Odd thing though: for the first three movies, Leia was pretty much the ONLY female character. If you don’t count Aunt Beru or Mon Mothma (who had pretty minor roles anyway). Maybe that made Leia seem larger than life, since there was really no other female to compare her to. It’s interesting that Star Wars become popular with females anyway despite this lack of representation.
I have seen Paths of Glory and The Killing. The opening scene of Lolita is pretty awesome, but Sellers is just playing a Taz to Mason’s cardboard cutout. Little Alex de Large does not seem like a real person, nor does anyone else in A Clockwork Orange, though I can imagine that that was Kubrick’s intent. It is just difficult to think of a character in a Kubrick movie who is reachable.
Lucas sometimes goes to the opposite extreme, creating caricatures like the ewoks who are too reachable. As sub-par as the acting is in the original Star Wars movies, at least the actors (the heros) were somewhat realistic as people and not over-tuned by hundreds of takes.
As Chronos has already observed, Robby wasn’t the robot from Lost in Space (although he was designed by the same guy who later did the Lost in Space Robot – and Robby appeared twice on that show). He was the Robot in Forbidden Planet and later in The Invisible Boy. (Hence my saying he was in movies twice. He later appeared in a lot of TV shows, including not only Lost in Space but also The Twilight Zone (three times, albeit a little altered) and others, including Columbo.
Robby defiunitely had a personality, and it was carefully crafted. The writers never lost sight of the fact that Robby was a ROBOT, and not a metal human being. His reactions and interactions were traceable to his robotic nature. Nevertheless, they did go out of their way to give him a definite personality beyond a mere mechanical device. When Altaira requests a gown, Robby definitely has a note of exasperation as he says “Again?” But you could image Morbius working that sort of thing in when he programmed Robby. Certainly Morbius had fun programming Robby. There’s no other good reason for Robby to have knowledge of many languages and dialects. But Morbius was a philologist my trade, and you could see him programming the languages in while Altaira was still a baby, so he’d have someone to talk to.
Similarly, when Commander Adams remarks on Altair IV’s oxygen content, Robby’s response is wonderfully unbusinesslike – “I rarely use it myself, sir. It promotes rust.”.
Finally, after Robby takes a sample of “old Rocket Bourbon” to synthesize more for the Cook, he answers the Cook’s protests with “Silence, please, I am analyzing!”, followed by an erupting bubble that sounds like a human burp. That’s not programmed – it’s fortuitous, but it certainly adds to his personality.
(The aftermath of this has one of the movie’s most underappreciated lines. Robby gives his analysis – “Relatively siple alcohol molecules with traces of fusel oil.” “Fusel oil” (now more commonlu called “fusel alcohols” or “fuselols”) are the undesired results of bad fermentation, a collection of amyl and other alcohols thought to contribute to hangovers. “fusel”, in fact, comes from German for “bad liquor”. It’s significant that Cookie’s prized liquor is, in fact, rotgut.)
I can’t imagine setting a role playing game or more than a ‘do exactly the move’ video game in 2001 without pretty much tossing the existing material, and I can’t really see how you’d open up the storyline to multiple serieses of books and comic books by other authors (again without tossing the material). Star Wars, OTOH, has lent it self quite well to a ton of ‘Expanded Universe’ books and comics (more than I want to tally up from either Wikipedia page, just in comics there’s more than 100 titles from Dark Horse and a decade-long series from marvel with over 100 issues) as well as over 100 video and board games, three different pen and paper role playing games, and two distinct MMORPGs (the newer of which is still running and has made over a billion dollars in revenue).
I think a lot of the longevity of Star Wars is not just the films themselves and whether they stand up to film critics, but the fact that it created a very good background for putting more stories in the series. One can argue that a film like 2001. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, or another of his is better in some sense, but they’re something that you watch, get a message from, and move on to another movie. They’re not something that you watch for fun and that spawns toys and video games and spinoff books and billion-dollar MMORPGs for people to keep coming back to. (I’m not sure I’d even want to be around anyone interested in playing Clockwork Orange spinoff games, and I definitely wouldn’t want to be around anyone who considers it something to watch for fun).
2001 is an amazing film on multiple levels. It is also boring as hell compared to Star Wars.
