the original is mostly the script’s fault, since the main actors all went on to prove they are perfectly competent if not outright good at their profession.
No, he’s not. He’s going to continue his quest to make a movie without any living actors at all and then he’s going to release a steaming pile of shit that we’ll all have to pretend is just so great because of the technological advances while inside we’re writhing uncomfortably at the terror invoked by the Uncanny Valley and Lucas’s own massive ego.
I think you might misunderstand me; this is not a criticism at all, it’s glorious corn, and the author’s intent. The Star Wars movies attempt to recreate for new generations something that was exciting for its creator as a child: melodramatic space opera serials. Yes, they’re polished up and there is a lot more technology being used, but in order to be true to the spirit, they are corny at the core.
The characters are paper thin, and the dialogue is over-the-top - and this is not a failing, it’s right at the heart of the concept. (In precisely the same way as the Indiana Jones franchise.) Of course it’s corny, it’s melodrama. …and it’s awesome.
When people say that the acting and dialogue of the prequels are consistent with the original trilogy, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they think the original series is rubbish. I have some criticisms of the new prequels, but they have mainly to do with pacing.
I think that in most cases if we don’t relate to the prequels in the same way as we did to the original trilogy, the fault lies not in Star Wars but within ourselves. (And this phenomenon is writ smaller within the original trilogy, in the way that Return of the Jedi was received.) Watch Star Wars repeatedly from the ages of seven to eleven and it makes a mark on you. It’s so bad ass! We don’t have the critical vocabulary to even register the “flaws” which are consciously part of its concept. This will hold through for Empire. At this age, there is little consciousness of the intentional hokeyness, and we respond to the cutesy characters (like R2-D2 and Yoda) that are engineered to appeal to juveniles. As adolescence progresses, we may begin to apply a more mature sort of criticism. We laughed gleefully at R2-D2 and Yoda struggling over a biscuit, but the same sort of shenanigans from the Ewoks struck us as babyish. Nothing has really changed, except us.
This effect is amplified when you’re approaching 30 (and beyond) and taking a fresh look at the Star Wars universe. We may not really be conscious of the hokeyness of the original Star Wars, because it’s familiar. It’s the same sort of magic that edits your nose out of of your view of the world - it’s always been there, so it may as well be invisible.
Like most of Star Wars, the dialogue is a bit stilted, and the delivery is not realistic or nuanced, and it’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that these “flaws” of Star Wars are an integral part of its design and concept. If you sit down to watch a movie titled Attack of the Clones, which namechecks Commando Cody, and you complain that the dialogue is a bit cheesy, you’ve missed the point altogether.
If you made a Star Wars movie with realistic dialogue, it wouldn’t be a Star Wars movie.
There are none so blind as those who hear but do not eat.
Ha. (I’m at work and taking my time, so didn’t see this before posting the above.)
Yes, that’s pretty much it. Look at the inspiration and the source. If you liked this kind of stuff as a kid, you’ll probably love Star Wars. If you find this sort of stuff stupid and worthless, you’re probably going to hate Star Wars, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Star Wars is about fantasy kid stuff and/or nostalgia. It’s totally okay if it doesn’t appeal to you, but it is what it is.
Incorrect.
George Lucas has only directed three films, if you consider the Star Wars movies as one long saga.
His other two films are wildly different. American Graffiti is a character study/personal history of a single night in a California town. If you haven’t watched it, you really have no idea how talented Lucas actually is. The other is THX 1138, a dystopian vision of the future, grim and character driven.
See his other two films and then say that he can only do Star Wars.
Since I don’t live under a rock, I’m actually pretty well-versed in George Lucas’s career. Even the movies that came out before I was born. Having been exposed to the breadth and depth of his painfully shallow career, I stand by my belief that he is, at best, a hack. Just because a lifetime ago (literally) he made two films that are marginally better than the steaming pile saga, that doesn’t mean my prediction is incorrect. I honestly doubt he will be making another film any time soon, but if he does, it will be worse than the prequels. It’ll be like watching a Verhoeven movie, except without the sense that at least he’s doing it on purpose. Or an Ed Wood movie with a bigger budget and the same paper-thin level of plot and characterization.
Again, did his other two films have “paper thin plot and characterizations”?
And I don’t accept that you are particularly knowledgeable about film given that you’ve used the director of 2006’s Black Book, one of the greatest films ever made about WWII - morally complex, moving and exciting in equal measure - as your example of a hack. Even if one disdains all of Verhoven’s work between Spetters and Black Book as total junk, it proves my point - a great director can return to greatness.
You think American Graffiti was written and directed by a hack? It’s somehow one of the greatest movies ever in spite of this? I can understand how a film like THX-1138 not might be to everyone’s taste (though it’s easily in the same league as Stanley Kubrick’s work,) but I can’t really fathom how someone can deride American Graffiti, which is a triumph by any metric.
I don’t think Verhoeven is a hack, and I didn’t imply it. I meant that when Lucas makes shitty, hard to watch films, he genuinely thinks he’s making great, epic films of the ages, and for the most part, the fanboys agree. The Verhoeven comparison was supposed to imply that when he makes “bad” movies (like the much maligned Starship Troopers and Showgirls and my least favorite Hollow Man) he really is doing it intentionally. Lucas has all the hallmarks of a sincere yet poor filmmaker, like Ed Wood. Especially after watching the 3rd prequel, I got the sense that he really doesn’t understand much about the art of storytelling, not to mention human motivation or emotion, and why he has a good technical eye, he has no business on the writing or directing side of things. Verhoeven’s films, on the other hand, demonstrate an understanding of how stories are told, and why people behave the way they do, he just skews or ignores elements as he sees fit.
Thanks for the mention of Black Book, though. I haven’t seen it yet, and it looks interesting.