Last week, we talked about "Star Wars." We left our heroes captured by the cruel Death Star. Obi Wan Kenobi just left to turn off the tractor beam holding the Millennium Falcon hostage.
Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker, taken by an adolescent fantasy about Princess Leia convinces Han Solo to help rescuethe princess. In their attempts to free Leia they break into a prison but do not consider that they might be trapped by a horde of stormtroopers who are unable to hit the broadside of a barn with their beam weapons. So they jump into a garbage chute.
The garbage cruncher turns on. What to do? Only one solution: radio the three-foot-tall deus ex machina on wheels and have it hack the computer again. This time it turns the garbage crusher off and unlocks the maintenance door. After they escape, they're chased by chronically late stormtroopers. Cue some stereotypically improbable hijinks, and they meet back at the Millennium Falcon.
Kenobi finds the tractor beam's power source. It is sitting, isolated and surrounded by a bottomless pit. What a maintenance nightmare. Demonstrating intimate knowledge of technology he's never seen before, he successfully turns the tractor beam off and heads back toward the Millennium Falcon.
On the way, who should he meet but Darth Vader? The two sole surviving masters of the Jedi order of warrior-monks, able to wield power "insignificant" compared to the ability to destroy a planet, engage in combat by ... pulling out dinky little glow-swords and hacking at each other. But this is the director who thinks that telekinetic choking compares to the destruction of a 5 billion trillion ton ball of iron, so I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up.
The fight ends by Vader killing Kenobi as the other protagonists look on. The protagonists make their escape, fight off a couple of fighters and escape to the Rebel base. Of course, the Death Star follows right along.
At the Rebel base, Solo loads up on precious metals, a reward for rescuing Leia, and takes off. Skywalker, meanwhile, is given an expensive piece of military equipment based on his ability to pilot a rusty old cropduster back on his farm. As the Death Star approaches, they launch an attack on the space station which has a very low chance of success. Darth Vader decides to take his squadron of crack fighters out and one-by-one destroys the rebel pilots.
That is, until in the final seconds before the Death Star destroys the rebel base, the intrepid Skywalker, piloting his fighter down a trench on the Death Star's surface, closely chased by Vader, is saved at the last instant by Solo's return. Vader is sent spinning off into interplanetary space. Skywalker manages to shoot two missiles at supersonic speeds down a 6 foot-wide hole. The Death Star blows up in a shower of glowing metal and heavy elements.
Yeah, didn't see that one coming.
This movie is full of bad clichés, stereotypes, New Age nonsense, cringe-inducing dialogue and slow action. Lucas missed a beautiful chance to deconstruct the age-old "hero's quest" archetype and instead fell right into the cliché. Why were we given a journey of black-and-white, good-and-evil when Lucas could have painted a richer and more nuanced canvas depicting the Empire as a complex social construction trying to find a balance between collective needs like security and individual needs like freedom?
The Rebel alliance as an organization torn between its democratic ideals and the necessity to commit terrorist acts in the name of its fight against what it sees as totalitarian repression? The Jedi as a nuanced priesthood of individuals, rather than a mythical idealized order? The movie's stunning lack of scale (humongous spaceships and battle stations) and its inconsistency within that scale (the Force is lame) only compounds the deep issue, and the poor acting (save James Earl Jones and Alec Guinness, who perform admirably in miserable roles) and poor effects are just icing on the cake.
"Star Wars" is the worst kind of bad movie: The gem of an idea that could have been, but was horribly not.
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