Flying High
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen FLYING HIGH by robert asahina None who has stood in line for three hours to see Star Wars has to be told it is doing "zowie business" (Variety's highest accolade). And if anyone else...
...Led by the Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) and the sinister Lord Darth Vader (David Prowse...
...But none of the sophisticated techniques on display?blue screening," holograms—match the spaceship dogfights, programmed by computer (rather than assembled through the by-now primitive method of "composite opticals" Kubrick employed) to handle angular displacement, depth of field, and the complex spatial relationships of the ships to one another and to the planet below...
...It is 20 minutes before we are introduced to Luke, and another 20 before we understand that the robots' role is to deliver Leia's plea for help to Kenobi...
...It is simply not clear why the death of a planet should weaken him, while his own death serves to strengthen Luke...
...At one point Lord Vader, who had been a Jedi Knight before being "seduced by the dark side of The Force," confronts Kenobi, his old master (sensei), in a climactic light-saber duel...
...The dogfight sequences, incidentally, represent a successful updating of material drawn from the past: Lucas screened 50 old war movies as a guideline to "what the battle sequence would look like, the feeling of it...
...Still, Lucas' account of The Force is not entirely cogent...
...According to Lucas' fertile imagination, "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," the evil Galactic Empire overthrew the Old Republic...
...Since Lucas fired his original editor, some of these post-production shortcomings could have resulted from a personnel problem...
...Coming from a critic who admires the infantile mysteries of Hitchcock and the adolescent melodramas of Cha-brol, that complaint cannot be taken very seriously...
...most of us go to the movies for fun?and Star Wars provides the best summertime entertainment in years...
...Moreover, the charm of the movie lies precisely in its skillful appeal to the child in all of us...
...The script also contains some technical errors...
...Mar-cia Lucas, wife of the director...
...The role of Kenobi, the wise man and warrior, is a plum almost any aging performer could score in...
...The mechanical Mutt-and-Jeff duo is such a delightful creation that I suspect Lucas could not resist the temptation to squander footage on what eventually turn out to be secondary characters...
...Thus Solo brags that his spaceship "made the Kes-sel run in less than 12 parsecs...
...Indeed, most of the special effects in Star Wars are throwaways, casually employed to "place" Lucas' imaginary universe...
...The result is a kind of instant familiarity and credibility that owes less to the technical wizardry than to the keen intelligence that guided its use...
...we are evidently supposed to believe his spirit has survived to guide Luke...
...Guinness carries it off with the dignified diffidence that is his trademark...
...Lucas avoids a trap that science fiction too often falls into—dreaming up fantastic religions and powers that substitute for dramatic logic and lack any significance outside the world of make believe...
...Haskell may prefer the "adult" angst of sexual politics...
...By thus giving a new twist to an old tradition...
...Actually, a parsec is a measure of distance (19.2 trillion miles), not of time...
...The Empire's secret weapon, the Death Star—an armored space station as large as a small moon, capable of destroying an entire planet?had been expected to bring a rapid end to the insurrection...
...Although Lucas has probably used them as a self-conscious nod toward the old serials (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers), they clash with the strictly up-to-date look of the rest of the film...
...Only Molly Haskell, in the Village Voice, registered a demurrer, grumbling that Star Wars is "childish—even for a cartoon...
...This mystioal warrior faith may sound like a figment of Lucas' imagination, but it is not...
...Ford is more engaging as Solo, the cynical and reluctant hero, but I kept imagining in his place someone with the panache of Errol Flynn...
...Other minor shortcomings involve the editing...
...their sword play is kendo, the ritualistic fencing...
...However, a determined band of rebels under Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), aided by Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness), succeeded in penetrating and eventually destroying the Death Star, bringing defeat to the Empire and restoring the Old Republic...
...Both lapses, if small, are nearly unforgivable in a science-fiction movie...
...Dignity, in fact, is what makes Star Wars a success—despite the shortcomings I have tended to dwell upon...
...But this film is a critical as well as a commercial smash...
...Star Wars is quite plainly the finest movie in its genre since Forbidden Planet—and that is fairly lavish praise...
...Lucas' frugality is especially noteworthy because Kubrick used merely 35 different special effects in 2001, while no fewer than 350 can be seen in Star Wars...
