And this is exactly me!
But that was typical at the time. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and Wednesday was always the day that the movie changed in the theaters. It was probably on the cusp of changing in the 70s.
Well the first one is really good. Just the flat-out fun it was supposed to be. Then Empire is fantastic.
Then a bunch of people fooled themselves into thinking RoTJ was good. Rogue One is genuinely good.
And The Mandalorian is a biiiiittttt overrated, but it looks fantastic so there you have it.
before Jaws and Star Wars summer was a dead time for movies with low attendance . Those 2 started the summer blockbuster idea
Hello! I think what is an alternate reality. space is very scary because it is unknown. and Star Wars gives us a false understanding of what is happening in space. Well, it’s a banal struggle between good and evil. beautiful picture. sexy characters. nice suits. the saga still lasts a very long time and therefore we are watching new parts. because with the old parts we have grown. it’s nostalgia.
I was a sophomore in high school when Return of the Jedi came out. I remember (though not very well) in my English class, two of my classmates gave mini-reviews of the movie. One of them thought it was great, the other thought it was half-good with an opinion very similar to yours (if I remember correctly, which is not a sure thing).
I was 27 when the first Star Wars movie came out so I don’t have the excuse of extreme youth to color my reminiscences, and as a reader of science-fiction I was well aware of the cheese-factor. However, I was blown away at the first scene after the crawl – I’d never seen anything like that on the screen before.
Baird Searles, the movie reviewer for Fantasy & Science Fiction at the time, said much the same thing. “I’d been reading about grungy spaceport bars all my life, but I never dreamed I’d actually see one.”
No doubt for some people. For others (like me) no, we like the new characters they introduced, Rey especially. I like her more than I liked Luke or Han or even Leia (my favourite), when I was a kid.
It created a world that was believable as a real alien world. They weren’t all just humans with funny foreheads, they were visibly hugely different to earth species, and they didn’t even all speak English. It was dirty - good point made above - and there was always something interesting in the background on screen. A lot of the world-building was left to your imagination, too, rather than being spoonfed what it was like to live there.
The music was a huge part of it. Of course, that’s not unique to Star Wars, but John Williams’ score should not be underestimated as part of the appeal.
Also, a lot of people still tend to assume Star Wars was for boys, and Leia certainly appealed to men, but she very much appealed to little girls and women too. She was genuinely tough, funny, smart, and could hold her own. They called her a Princess, which made her accessible as a kid, because you know that stories have princesses, but she never acted like a princess, she acted like a bad-ass hero. Even her getting out that message to Obi-Wan, which could be seen as a damsel in distress, was played as her thinking quickly, using what resources she had, and taking a risk.
In the 80s there really weren’t many female characters you could look up to and want to be like the way you could with Leia. She was a trailblazer.
Plus the films have robots that sort of had personalities, and a variety of them too, and sometimes save the day - that’s unusual. Artoo is well loved for good reason.
Agree with the above, but we already had “robots with personalities” in the movies. Even ignoring the robots of the fifties and TV(Robby the Robot – twice, Tobor the Great, The Robot from Lost in Space, to mention a few) we had the example of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, the “Drones” from Silent Running, which I think was a huge influence. They were short, non-human robots who didn’t speak in human language. Their very name – “drones”, rather than “robot”, I think strongly influenced Lucas’ decision to cal his “droids” (presumably from “android”). And they definitely had personalities.
(Only once, to my knowledge, is the word “robot” (rather than “droid”) used in the Star Wars films. It’s in the scene where Luke and Ben encounter the destroyed Jawa tractor and Luke suddenly realizes that if the Stormtroopers have been following “the robots” they might find his Aunt and Uncle.)
We got a month of Dizmal+ to watch Hamilton. So of course I’m obligated to watch all the SciFi I can, to get my money’s worth. I’ve been watching the first five minutes of a bunch of films to get a feel for them.
Well, The Force Whatever opens with Rey spelunking inside a crashed Star Destroyer. How cool is that? And then she befriends BB8, and beats up on Finn (a really inept stormtrooper, who won’t shoot anyone). Very quickly I thought “I actually care about these characters.”
