A lot of “you had to be there” responses…but I enjoyed it and I WASN’T there. I didn’t see the original trilogy until something like '94. My mom had taped it off of TV, so it came complete with commercial breaks and Carrie Fisher hosting. I didn’t get most of the plot, but I still enjoyed it. (And, remarkably, I had not been spoiled on “I am your father,” so I was still surprised when the line was said.)
That being said, I did end up seeing the '97 special editions in theaters.
As for why I enjoyed it, it was probably because my folks were fans. Well, my mom was, anyway. She saw the first one something like seven times when it first came out. She also has an entire shelf full of the extended universe books. So I would amend the “you had to be there” argument to “you had to be there, or you had to be a kid of someone else who was there.”
The technology in Star Wars is costuming; none of it is explained, none of it is essential to the story. Star Wars is space opera or space fantasy, which are not science fiction as I understand it. (Granted, for many, “science fiction” is marked by the costuming, but I don’t find that a useful definition.)
You mean the spaceships, hovercraft, lightsabers, androids and holograms were all peripheral to the story? I can’t say I agree. They couldn’t have been replaced by old-world fantasy tropes. (The aliens could have been). Space opera (which I also said it was - gah, it grates when someone disagrees with you by stating exactly the same thing you said) is a light form of science fiction.
Why does 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea get a pass? I know you said speculative fiction gets a pass, but how is a man using his submarine to hunt for a giant whale speculative? It’s not asking ‘what if this scientific change happened…’
Not me, man. I “saw” the first movie when my parents dragged my six-week-old self to the movies to see it. I saw the next two in theaters too (I actually remember seeing Return of the Jedi at age six), and didn’t like them any better. Maybe I was too young to appreciate them in theaters, but I saw them each twice more between the ages of ten and twenty, and the result was always the same: me being bored shitless.
It helped me conclude early that people have generally awful taste in movies.
I think it could be done as medieval sword & sorcery fantasy.
Spaceships - seafaring ships
Hovercraft - horsedrawn wagons (speederbikes - horses)
Lightsabers - swords (there’s no point in the original Star Wars in which the unique properties of lightsabers matter)
Androids - golems (okay, this one’s tough)
Holograms - c’mon, magic sendings
Death Star - A dark fortress
It would actually be a pretty neat exercise to rewrite A New Hope in this way. I’m almost positive you could keep the excitement and story flow without getting too contrived.
The point is that if the lightsabers, blasters, spaceships, aliens, etc. were replaced with fantasy tropes, it would cease to be Star Wars and would lose much of its appeal.
It’s myopic to say that setting is not intrinsic to genre. Sure, Avatar was maybe “Dances with Wolves in space”, but if you stripped away the high-tech/planetary romance aspects, you’d end up with something so close to Dances with Wolves that what made Avatar unique would be lost.
Authorial intent seems to be a pretty slippery thing on which to hang a genre’s definition.
Apart from Lightsabers, none of those would work in the same way without the specific properties that the tech versions have. Horses simply wouldn’t have worked, seafaring ships can’t go from planet to planet and fly through the air, a fortress wouldn’t require a central core and what are magic sendings? Golems definitely wouldn’t work as androids - that they’re electronic, can interface with other electronics, can be pulled apart and put back together, etc etc, is integral to them.
They are all similar to those old items, yeah, but they can’t be replaced by them. If they were, and you managed to fudge it so that it worked, it would be fantasy, but it’s not hard to make any text change genre by changing numerous key elements of it.
Simple. They’re not planets, they’re nations or citystates. Alderaan wasn’t a planet destroyed in one blast by the Death Star, but a beautiful coastal city decimated by a gigantic, heavily armed and armored galleon.
It wouldn’t be Star Wars, no. But it would be the same style of swashbuckling story, using the same characters and evoking the same emotions without a significant change in storyline. It would just be Star Wars as told by Ed Greenwood rather than George Lucas.
Sorry, this is getting into a bit of a hijack and an unnecessary argument. I’m just rather taken with the idea.
It could be a good story, yeah. Though I’m not sure how one galleon could utterly destroy an entire city.
But there are very, very few science fiction films - even hard science fiction rather than space opera - where you couldn’t replace key elements with fantasy tropes,twist the story a bit and turn it into fantasy instead.
I guess I am missing the distinction between “space opera” and “science fiction”. What are some well known examples of hard science fiction where the technology is not window dressing?
2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon, Blade Runner. All well known, all fall into (IMO) category 5 of TVtropes’ “Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness”. Star Wars is category 1 in my opinion.
That franchise did a lot to legitimize space opera, and most of the TV shows inspired by its success are in the same genre. It’s little surprise that a person might consider science fiction and space opera to be the same thing, or that space opera is at least a subgenre of SF, seeing how most of what is marketed as science fiction is short on science and heavy on whooshy space.
Wasn’t always that way, especially for written science fiction. Hard SF authors tried to define science fiction as a genre of speculative fiction, specifically placing fantasy (like space opera-- another term for Star Wars is “science fantasy”) outside the boundaries of science fiction.
