True story; I was playing “Knights of the Old Republic” a while back and my wife came in and watched me play it. After TEN MINUTES, she said, “Hey, this has a better story than either of the last two movies.”
It does, too.
And my usual rant; John Williams scored “Star Wars.” He did not score, at least not originally, a movie called “A New Hope.” That’s the name of a VHS release.
It’s no great shame or surprise that the Star Wars score is deriviative of Holst, Wagner, Korngold, etc.
First, most Hollywood movie scores are derivative of classical works or other movie scores. It’s hard to be breathtakingly original when you only have a very limited amount of time and directors and producers are demanding a very specific sound. (As I’ve said before, the main reason Williams plagarizes himself so often is that directors and producers force him to.)
But there’s another reason specific to Star Wars. Lucas’s original plan was to use pieces of existing classical music for the Star Wars soundtrack. This was inspired not by 2001, as you might think, but by Lucas’s original cinematic inspiration: the old Flash Gordon serials, which used stock classical cues. Williams convinced Lucas using an original soundtrack would be better, but the influence of the original temp track can still be heard.
It is interesting what happened to Science Fiction Movies because of Star Wars.
Effects became the centre of what made a “cool” Science fiction movie, not the story nor the characters. It had to be fast flashy and mindless to work. There have been exceptions, and it is notable that those became classics, but they are a small handful.
Now The 60’s and 70s had their fair share of cheese but there is an earnestness to some of them. They seemed to be about something.
Planet of the Apes and 2001 both came out at roughly the same time and both boasted some impressive makeup and special effects for the time, but that wasn’t the thing that keeps them in a high place of Science fiction film. It was what they were saying about us, and what they continue to say.
Soylent Green is another that as a look of the future seems dated, but in its core it still says something about the current world we live in where a small percentage of the planet lives in luxury and uses most of teh remaining resources while the majority live with, deprivation, poverty, and overcrowding.
What was Star Wars about? Good vs evil. Beyond that… you’d have to stretch the characters and subtext into something that was never really there to begin with. The fan base that tries to elevate this romp as something beyond its flimsy premise.
It’s entertaining but it is fluff. It says nothing about us, and that is not a sin in itself. The real sin is that the box office take made sure that Science fiction films would forever more be louder, flashier and dumber.
And those that said something would be considered boring because there were no wooshing spaceships or running laser battles.
A shame really.
You said that quite elegantly, kingpengvin, and I concur whole-heartily
Except that insightful, relevant movies with good stories and characters have always been a small handful, in any genre. We notice the flashy effects-driven things more nowadays because of the big numbers after the dollar signs, but since when are dollars a measure of artistic merit? I would wager that we still have as many relevant films now as we ever did.
How about the soundtrack from Total Recall? It seemed to ‘borrow’ quite liberally from Holst.