So of course I had to watch the whole movie, and loved it. Enough to carry me through the last two movies, which had issues but damn, they were Star Wars!, with Rey… and Luke and Leia!
Oh, and the opening scene of The Next-To-Last Movie (#8) is hilarious. Poe paging the Imperial cruiser “Hello, is this on? Holding for General [guy who played oldest Weasley in H. Potter]. Y’know, pasty guy? Hello?”
I wouldn’t count Robby the Robot from Lost in Space as a robot with a personality. You might well be right about Silent Running, though - afraid I haven’t seen it.
Robby was the robot from Forbidden Planet, and definitely had a personality. The robot from Lost in Space had a similar aesthetic, but was different, and I don’t think had any name beyond “the robot”.
He was Robot B-9
From the Wiki
The Class M3 Model B9 General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot , also known simply as the M3-B9 G.U.N.T.E.R. ,[1] is a fictional character in the television series Lost in Space . His full designation was only occasionally mentioned on the show.[2][3]
Sorry, it looked like you were saying that the robot’s name in Lost in Space was Robby. I didn’t actually think it was, but assumed you knew more than me. Should know better and go with my first instincts, or at least check first. He still definitely did not have a personality.
I guess Star Wars wasn’t the first to have robots with personalities, then, but it was definitely one of the biggest films to do so, and with multiple robots with different kinds of personalities, too. That does make it different, IMO. It was one of the ways in which it looked, and still looks, like a more alien world than most scifi shows and movies.
My biggest gripe with Star Wars is that it gets an insanely exaggerated amount of attention even though there have been hundreds of amazing films ever since.
The film really did break new ground, but at heart it was a great kids film with a fun plot, and that worked just fine for 11yo me. So why, more than 40 years later, does every Cracked list article about anything related to movies have to contain at least one Star Wars entry?
It’s like there were no other amazing films before or after. (IMHO, 2001 was a far better film, with great depth, and didn’t deserve to be swept aside by the Star Wars juggernaut.)
Star Wars should be treated as what it was: a really good film in 1977 that everyone had to see eleven times and blew everyone away…but then the world moved on.
Side note: When I saw Star Wars in the theater, there was a trailer for Saturday Night Fever. What a contrast in genre and ability to age well.
The problem with Kubrick is that he had no facility for directing people. The only film he did that had really good acting was Strangelove. All his other characters are either talking furniture or Taz, but never particularly realistic or easy to identify with. His movies are beautifully done, but flawed.
In the Star Wars movies, the writing is sophomoric, and the acting is ultra-meh, but one can connect with them.
Have you seen Lolita? The Killing? Paths of Glory? The humans being less human than HAL was a point of 2001. Bowman only merited elevation to starchildhood after he stopped being robotic and took a risk.
Well that’s what the thread is about. It’s modern mythology.
The attention paid for a given item of pop culture isn’t always perfectly proportional with its quality. I think it fair to say the attention being paid to Star Wars today would be out of proportion even if it was literally the greatest movie ever made.
Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back were legitimately great movies; Return of the Jedi was good. Since then the franchise has spawned a few okay movies, some atrocious ones, a few good TV series, some great video games and a lot of shitty throwaway paperbacks. That all said, the thing is that in the last ten years the attention paid to the franchise has gotten a bit ridiculous as Disney has leveraged it to rake it as much dough as possible and as popular culture has turned towards obsessing over franchises. (Look at the absurd dominance of Marvel movies.) I don’t honestly see that there’s a lot of attention paid specifically to the original trilogy of MOVIES.
But not nearly as entertaining a film, at least to the vast majorirty of movie viewers. I watched it (albeit not under ideal circumstances) and was bored. Many of the films that people have claimed in this thread are much better just don’t have the entertainment value for braod audiences that Star Wars has. A good/great movie that’s entertaining and accessible and fun to watch is going to be more popular than a good/great movie that isn’t.
Star Wars has heroes and villains and action and humor and forward momentum, characters that aren’t deep but are easy to like (or hate), and nothing that’s particularly hard to understand.