35 thoughts on “Why Star Wars And SF Don’t Actually Suck”
A little rant.
Back in the day I remember taking BART from the East Bay to San Francisco’s north side to see this new movie there was a buzz about. Walking a mile from the station to a huge theater. Waiting in line for two hours in a drizzle. Getting a third row seat far over on the right side in an overheated huge old building reeking of damp humanity.
And gasping out loud at the first two minutes of the film.
For making me gasp I forgave Lucas the stupid “Kessel Run” line. And everything since. It was worth it. (Even being chased by a drunken prostitute as I walked back to the subway sometime after midnight.)
I’ve never understood the hatred of Lucas. He made some wonderful entertaining movies that I was happy to pay to see. They were space opera, sure, but I LIKE space opera.
If someone didn’t like them, well, they didn’t have to go. They were free to walk out and ask for their money back (I did that with Zardoz). They were create their own vision. They still are.
Lucas doesn’t owe me – or anyone else – anything. I got my money’s worth (unlike Zardoz). Spaceships, light sabers, robots, aliens, Princess Leia. My life is richer because of George Lucas.
I don’t owe him anything either – I paid to watch. I don’t go to Cons. I don’t own action figurines. I have none of the movies on DVD.
But if I ever meet him in person I’d like to buy him a beer. Just to say “Thanks”.
I liked the first Star Wars movie. It was the first science fiction movie I saw that made the future look “lived in”. All the futuristic high-tech stuff was a little dusty and dingy-looking. Contrast that to the sterile, antiseptic look of the spacecraft in “2001”.
Probably my favorite scene was when the lights in the Millennium Falcon went out and Han Solo banged on the instrument panel to make them come on again.
As for Zardoz, I never saw it in a theater. I saw it on TV years ago, probably in an edited version. It did inspire possibly one of the greatest movie reviews of all time, though. Read that, and I think you’ll agree that you got your money’s worth. For the review, I mean, not the movie.
Zardoz was a great movie! Oh, it was horrible sci-fi. But it was the perfect example of a leftist commune taken to its logical conclusion.
I meant to include this quote from the review in my previous comment:
I bet if the Berkeley class of 1970 had obtained immortality upon graduation and taken over the world, Zardoz is pretty much how things would look 300 years later.
I agree – Zardoz was a great movie. For many reasons – including Charlotte Rampling
Especially Charlotte Rampling.
Star Wars sucks and so does George Lucas. The series has been merchandised to the point that in the 3D re-re-re-release Jar Jar was replaced by a shark with a laser strapped to its back.
There is no added value from all of the crap Lucas has done to the movies, except to his pocket book.
I think the link below pretty much sums it up. I would encourage everyone to listen to the song and sing it aloud the next time you see a Star Wars ratchet set or Mos Eisley body spray.
And his ex-wife’s. Which brought about the sale of Pixar. To Steve Jobs. So one could argue we owe more to HER than to him.
I watched the Star Wars Christmas Special on TV and watched it again on the internet decades later.
I can never unsee that.
Sometimes in hospitals I’ll see an old man or woman staring blankly at a wall or off into space, their eyes empty, their spirit defeate, and I know they saw it too.
Never saw the Christmas special. Think I was overseas tramping along the IGB in winter at the time (Hup hup cavalry HO!) Thanks to the wife-unit we have all six SW movies. If I was to rummage about for something to fill time I might do the first three, not so much the last three (I’d likely do Mars Attacks, 2001 or Army of Darkness before any of them.) He didn’t make the case for the whiney little adolescent bi-atch to become the great hairy eminence grise.
I was in college when the first Star Wars movie came out. I liked it a lot. I read a lot of sci-fi; loved the idea of space travel, and it had all the glitzy special effects of 2001 allied with a story I could actually understand.
I haven’t seen any of the more recent versions – just don’t care about Jar-Jar or Cup-Cup or whatever.
Haven’t read any decent Sci Fi in years either……I don’t know who is writing and who writes the sort that I like.
SW was the first movie, or at least memorable one, about a cosmopolitan galaxy, not just another frontier. Irvin Kirshner gets the props for turning the otherwise one-hit-wonder into a trilogy for the ages.
I think most of the (justifiable) Lucas-hate comes from the “prequels.”
I was only three when Star Wars came out but do remember seeing Empire in the theater. The Battle of Hoth was just too stunning to not have that seared into my brain even at the tender age of 5. I fully remember going to see Jedi and standing in line for 2 hours to be let into the theater. In fact I think I saw Jedi before having ever actually seen Star Wars in its entirety. Its funny to think now days of how hard it was to see a movie back then. Now you can tap a few keys and pull up practically anything you want.