My favorite definition of science fiction is from Robert Heinlein:
I find it possible to enjoy both science fiction and fantasy, but sometimes the blurry lines with space opera annoy me-- I dislike whooshy space, the planet of the week, and technobabble tropes used by the Star Trek franchise so much that I haven’t watched much beyond the first series. I enjoyed the clever use of tropes in Avatar: early in the film they busted out with several hard SF tropes such as an absence of faster than light travel, humans couldn’t breathe Pandoran air, calling unobtanium “Unobtanium”, things like that, so that when the fantasy elements like planetary treebased internet and titties on alien chicks came along, I’d already been won over and was willing to sit back and eat my popcorn.
I watched the whole review last night after reading your post and clicking the link.
That was an excellent critique of the Phantom Menace (and the prequels). Occasionally the complaints seemed to descend into needless nitpicking, but all of the points he raised about the major flaws in the film were spot on.
And it was probably more entertaining than actually watching Episode 1.
I just wished he’d left out all of the rape, kidnap, and murder jokes. I don’t know if this is the reviewer’s shtick or not, but I found it to be really distracting, and a little too much at times. If he’d left that stuff out he’d have a semi-professional critique that could be shown in film classes (“young filmmakers, this is what NOT to do in a film”).
That’s his schtick, and it’s the primary reason I’ve never been able to get more than five minutes into one of those reviews. Pity, because I’ve heard lots of good things about them, but it’s just not worth putting up with the juvenile shock humor.
Star Wars is science fiction, but that’s a very broad category. Specifically, it’s Space Opera or Science Fantasy. As Mark Hamil once described it, it is essentially a story of a farm boy who decides to help an old wizard rescue the Princess from a dark knight, with the help of a pair of pirates (well, smugglers, but whatever) and two of the Princess’s servants.
And yeah, you could tweak and replace the sci-fi elements with straight fantasy elements and tell more or less the same story, but it would definitely change the story you’re telling. A similar fun thinking exercise is retelling Star Trek II as an age of sail adventure. The only real point where that plot doesn’t work in that setting is figuring out a 18th century equivalent to the Genesis Device.
That wouldn’t really be too tough - the Genesis Device is largely a MacGuffin. It just needs to be something very valuable, in the possession of a powerful government, that would attract the attention of a pirate. Information about the routes and departure schedules of a Spanish treasure fleet would work just as well, plot wise.
Mind controlling otherwise loyal crewmen would be a tougher translation, although I supposed you could substitute blackmail for ear worms.
There was an excellent article in Invention & Technology Magazine several years ago that covered this aspect of Star Wars. I wish that they still had their archives online, but they were recently pulled after a decade or so.
As such, I’ll quote about as much as I think I can get away with as fair use, and let the mods chop it down if they feel necessary. Note that the full article is 11 pages of tiny magazine print, so fair use should allow some decent sized paragraphs.
All quotes below from the following source:
Lennick, Michael. “Star Wizards.” Invention & Technology. Summer 2007: 11-21. Print.
Well then. To begin with, Star Wars was released in a particularly dry moment in special effects history.
As you noted, Kubrick’s effects were also groundbreaking, but they were also the result of deeper pockets and more time.
And compared to 2001, Star Wars was also groundbreaking.
Before Star Wars, special effects were dominated by blue-screen work, traveling mattes, and optical printers.
These techniques were still used in Star Wars and are used to this day, but they just weren’t the right tool for the job of making great spaceship battles.
These techniques just weren’t up to producing the crispness desired:
George Lucas used scenes from WWII dogfights and gun camera footage as a modeling aid for the space battle scenes. It was clear that they weren’t going to be able to achieve this kind of spectacular action with any degree of realism without some technological breakthroughs.
2001 did have plenty of new techniques, but they were good for slow drifting in space, but not for dogfighting.
(Douglas Trumbull was one of the effects supervisors for 2001).
They decided that they would need a system that could repeat a nonlinear path the exact same way many times. This was probably the greatest achievement of Star Wars.
The new technique allowed them to program a camera’s movement, using stepper motors hijacked from the budding CNC machine tool industry, so that a single swooping movement of the camera could be repeated dozens of times, exactly the same way on each pass.
This was necessary because every scene that you see with TIE fighters and X-wings was filmed in half a dozen passes:
As it turned out, they found the CNC milling machine stepper motors were too jerky, using square waves to jerk them through their 200 steps per rotation, so they did some tuning an tweaking to make those same motors rotate in a much smoother fashion, with micro steps. They didn’t patent this work, and it eventually filtered back into the CNC machine tool industry.
The article covers many of the other issues involved, such as the political issues they faced, as well as the challenges that their extremely primitive camera path programming hardware imposed on their deadlines—as cutting-edge as it was, they couldn’t edit existing saved programmed moves, and each move was slow and tedious to set up.
Star Wars is impressive to watch if only to appreciate the very first time that such scenes appeared in the theater.
As a film in itself, the story was awesome for teens and pre-teens (which I was at the time). And I imagine that this might also affect an adult’s enjoyment of it. Many films I loved at fifteen just don’t hold my attention as an adult.