...Part of the credibility results from the varied and familiar sources Lucas has drawn upon...
...Luke hears Kenobi's voice in moments of crisis...
...And if anyone else needs persuading, the figures are irrefutable: In its first week alone, Star Wars grossed $2 million in 26 theaters across the country—the fastest box-office draw since Jaws...
...Later...
...He has succeeded admirably...
...Newsweek gave it a two-page color spread...
...Kenobi and the other "Jedi Knights"—the "guardians of peace and justice" in the Old Republic—can tap into The Force, releasing its energy through their "light sabers" (lethal laser swords...
...Yet earlier in the movie, when the rebel planet Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star, Kenobi had sensed a depletion in The Force, and thus in his own powers...
...Whatever the case, I should stress that on balance the final cut (credited to Paul Hirsch, who was reportedly called in to rescue the project...
...When Vader examines the heap of clothing on the spot where Kenobi died, he finds no trace of the body...
...It would have been better to follow the approach of the rest of the movie and accept the unfamiliar environment and characters as "natural...
...Lucas seems to have forgotten that "android"—from the Greek andros, meaning man—has always been used in sci-fi to indicate robots that resemble human beings...
...and Richard Chew) is quite good duction, moreover, are truly impressive...
...the Jedi Knights are samurai...
...not to be outdone, Time devoted six pages to hailing "the year's best movie...
...with the unbilled vocal assistance of James Earl Jones), Imperial Storm Troopers went about slowly crushing the remaining resistance...
...Star Wars is science fiction with the emphasis on fantasy rather than on technology...
...In this simple tale of good versus evil, Luoas has managed to create a coherent and believable universe —unlike such recent science-fiction disasters as Zardoz, Rollerball and Logan's Run...
...On the other hand...
...Individual sequences are connected by "wipes" and "iris-ins"—techniques that were old hat 30 years ago...
...Finally, a barroom panorama lingers too long over the faces of too many grotesque aliens (expertly made up by Rich Baker, who did King Kong...
...The Force is what the Japanese call ki, the animating spirit of the martial arts...
...In addition, all the robots are colloquially referred to as " 'droids" (short for "androids") ?even Artoo Detoo, who resembles a cannister vacuum cleaner...
...George Lucas, the 32-year-old writer/director of the film (and of only two others—THX 1138 and American Graffiti) was forthright about his intentions: "I wanted to do a modern fairy tale, a myth [fori a whole generation . . . growing up without fairy tales...
...Peter Mayhew does about all an actor could do with Chewbacca the Wookie, an eight-foot-tall, shaggy-haired monster who is Solo's companion, and Cushing (a veteran of countless Hammer horror films) does his nasty bit nicely...
...I shall become more powerful than you can ever imagine": he then allows himself to be killed...
...For the first half hour, the main characters of Star Wars are two robots—Artoo Detoo (R2D2), a squat, cylindrical automaton played by 3' 8" Kenny Baker ("the smallest man in England"), and See Threepio (C3PO), a tall mechanical man played by Anthony Daniels as a kind of prissy English butler in gold armor...
...Lucas takes his fantasy very seriously, and without the intellectual condescension that ruins most science-fiction films...
...9hot on location in Africa, Guatemala and Death Valley, and in 45 sets on 11 sound stages in England, the film came in with a budget of only $9.5 million (by contrast, 2001: A Space Odyssey cost $10 million in 1968...
...The one area where a simple-minded humanist can validly criticize Star Wars is the acting: Hamill and Fisher are absolute disasters...
...These and other extraordinary effects were engineered by John Dykstra and John Stears, under the general direction of producer Gary Kurtz and production designer John Barry...
...One scene, where Luke is overcome by a Tusken Raider, is over so quickly that Luke is not the only one who doesn't know what has happened...
...Kenobi warns his former student, "If you strike me down...
...For example, the religion of the Old Republic is a belief in "The Force," the "energy field generated by all living things" that "binds the galaxy together...
...Only a Luddite like Haskell could complain that the director's offhanded acceptance of sophisticated cinematic techniques is somehow more ignoble than the kind of simultaneous fascination with and alienation from technology that made 2001 such an egregious spectacle...
...The structure of the story causes a problem, too...
Vol. 60 • July 1977 • No. 14