The prequels were garbage. I have Episodes II and III on DVD somewhere that were acquired as gifts. When I upgraded my entertainment system to a HDTV and a Playstation 3 I threw in Episode II because the PS3 does DVD upconverting to HD and I wondered how it would look. My God it looked terrible. All the upconverting did was make it painfully obvious that the actors were standing on sterile sets in front of green screens. The scenery looked about as plastic as the acting. CG animation is just being so overdone that I long for special effects that just use physical models and forced perspectives.
Out of the prequels, Episode III is the only one that has a few redeeming moments. But that’s only because George gave up a few pages of the script for a rewrite of Emperor Palpatines dialog to someone that actually knew what they were doing. But the last fight between Obi Wan and Anakin just goes on for sooo long that I find myself yawning in the middle of whats supposed to be the epic swashbuckling light saber fight to end all saber fights. And I can’t for the life of me figure out what precisely caused Anakin to turn to the dark side. He wanted to have the potential to learn how to bring someone back to life so he suddenly decides it’s okay to go on a murderous rampage to kill a bunch of 6 year olds?!? It should have been that the emperor’s lighting power had the ability to darken someone’s soul and brain wash their mind and he was in fact doing that to Luke at the end of Jedi before Vader stopped him. But no we get this ridiculous light saber battle with Mace Windu, the emperor’s face magically turns into a butt face, and suddenly Anakin is like, “okay I guess I’ll turn to the dark side now, why not…” Okay I’ll stop I could rant like this all day. I HATE YOU GEORGE YOU RUINED STAR WARS! YYYAARGGHH!
“CG animation is just being so overdone that I long for special effects that just use physical models and forced perspectives. “
I’m with you there. Am I the only person who thinks the cheesy effects on the original Star Trek look more realistic than most of the stuff on TNG?
The Hobbit movie at the end of this year will be a real cinemagraphic treat.
….and besides, any series of movies where the first ones screened are Episodes 4,5 and 6….
well you just know someone has lost it…..
It’s the “hate” that I don’t understand. Indifference or mild distaste, OK. But the over the top screeching is just … weird.
It’s a few Hollywood movies, out of something more than two million made, but it seems to generate more complaints than all the rest put together.
Maybe it has to do with dashed hopes?
I think part of it is that so many people got very deep into the mythology and majesty of it, thinking the story was much deeper than it really was, and then were presented with the awful truth that it was a cheesy, incoherent, poorly written piece of schlock.
On a deeper level, I find it fascinating that so many people in a post-enlightenment, technological, Western democracy could embrace a story that was antithetical to all their beliefs, just because of framing, a cheap hero narrative, and a good soundtrack. I don’t think Lucas even realized that he had his good guys and his bad guys backwards, and that may be the root cause of the story’s failure.
It reminds me somewhat of the way Star Trek fans can remain convinced that the Federation is good and Star Fleet is a band of peaceful exporers, despite what’s actually shown on the screen, just because every episode has their crews insisting that they are peaceful explorers – right before they launch a full spread of high-yield nukes at yet another alien species and add another couple of planets to the expanding Federation.
“…a story that was antithetical to all their beliefs…”
Not to my beliefs. But, then, I’m the twisted fellow who thinks Henry F. Potter was the hero of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Where would Bedford Falls have been if he hadn’t been there to keep it all together?
Back in 2005 I wrote a geeky two part blog post for the Rott explaining why we used a Sith theme. It used lots of cursing. 😀
Funny stuff! OK, yeah, the SW ‘verse doesn’t hold up very well to close inspection. But, the overarching message that came across was resistance to an all powerful government by a grassroots organization of freedom fighters. It was the mindless collectivists, insouciant and officious bureaucrats and their robotic stormtroopers, pitted against a mass of freely organized individualists, and the individualists won. That works for me.
That’s what the original movie portrayed, but then Lucas kept on writing scripts, unfortunately.
When the story started, the Jedi were democracy’s guardians who had opened their minds to the universe, but were cast aside as obsolete, crushed by a tyrannical bureaucracy and its army of clones. Against all odds, our intrepid and unlikely heroes struck back and won against the forces of evil.