True, but they’re very different kinds of films. 2001 was avowedly created to be the “good science fiction film” that fans of the genre had desired for so long, with respect for science , good FX, and a hint of mysticism. Star Wars was a rousing Saturday-morning pulpish serial with no wait until next week for the cliffhangers to be resolved. (the Indiana Jones movies were this, too). It had the trappings and tropes of science fiction without the substance – it’s got a princess and a Ruritanian titled Evil Lord and every main character gets to be a general, eventually. Lucas admitted that he was going back to his childhood entertainment in crafting it, and that he’d been regressing through the years – Star Wars was for kids, American Graffiti for teens, and THX 1138 was his adult science fiction film. And THX 1138 is pretty “boring”, too.
Science fiction doesn’t have to be boring, of course. Look at James Cameron’s SF films. But 2001 isn’t an “action adventure” film.
I’m just addressing why it’s not going to be in “every Cracked list article about anything related to movies” while Star Wars is. It just isn’t going to have the same wide appeal because it is much less boring to a lot less people. I like 2001 and there’s just some excruciatingly boring parts in there.
Oddly, I have become bored with battle scenes. I rather like the lengthy movie Cloud Atlas, but its long, intense action sequences are just something to endure and get past so that we can get back to the actual movie. That is just one example. An action sequence that goes on for more than a minute or two becomes tedious, and if it goes into those kinetic first-person CG effects, it becomes intolerable in seconds.
Maybe that is just me, but the stuff is overdone and formulaic. 2001 may have too much in long, slow sequences, but I feel like the standard has swung way too far the other way. For my taste, at least.
(Except for Jackie Chan. He knows how to do action sequences that I can appreciate.)
I liked them all in The Force Awakens and I continued liking all of them in the sequel except for Poe. I’m fine with a hothead pilot, but the mutiny subplot was stupid, unnecessary, and made Poe look like a jerk.
Because Star Wars is a seminal work that’s become the gold standard by which we judge other movies against. At some point I’m sure Star Wars will fade from public consciousness but apparently that day isn’t close.
The classic example, of course, being the Star Wars prequels, which have action scenes that go on and on but which have zero emotional connection or meaning. They’re just criminally boring.
Yeah, this. Watch sci fi movies that are contemporary to the first and second StarWars (Black Hole is one that often comes up, it was released two years after the original Star Wars, and seems like it was made in a previous decade).
They were serious ground breaking and light years ahead of anything else in that era.
It’s amazing how well the special effects and general look and feel of Star Wars holds up. Personally I like Star Wars because it walks the line between grand adventure, sci-fi, comedy, and drama. I love the gritty look of the places and vehicles, I love all the varied alien races, the might of the Empire and the rag-tag nature of the Rebellion. Even though every planet seems to have just one ecosystem, with light speed and The Force it feels like there are an infinite number of stories to be told in the Star Wars galaxy, past, present, and future. The ship designs are awesome too, from the X-Wings to the Star Destroyers. And so many of the places and things in the movies feel like real used and worn objects, not just movie props.
While I don’t disagree about Ford, I think that the casting in general was pretty inspired. Carrie Fisher was NOT a damsel in distress, and Peter Cushing & David Prowse/James Earl Jones were fantastically good villains.
What made it so cool at the time of the first trilogy was that it was SO mysterious. What was the Force? What were the Jedi? What was Darth Vader? How did he get that way? What was the Republic? The Clone Wars? What is the Rebellion fighting for?
We got basically a little vignette in all that epic scope stuff centered around Luke and the Battle of Yavin, and then were left to wonder. Same with Empire - we got a little bit more, but still no real answers. Even Jedi didn’t resolve everything.
Then the prequels showed up and literally answered ALL of it. There wasn’t any mystery anymore. That’s my theory as to why the prequels are so roundly hated; beyond being awkwardly directed with bad dialogue, they showed behind the curtain. Which might have been fine, had they waited until Revenge of the Sith to actually do most of it. But they started out right from the get-go with midichlorians and systematically pulled back the curtain on everything else.
Patton Oswalt did a bit about this in his standup routine years ago, to the effect of “we don’t need to see how the things we like originated, we just want to see the things we like.” In other words, excessive backstory killed the mystique. He said just because he likes Angelina Jolie, doesn’t mean he wants to see John Voight’s ballsack. Lol. He was dead right though.