As a wiser fella than myself (whose handle I can’t recall) once said: Whenever a Star Wars movie is being made, George Lucas needs to be given a Star Wars coloring book and told to go sit in the corner.
Although yes, he did get that one right.
The poncho was nice. Know what was even nicer? Her Boushh drag.
Ahhh, yes…who doesn’t love a throaty voice…
Do you mean “right” as in he got Carrie Fisher to go braless, or right that “there’s no underwear in space”??
One thing that these kind of get at is that the original three Star Wars assumed some level of intelligence on the audience’s part, at least a level of intelligence above the brain-damaged squirrel that most movies and TV are aimed at.
Think of that fantastic opening scene, with the slight curve of the planet across the bottom of the screen. Sure, the glowing atmosphere was a revolutionary special effect, but just as important was that the movie didn’t start with a wide shot of a ball in space with a nice slow zoom in – the equivalent of saying "Look, here’s a planet in space. Did everybody get that? Again, this is a planet, and you all know it’s a planet because it’s a round ball in space, and every movie in the history of time has let you know something is a planet by showing a round ball in space, right? OK, I’m going to let the planet sit there for a minute so you all can understand it’s a planet Got it yet? Well, maybe just another minute for the slow folks. " It just jumped right in, and let you figure it out. Likewise, it didn’t have much if any characters explaining things that they both knew to each other for the audience’s benefit, etc. There was a huge amount of world-building, but it was all done very deftly and subtlely – for instance the announcement that the Senate has been dissolved gives a huge insight into the politics of the world(s), but the viewer barely notices because it’s camouflaged as an explanation of the Death Star. The movie isn’t worried about whether some people are confused by a reference to the Clone Wars that’s never followed up on.
Well, I don’t work at NASA, soooo…
I saw an interview with Lucas once, where he talked about the influence of Kurosawa on his own work. One of the things he mentioned that he wanted to capture was the feeling he had, when watching Japanese cinema, of seeing an “alien” world that wasn’t created to facilitate the understanding of an outsider: Japanese films, obviously enough, didn’t feel the need to explain Japanese culture to Japanese people. They’d drop a line like, “The Shogunate has broken the power of the daimyos,” and would bother to explain what “Shogunate” or “daimyo” means, any more than an American film wouldn’t feel the need to explain, “The Thirteen Colonies have broken away from the British Empire.” Lines like, “The Emperor has dissolved the Senate,” or throw-away mentions of the Clone Wars, were his attempt to capture that feeling.
In the buildup to the release of The Force Awakens, the website io9 has been running retrospective columns about the first six movies. Today’s column on the original Star Wars is pretty good. As some of the comments note, the writer gets a couple of things wrong (most notably that Obi-Wan knew on Tatooine that Luke and Leia were Vader’s children, and other plot developments that Lucas hadn’t yet formulated).
Overall, though, I agree with the main point – *Star Wars *was great because it brought up so many questions that it didn’t answer. Some of the answers that came later, especially in the prequels (I’m looking at you, midichlorians), haven’t done the 1977 film any favors, but regarded in situ, Star Wars is a really great movie that challenged the viewers’ imaginations to fill in its blanks.