Then came the prequels, and we learned that the Force was an inherited bacterial infection, the Jedi Order was an absolute theocracy of child kidnappers who banished love and ran around assassinating anyone who disagreed with them, that the clone army was actually under their command, and it was used to crush free trade and any planet that didn’t toe the party line.
We thought we were going to watch Anglo-American freedom fighters toppling the Third Reich, and it turns out they were really SA Brownshirts trying to restore the Nazi Party to the 1934 status quo prior to the Night of the Long Knives.
Combine that with Jar Jar binks, incompetant producing, an incoherent plot, gratuitous and overwrought CGI, and horrible dialog, and no wonder so many people say “George Lucas raped my childhood.”
He should’ve quit after “Howard the Duck.”
Upon finding out that the duly elected Chancellor is a Sith, what does Mace do? He goes to kill him. Hell, Islamic jihadist militants are reasonable by comparison. At least they wait to get a fatwa. Could you image a Secret Service officer, some dyed in the wool Protestant, storming into the Oval Office to assassinate the President of the United States of America because someone in the White House press room claimed the President was *gasp* Catholic?
The Chancellor is a Sith! Big-fucking deal. Bush=Hitler, too. That doesn’t give anyone the right to assassinate him. Splash the scandal all over the tabloids. Publish the gritty details in the Galactic Globe and Gazette. Have the Jedi fax-droids bombard the Senators in an avalanche of thermo-paper. Form a non-profit “No Palpatine” 527 PAC and get moving on a no-confidence vote. Level charges of high treason in the Galactic Senate. Subpoena the Chancellor’s robes to scan them for Dark-Side auras. Judas H Jedi, you just don’t march in with a light saber and decapitate the elected head of the freakin’ government.
Pure win. This always seemed like Lucas’s BDS-inspired eliminationist fantasy: “Master Windu, you’re going to ‘arrest’ the Supreme Chancellor in the middle of the night…with no witnesses? Really?” “Yeah, I’ll just take a couple of dudes. He’s only the Dark Lord of the Sith — I’m sure it won’t come to blow…”
Yea, in the Plinkett review he mentions something about how that the war in Iraq is what had possibly got Lucas stuck on stupid. There are no clear bad guys through most of the prequels. Hell even in the rolling text at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith it says that there are “heroes on both sides” of the war. WTF??
Oh and I just remembered that Lucas did the same thing to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. In the other movies Indy is like, “Nazi’s, I HATE these guys!” But in this one he’s just goes, “Russians….” And then it bends over backwards in the first half of movie to equivocate the rampant McCarthyism in America as being just as bad as the Communism itself. Complete with a 2012 style Occupy protest out in a university lawn during the 1950’s.
Wow. Deepest sympathies to the unfortunate nurse tasked with wiping the drool from Lucas’s beard…
Oh, and Orson Scott Card came to the same conclusion. link.
The core problem is the false equating of “Star Wars” with “Science Fiction” (if you use Harlan Ellison’s term “Speculative Fiction”, then there’s more relevance). “Star Wars” (the 1977 movie, not the series) is space opera, not SF. Highly enjoyable space opera, but space opera nonetheless.
What Kathy Shaidle apparently doesn’t understand is that SF is a genre with a rich history, almost exclusively written. With very few exceptions, films from the ’30s to the 80’s that purported to be “science fiction” were really monster movies, space opera, horror flicks, etc. Very few filmmakers are willing to come to terms with SF in order to make good SF movies (Stanley Kubrick is the notable exception). Hence, there are very few good SF movies, and “Star Wars”, as enjoyable as it is, doesn’t remotely qualify. (Interestingly enough, Lucas’ earlier “THX-1138” is a much better SF movie, rooted in Bradburian themes.)
The core of SF is to make projections of technological change, and then develop a story that shows how that affects humans (or other entities). Take Fred Pohl’s Gateway: the core idea is that humans discover a half-a-million-year-old space station left by an unknown alien species; said station contains several hundred spaceships capable of traversing interstellar space, but the humans have no idea how to control them, so every trip out is a leap into the total unknown. The story revolves around how humans deal with this situation, balancing the chance of unimaginable riches against a large chance of death. Sure, Pohl makes two potentially unsupportable scientific projections: FTL travel and advanced alien civilization, but that’s the kind of story enablers that fits within the bounds of SF; they aren’t arbitrary, like “the force”.
And don’t get me started on “Star Trek”…it’s insane that people like Shaidle think that stuff like “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” are exemplars of SF. It’s like people thinking that Agatha Christie novels are the cream of the mystery genre and have never heard of Chandler, Hammett, Stark, Ellroy, etc.
