Another point to consider is what was “in” at the cinemas leading up to Star Wars. Look at the giant films of the early to mid '70’s. You will notice they are, by and large, pretty dark films. Godfather, Love Story, Chinatown Taxi Driver, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, The Last Picture Deliverance. Great films. But downers. Even Rocky and American Graffiti were not exactly “up” endings. George and Steven come along and put happy endings in their films and BINGO the audience responded.
It probably has some weird thing to do with Viet Nam and Star Wars is more WWII.
Forbidden Planet was kind of a special case – they sold it as a low-budget film (“The Monster’s invisible! Think of the money you’ll save!”), then sorta escalated the budget as it was being made.
Certainly Hollywood didn’t treat it like a big bedget movie, with a gala release and all. In fact, by modern standards, the release of this film was insane – today it’d go out as a big summer fun film, or at Christmas time. FP was released on the Ides of March.
You could argue that the first big-budget Hollywood mnovie to take the genre seriously was The Day the Earth Stood Still. Certainly 2001: A Space Odyssey was a big budget, serious movie.
Another thing that I like about the original trilogy is that all of the costumes, sets, and other design work is done with a central vision in mind. Among the imperial forces, everyone wear’s either totally white or totally black. The inside of their ships and the Death Stars are all done in straight, harsh lines and it’s flat-out ugly in a good way. Among the rebels, there are colorful costumes and the sets are typically curved and natural-looking. So the visual feel of the movie matches the story, where there’s a clear contrast between the good guys and the bad guys.
In the prequels, on the other hand, Lucas simply tried to cram every single scene with as much visual garbage as possible, not caring whether it made a coherent visual experience.
This is especially true of the SciFi type of stuff. In the 70’s the future was just a stone cold bummer. The earth would be crowded and run out of resources like in Soylent Green, people had to be killed so scarce resources could be conserved like in Logan’s Run, or society had destroyed itself in a nuclear conflagration or something similar like in The Planet of the Apes. Star Wars was fun and filled with cool gadgets like light sabers, bickering robots, and cool spaceships. The characters were archetypes like the lovable rogue, wise old man, and naive farm boy, yet the charachters all seem like real people and acted in logical fashion with clear goals in mind. There was so much that made these films great.
To second or third some of the other comments, I was 25 when I saw Episode IV, owned 600 or 700 sf books and magazines, had 2001 as my favorite movie, watched TOS from the first show, and had read the entire run of Golden Age Astoundings, and lots of pulps too.
Star Wars had me at the fanfare and the crawl. It really had me when the Star Destroyer appeared. And it really, really had me when the arrived at the Death Star and things started to move. Baird Searles, in his review in F&SF, said that when the cantina scene showed up he started to burble and lost all critical faculties. I was gone before that.
It was fun. Ir was space opera. And it expected its audience to understand what was going on without spoon feeding the plot. I liked the dirty spaceships and the lived-in look of the good guys. And the SFX that they invented were all for benefit of the story.
Empire did not disappoint. I like RotJ more than most because I thought Luke’s final confrontation with Vader and the Emperor was handled well, and really showed why he was the hero. Plus, when R2 shot the light saber to Luke during the opening, we got to see what a Jedi could really do for the first time. That was a great moment too.
It was special because of John Williams. He took a merely decent movie and made it into an epic. Going purely by the visuals, Star Wars is clearly a product of the 70s, and with a more pedestrian soundtrack it might have been unable to escape being dated as such. But the music gave the visuals credibility. If I mention Luke looking out into the desert with the setting suns, or the cantina scene, or even just the words “Imperial March,” that music slams into your head immediately.
There was also humor in the script. Not merely jokes, nor ineptly handled comic relief, but the characters had senses of humor and it came out in their personalities. The prequels suffered from not having a Han Solo character or any characters that had any kind of humor at all, though Ewan MacGregor almost managed it in Revenge of the Sith. Everyone was just so. Damned. Serious.
The focus of the originals versus the prequels was different as well. The originals followed Luke’s story using war and politics as a backdrop. Even at the end, the confrontation with Vader and the Emperor was more about freeing Vader from the Dark Side and redeeming Luke’s father than stopping the Empire and the war. Conversely, the prequels followed the war and politics, with Anakin’s story as the backdrop. They really seemed more like they were focused on the downfall of the Republic than Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side.
Williams turned mediocre-to-decent movies into epics with the originals, but the prequels lacked that which made the originals mediocre-to-decent.
