I think for me what makes them so great is how real the universe they create feels, in ANH Tattooine is real to me. It shouldn’t be, but it feels real, I could imagine living there.
The cantina scene, holy shit! I remember watching this and it sent my imagination into overdrive, can you imagine a bar with customers of 40 different species?!?!? It feels like you are a fly on the wall in another reality, every detail is fascinating. Its almost like being an anthropologist or something.
Greedo confronting Han, what an amazing touch with the invented language, again this helps make the whole thing seem authentic.
While the film may be all ages it is NOT childish at all, Han is a criminal smuggler, there are the female barflies(hookers?) in the cantina which you know of course there would be at the equivalent of a truck stop. The film has a lot of background details that make it seedy enough to seem real. It knows that life is unfair and dirty but doesn’t dwell on it.
Now the prequels, they are like cartoons. TPM briefly captured that sense of wonder with some of its sets, but after that its all bleh. There were so many chances to do a next gen cantina scene too! The bar in AOTC looks like a fucking sports bar! Obiwan visits a chef friend who operates a 50s diner and dresses like a 50s frycook :smack::rolleyes: This is just stupid. In TPM Tattooine no longer feels real, for christs sake slaves at the ass end of the galaxy live in nicer quarters than Owen and Beru! I feel like the whole thing is a joke, its campy.
You saw the originals as a kid, and you weren’t critical of what you were watching. You’ve had years to reinforce your nostalgia. When the new trilogy came out when you were older, you were both more critical and also had an unreasonably high expectation based on your nostalgia of the previous movies.
Kids today that grow up seeing the newer trilogy first probably have no great reverence for the old movies.
I think they’re all painfully childish and it’s weird to me that the old ones are so revered and the new ones are so reviled. It’s possible that they were somewhat better, but it’s not nearly the gap people seem to say it is.
Actually thats not true, I saw the films in passing as a kid and had seen the most of ROTJ for some odd reason. I never cared much for them, as an adult I went back and watched the original trilogy before ROTS came out,it was only on watching them as an adult that I came to love them. The detail and amount of thought that went into the world building was amazing, the use of real world historical sites only added to it when they were used as sets.
Just out of curiosity can you name an adventure or fantasy film you do like and do not think is childish? Or do you just not like the genre?
I think Avatar set out to do what Star Wars did - use groundbreaking technology to tell a simple story in a way that really enraptures the audience. I essentially view Avatar as the Star Wars of this century, just way way better at it.
So it’s not that I hate all movies of that sort, I just really hate Star Wars in particular.
I concur - the first movie was not childish, the second wasn’t. The third, though… the Ewoks did a few cool things (I’m still impressed by the awesome death-traps for the walkers - they make the Viet Cong look like a bunch of amateurs) but were clearly comic relief in a series that up till then had been light on comic relief, to where the little touches (“I can imagine quite a lot”, “It was a dumb conversation”, “I thought these things smelled bad on the outside!”, “With the rest of the garbage.”, “I know”) made for nice small moments. The humour was never forced, until we got swamped with Ewoks, and then decades later, with Jar-Jar. Further, what had been only romantic tension got forcibly resolved (“She’s my sister!”), further hurting ROTJ because Lucas can’t write romance, something painfully obvious in the prequels.
I disagree. I think this is a pretty bog standard apologist argument that has next to no actual grounding in reality. It is easily trotted out with next to no thought despite the evidence to the contrary.
Here there are two very good examples in the OP that you have completely ignored. The original trilogy was otherworldly. Yes, things occasionally felt vaguely familiar but they were always far enough removed from our reality to feel right. In the prequels locations could have been picked out and placed in a modern American setting with next to no changes, with the aforementioned examples that you completely ignored being some of the most obvious and clear ones. Yes, the bar in ROTS does just look like a modern sports bar, to the point that it is showing actual sports that look like modern Earth sports on TV sets. If I remember correctly there’s a game which basically looks like American Football played by droids. And don’t get me started on “death sticks”. Only a desperately uncool, out of touch guy like Lucas could come up with that.
And then there’s the diner. I’m glad it was mentioned as I was a real apologist for the prequels up until that moment, but as soon as that Oirish '50s diner owner appeared with the stereotypical squawky waitress the magic had died. That wasn’t “A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away”, that was at the roadside of just about every town in the United States.
But no, you’re right. It must be just that I had forgotten that the Original Trilogy was just for kids.
This “explanation” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, Star Wars was massively popular with adults when it first came out. You are making the mistake of projecting your own tastes onto others. There are plenty of films I loved as a child which I now find unwatchable, but I’ll still happily watch the original trilogy every few years. Your argument is weak, I could just as easily (and lazily) accuse you of being a hipster for not liking them.
You shouldn’t be expected to make any apology for disliking them. I’ve said it before, enjoyment of films is almost a binary experience - immersion is essential, and anything that breaks suspension of disbelief ruins that. The strengths of the original trilogy are a strong, simple plot with some interesting twists, very good pacing, an iconic villian, special effects that still look good, and the sense that the story is set fully realised universe. They are by no means perfect, some of the acting is mediocre and a certain amount of cheese is on the menu. In comparison, the prequels are a muddled mess with a nonsensical plot. The pacing is also terrible, so many scenes fails to advance the story.
The opening shot of Star Wars immediately sucks me in. It’s a brilliant scene, because it sets up so much of the story visually with great economy. The rebel ship fleeing from the enormous Star Destroyer establishes the overwhelming power and menace of the empire.