Actually, Agatha Christie mysteries are really good — they’re just not noir-type mysteries, though some of them have their surprisingly harsh, downbeat elements (the “cozy” type mystery, as her novels are supposedly the chief example of, can be quite uncozy at times). I mean, what we think about a story like Murder On The Orient Express is probably based on half-watched movies, but actually it’s a cold little story of [SPOILER WARNING]
vigilante justice where everyone did it, the victim deserved it, and the detective let them get away with it.
Movies have ruined a lot of stories in peoples’ eyes this way. For example, everyone thinks of Rebecca as this love story with a dash of mystery & suspense, with a Heathcliffish hero and a delicate ingenue heroine, but actually it’s a psychological thriller where all the characters are rather grayish when it comes to good and evil, and it also has a not-entirely unjustified murder that the murderer gets away with.
I want to add that the movie versions of Murder on the Orient Express of course kept the plot points about the murder because it was the point of the story, but all anyone seems to carry away from the film versions is it’s about a train and a silly-looking Belgian detective and a bunch of English people. For some reason Europe, trains, costumes, and British accents add up to “not serious” in the minds of mystery movie watchers. It’s like Sherlock Holmes — those stories are often about murder and psychologically twisted people, and the hero is practically a sociopath (we’d say Holmes had high-functioning autism today and want to medicate him with something less fun than cocaine), but everyone just thinks of the stories as light-hearted fun.
Seconded. Actually Star Trek and Star Wars have damaged the image of Science Fiction in popular consciousness quite a bit.
It creates the perception of “oh, the stuff you read, its just all lasers and spaceships” and puts many people off from what could otherwise be mind opening literary explorations.
Star Wars is fun to watch, and it came along at a time when people were getting tired of 70’s films–they’d had enough of the grit. But Star Wars was nothing except a pastiche of Golden Age SF, and it was never, repeat never, meant to be part of a multi-part epic saga, as George Lucas would have one believe. Lighting struck with the original, which was not originally “Episode IV”, and Lucas showed good sense in handing the story off to talented people who made something worthwhile out of the subsequent two (2) sequels.
Starlog had a blurb on Star Wars a few months before it was released. At that time it was supposed to be a trilogy of trilogies.
A little rant.
Back in the day I remember taking BART from the East Bay to San Francisco’s north side to see this new movie there was a buzz about. Walking a mile from the station to a huge theater. Waiting in line for two hours in a drizzle. Getting a third row seat far over on the right side in an overheated huge old building reeking of damp humanity.
And gasping out loud at the first two minutes of the film.
For making me gasp I forgave Lucas the stupid “Kessel Run” line. And everything since. It was worth it. (Even being chased by a drunken prostitute as I walked back to the subway sometime after midnight.)
I’ve never understood the hatred of Lucas. He made some wonderful entertaining movies that I was happy to pay to see. They were space opera, sure, but I LIKE space opera.
If someone didn’t like them, well, they didn’t have to go. They were free to walk out and ask for their money back (I did that with Zardoz). They were create their own vision. They still are.
Lucas doesn’t owe me – or anyone else – anything. I got my money’s worth (unlike Zardoz). Spaceships, light sabers, robots, aliens, Princess Leia. My life is richer because of George Lucas.
I don’t owe him anything either – I paid to watch. I don’t go to Cons. I don’t own action figurines. I have none of the movies on DVD.
But if I ever meet him in person I’d like to buy him a beer. Just to say “Thanks”.
I liked the first Star Wars movie. It was the first science fiction movie I saw that made the future look “lived in”. All the futuristic high-tech stuff was a little dusty and dingy-looking. Contrast that to the sterile, antiseptic look of the spacecraft in “2001”.
Probably my favorite scene was when the lights in the Millennium Falcon went out and Han Solo banged on the instrument panel to make them come on again.
As for Zardoz, I never saw it in a theater. I saw it on TV years ago, probably in an edited version. It did inspire possibly one of the greatest movie reviews of all time, though. Read that, and I think you’ll agree that you got your money’s worth. For the review, I mean, not the movie.
Zardoz was a great movie! Oh, it was horrible sci-fi. But it was the perfect example of a leftist commune taken to its logical conclusion.
I meant to include this quote from the review in my previous comment:
I bet if the Berkeley class of 1970 had obtained immortality upon graduation and taken over the world, Zardoz is pretty much how things would look 300 years later.