The problem with this idea is, if it were true, why doesn’t it apply to all the stuff we used to like when we were kids? Star Wars was my favorite movie when I was a kid, but I was nearly as big a fan of GI Joe or Transformers. I ate up crap like Knightrider and The A-Team with a spoon. I’m pretty sure I’m a Democrat to this day because Ronald Reagan pre-empted the second half of a two-part Scooby Doo cartoon by getting himself shot. And that’s not even getting into the books I was reading at that age.
But if I look back at that stuff now, it’s all crap. Some of it (particularly Scooby) I can enjoy as nostalgia, but most of it is simply unwatchable. Star Wars holds up. Empire holds up. Jedi… I can enjoy as nostalgia. Which is itself an inversion of how I felt as a kid: I was eight when I saw Return of the Jedi, and I thought it was the greatest movie ever made. Better than Star Wars, way better than Empire, which was kind of boring. If my current estimation of these films is a result of my critical blindness as a child, why doesn’t it apply equally to all three films?
Now, admittedly, if I first saw Star Wars as an adult, I probably wouldn’t be as enamored of it as I was: I doubt I’d have spent quite so many hours running around my backyard making lightsaber noises. (I estimate at least a 35% reduction in this activity, under the circumstances.) But there’s clearly something else going on with these movies that set them apart from the general sea of kiddie crap in which I was immersed as a child, but have long since outgrown.
My question about movie budgets wasn’t meant to include an all-inclusive list, I was just questioning the assertion that Star Wars was the first “big budget” SF film. (In Jim’s Son post.)
Same here. I liked Empire the least until I was in my teens, then I started seeing its value and now I’ll happily call it the best of the three with Star Wars close behind. Learning critical and literary analysis actually helped better my appreciation for Empire, not diminish it. There’s more to the movies than pap for kids.
But the same description applies to Boba Fett in Empire, and he’s the coolest villain in history (until eaten by a hole in the ground). And Darth Maul actually did combat and rather cool combat, vs Fett and his merely standing around smugly. Though he did talk back to Vader.
The problem with Darth Maul is that everyone was expecting him to be the Darth Vader equivalent - the big bad guy at the center of the drama. But he wasn’t, he was the pack of stormtroopers - execute the bad guy’s plans against the heros, cause tension, then die dramatically. So Darth Maul didn’t fit expectation, and that’s why he comes off as lame.
Hell, look at his reedit of the first street scene in Tatooine, where we’re trying to watch the Stormtroopers inquire about Luke’s droids, and all we see is a giant space camel* walk between us and the action. I don’t want to look at a space camel’s butt, I want to see the conversation between Kenobi and the Stormtrooper.
To me, the sense of vastness and reality described is a critical element, the good storytelling, the enjoyable characters, the humor that is integral but relatable. All of that makes the first three better than the prequels.
Add to it Lucas’s shift in taste, his forcing every plot element and character history to tie together, his hamstringing the actors with dialogue and direction that made them come off wooden. His use of negative stereotypes to form the basis of his alien cultures/characters. The “Han shot second” effect (also the ET radio effect).
*Lucas didn’t name it a Space Camel, but that’s what it is. It’s a desert beast used by desert nomads to navigate the desert. And be onery.
For “my birthday”, a couple of older kids who were friends of the family got together and took me to a theater in far off St.Louis Park to see it. We missed getting tickets to the show we arrived in time for, so we bought tickets to the next showing. Then we walked over the freeway bridge to the grocery store and stocked up. We walked back through the packed theater and somehow managed to get into the show with two grocery bags of pop, candy and chips. We were the envy of all the other kids in the theater and it was one helluva experience.
That being said, the movie blew me away. It was light years ahead of and completely different than anything I’d ever seen. Nowadays we take this shit for granted, but it really was a groundbreaking movie that changed how Hollywood viewed science fiction movies.
On one of the DVD releases bonus features, they have a trailer from far enough back that there was no Williams music in it yet, and wow, even though all the scenes were things I’d seen a thousand times before, it seemed like an entirely different movie being advertised. I don’t know if I’d go as far as you in how much credit you give him, but I do think he deserves a great deal of credit.
Even his work on the prequels seem to me to be one of the few areas that is every bit as good as the original movies. And I say that as one of the few non-haters of the prequels (I actually like Jar Jar).
Han Solo. An unbelievably cool anti hero criminal who makes fun of the Jedi (defusing their natural pomposity) and shoots someone under the table while talking to them (without the victim ever shooting).
It’s the grown up way to play Jedi.