Verse
Sullivan, James
is to make war hell by recreating its miscalculation and slaughter as fully, accurately and graphically as possible. The idea is, in other words, to create a tragedy with a close-up. And there's...
...An historical relativism really is the secret to Lucas's success...
...The historical panorama that it grafts onto the future really comes from a lot of Hollywood movies about the past rather than the past itself...
...Like the Arnhem campaign, A Bridge Too Far was so misconceived that it was doomed before it got started...
...Thus he makes a work of flawless escapism: it escapes the angst of the present altogether...
...Will the universe be saved...
...This is the second year in a row that the movie industry has managed to come up with a perfect summer-time film...
...The other hero is an adventurer and soldier of fortune, a gun for hire...
...But Lucas, like the hot-shot astronauts in his film, is more of a free agent...
...Lucas's Star Wars, on the other hand, takes the long view of history, and finds no moral in it whatsoever...
...Commonweal: 433...
...That simple declaration is By one who only thinks of his...
...While Lucas's characters live a millennium or two from now, much of their story seems to occur anywhere from a generation to a millennium ago...
...But if there is any period genre Lucas's film seems to prefer, it is the Medieval...
...If Attenborough lived too much in the recent past of the war itself while he was making his movie, he also lives too much in the present the rest of the time...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0000 5AMES SULLIVAN MEN ON TREES "The husbandman will prune a tree To concentrate its energy On making fruit that he can reach...
...Besides being punctuated with adventures from Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, the film is pervaded in general by an atmosphere of knights in shining armor and a damsel in distress...
...Last year it was Swashbuckler, this year it's Star Wars...
...One hero comes straight out of a Ford western, and the other out of a Bogart ~Im heir (in fact, as he prepares to smuggle the Rebels away from a desert space port, the way Bogart smuggled the Free French off Martinique in To Have and Have Not, he even shoots an interloper right through a table top, the way Bogart shot Dan Seymour...
...The heroine is a Princess, no less, and the villain is an appropriate nemesis for such royalty, the blackmasked Lord Vader...
...Just as his movie becomes the captive of World War II, his original motive for making it was probably too much the captive of our own revulsion at war, brought on by Vietnam, to tell us anything we don't already know...
...Having set his film in the furthest imaginable future, Lucas has drawn his plot from the furthest historical past, or at least a reasonable Hollywood facsimile thereof...
...Attenborough's close-up gets so close to his subject that his film begins to seem what war itself must often seem first-handma mere processing of men and mat6riel, an administrative problem rather than a moral one...
...Will they be able to use "the Force" to penetrate Death Star's defenses before it incinerates the Rebel planet...
...I wonder what it is to be A solid object like a tree That seems to stay the same but grows?'" A man who asks that question, knows...
...This tree is mine...
...One of the film's heroes is the adopted son of pioneers who are massacred in an Indian-style raid on their homestead on an out-of-the-way planet...
...And there's little else to say, really...
...That one is yours...
...Instead of trying to apply the standards of the present to the past, as Attenborough has, Lucas applies the standards of the past to the future...
...Attenborough himself obviously became so involved in restaging the campaign that he couldn't make value judgments about it any more effectively than the participants could at the time...
...This kind of thing you read In books by men who stay indoors...
...There's no possibility of considering the technique or style of Attenborough's workmif indeed it has any---because its failure inheres in the very idea behind it...
...Such lessons autodidacts teach...
...The results, mounted on such a spectacular scale, and with such tediousness, are more likely to make us feel outrage at movies than at wars...
...Even "the Force," an ~lan vital usable only by the righteous, is made manifest in an ancient form, a hand-held laser beam wielded as if it were Excalibur...
...A tree will grow because it will, Despite bad soil and winter chill, And nobody can tell which seed Will grow...
...The result of Lucas's efforts is to raise such questions as were never dreamt of in Richard Attenborough's philosophy: will the two heroes be able to rescue the Princess from the Death Star...
...They exist in its assumptions, not just its conclusions...
...The film's difficulties are philosophical rather than artistic...
...Perhaps what frees Star Wars from the ponderousness of A Bridge Too Far is the fact that it deals not with history, but only with pop images of history...
...His film is propelled by a kind of Relativity Theory...
...The only blame he could imagine is that which the commander in the field probably assigns, the one based on resentment of those other commanders who don't actually take the field themselves but only plan campaigns from the safety of headquarters...
...He zooms through time from the remote future to the remote past as easily as Star Wars" rocket ships zoom through "hyper-space" from one end of the universe to the other at the speed of light...
...Will we all be given decoder rings as we leave the theater...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 14