Actually, I’d argue they are childish in a sense. There is a great moral simplicity to the Star Wars universe. The good characters are almost uncompromisingly good, and the evil ones unthinkingly so, and come marked with convenient labels. Even Han Solo, a smuggler, is a paragon of virtue. It can also be a strength, the simple outlook helped Lucas tell a modern myth. I don’t think they would be improved by a Tarantino-esque aside on the variety of appendages a Mos Eisley call girl encounters in the course of her working day, or a sub-plot involving a Death-Star gunner dealing with the guilt of wiping out a planet. I’m very glad that films like Star Wars get made, but also that I can watch more subtle, intricate and serious works as well.
star Wars was a ratre case of a Hollywood movie embracing the weird of science fiction and treating it as normal and revelling in it.
Hollywood is made up of people who are spending vast amounts of money on projects that can lead them out of a job if they’re unsiccessful, so they tend to play things safe and go with proven successes (even though they recognize that people want something new and different). So Hollywood science fiction tends to want to be weird and interesting, but not something that will freak out the folks in the sticks. So it ends up being wimpy and unoriginal until someone breaks the barrier.
Despite the existence of science fiction that featured aliens and other SF trappings (especially the series Star Trek), Hollywood was still skittish, which is why, despite all the fan interest, there hadn’t been a Star Trek movie.
Then Lucas did [BStar Wars** and gave us unapologetic aliens by the score, space battles, worlds with double sunsets, alien languages, and all the stuff that had been staples in SF pulp for decades, and made it fun. It was instantly accessible, and the weirdness was a draw, rather than a turnoff. Part of this was simply going with the gut, part choosing things that would seem familiar, despite being alien (the Cantina band sounds more like Benny Goodman than Krel synthesizer) and avoiding the grotesque weird (no alien chest-bursters or David Lynch Dune weirdness)
On top of all that, the plot and characters were pretty simple, straightforward, and morally black and white. You knew where you stood, and whose side you’d be on.
Of course, it didn’t hurt to start things off with a bang – big Space Battle, military attack, Evil Overlord with a Deep Voice dressed in Black killing a guy by holding him up with one arm by the throat.
How did the first of the new trilogy start? Oh, yeah – the Jedi arrive for trade negotiations. The biggest problem with the second trilogy is that it’s not as clear as the orioginal one and the plots are muddled and confused (Who the hell is General Grievous? He’s simply dropped in our lap, and we have to figure out what to do with the four-armed freak). Even after watching them several times, I still can’t give you the plots without mixuing them up. I don’t have that problem with the first trilogy.
I agree with Cal. The mythic qualities of A New Hope broke the mold of what the standard SF film could do. It transported us all to a world ‘long ago and far away’.
The next film, ‘Empire Strikes Back’, can be argued to be one of the best sequels out there.
Unfortunately, ‘Return of the Jedi’ suffers from a lot of product marketing interference. The interjection of those dang little bears made for a significant amount of cognitive dissonance among the fanbase. I KNOW they were supposed to be cute yet wily but danggit that wasn’t STARWARS!
And, of course, I can’t even say out loud the name of the racially embarrassing critter that Lucas gave us later in his prequels.
I’m mostly talking about the first film–which came out when I was a very young adult, not a kid. I’d read SF most of my life, including what was considered “adult” stuff back then. The movie was Space Opera–complete with Spaceport Bar–with excellent special effects & some interesting characters. Not as psychedelic as 2001, but great fun!
The other two movies carried it on, although I didn’t love the Ewoks. Really haven’t seen the prequels in full…
I was in my twenties “Star Wars” when it came out and I loved it. It was like the old Buster Crabbe “Flash Gordon” serials that shown one episode every Sunday on morning television. I’;; bet if you broke the first film, or even the trilogy, into 15 minute blocks it would work well.
Lucas was probably better when he had less money to work with. The clip you saw on television
in the late 1970s was when Luke and Han man the anti aircraft guns to repel four TIE fighters. It was quick moving and fun. With larger budgets you could put more ships on the screen but it diluted the watching experience.
On one of the audio commentary tracks for the 1953 version of “War of the Worlds” one person said that science fiction films in the 1950s invariably made money but for some reason Hollywood never tried to do a big “blockbuster” scifi film.
I was in my 20s, and I’d been reading science fiction for at least ten years by then. Star Wars was the first big-budget space opera put on screen. The effects were state-of-the-art, the characters first-class pulp, and the space battles were the best ever put on the screen. It also had a nice sense of humor mixed in. I recognized it for what it was: 30s-style space opera done well.
I agree with what Baird Searles (one of the top SF reviewers of the time) said, that for years he had been reading about rowdy spaceport bars, but, for the first time, he saw one on screen.
Empire was nearly as good (it helped that Leigh Brackett, a veteran of the pulps, helped write the script), and Return was good up until Luke discovered he was Leia’s brother. The final battle was weak compared to the earlier ones.
The prequels were mediocre. Part of that was they they were prequels, so when Obi-wan Kenobi gets into a fight to the death, the winner is obvious before it starts. It also didn’t help that Darth Maul was the lamest villain in the history of film (sure, he looked cool, but he had all the personality of a block of concrete) and that, instead of genuine humor (like the trash compactor scene), it had Jar-Jar Binks.
I saw Episode IV (the original) when I had just graduated college. I absolutely loved it, having been a fan of myths, SciFI, LotR, Dune, etc. most of my life. It seemed the perfect combo of all those things, and with spectacular special effects (for the time).
I liked Episode V, and agree with others that Ep VI was a bit too much on the kiddie side with the Ewoks. Eps I - III were terrible, with II maybe being the least bad. Give me Ewoks over Jar-Jar any day!