I agree – Zardoz was a great movie. For many reasons – including Charlotte Rampling
Especially Charlotte Rampling.
Star Wars sucks and so does George Lucas. The series has been merchandised to the point that in the 3D re-re-re-release Jar Jar was replaced by a shark with a laser strapped to its back.
There is no added value from all of the crap Lucas has done to the movies, except to his pocket book.
I think the link below pretty much sums it up. I would encourage everyone to listen to the song and sing it aloud the next time you see a Star Wars ratchet set or Mos Eisley body spray.
http://www.paulandstorm.com/lyrics/thanksgiving/
except to his pocket book.
And his ex-wife’s. Which brought about the sale of Pixar. To Steve Jobs. So one could argue we owe more to HER than to him.
I watched the Star Wars Christmas Special on TV and watched it again on the internet decades later.
I can never unsee that.
Sometimes in hospitals I’ll see an old man or woman staring blankly at a wall or off into space, their eyes empty, their spirit defeate, and I know they saw it too.
Never saw the Christmas special. Think I was overseas tramping along the IGB in winter at the time (Hup hup cavalry HO!) Thanks to the wife-unit we have all six SW movies. If I was to rummage about for something to fill time I might do the first three, not so much the last three (I’d likely do Mars Attacks, 2001 or Army of Darkness before any of them.) He didn’t make the case for the whiney little adolescent bi-atch to become the great hairy eminence grise.
I was in college when the first Star Wars movie came out. I liked it a lot. I read a lot of sci-fi; loved the idea of space travel, and it had all the glitzy special effects of 2001 allied with a story I could actually understand.
I haven’t seen any of the more recent versions – just don’t care about Jar-Jar or Cup-Cup or whatever.
Haven’t read any decent Sci Fi in years either……I don’t know who is writing and who writes the sort that I like.
SW was the first movie, or at least memorable one, about a cosmopolitan galaxy, not just another frontier. Irvin Kirshner gets the props for turning the otherwise one-hit-wonder into a trilogy for the ages.
I think most of the (justifiable) Lucas-hate comes from the “prequels.”
I was only three when Star Wars came out but do remember seeing Empire in the theater. The Battle of Hoth was just too stunning to not have that seared into my brain even at the tender age of 5. I fully remember going to see Jedi and standing in line for 2 hours to be let into the theater. In fact I think I saw Jedi before having ever actually seen Star Wars in its entirety. Its funny to think now days of how hard it was to see a movie back then. Now you can tap a few keys and pull up practically anything you want.
The prequels were garbage. I have Episodes II and III on DVD somewhere that were acquired as gifts. When I upgraded my entertainment system to a HDTV and a Playstation 3 I threw in Episode II because the PS3 does DVD upconverting to HD and I wondered how it would look. My God it looked terrible. All the upconverting did was make it painfully obvious that the actors were standing on sterile sets in front of green screens. The scenery looked about as plastic as the acting. CG animation is just being so overdone that I long for special effects that just use physical models and forced perspectives.
Out of the prequels, Episode III is the only one that has a few redeeming moments. But that’s only because George gave up a few pages of the script for a rewrite of Emperor Palpatines dialog to someone that actually knew what they were doing. But the last fight between Obi Wan and Anakin just goes on for sooo long that I find myself yawning in the middle of whats supposed to be the epic swashbuckling light saber fight to end all saber fights. And I can’t for the life of me figure out what precisely caused Anakin to turn to the dark side. He wanted to have the potential to learn how to bring someone back to life so he suddenly decides it’s okay to go on a murderous rampage to kill a bunch of 6 year olds?!? It should have been that the emperor’s lighting power had the ability to darken someone’s soul and brain wash their mind and he was in fact doing that to Luke at the end of Jedi before Vader stopped him. But no we get this ridiculous light saber battle with Mace Windu, the emperor’s face magically turns into a butt face, and suddenly Anakin is like, “okay I guess I’ll turn to the dark side now, why not…” Okay I’ll stop I could rant like this all day. I HATE YOU GEORGE YOU RUINED STAR WARS! YYYAARGGHH!
“CG animation is just being so overdone that I long for special effects that just use physical models and forced perspectives. “
I’m with you there. Am I the only person who thinks the cheesy effects on the original Star Trek look more realistic than most of the stuff on TNG?
The Hobbit movie at the end of this year will be a real cinemagraphic treat.
….and besides, any series of movies where the first ones screened are Episodes 4,5 and 6….
well you just know someone has lost it…..
It’s the “hate” that I don’t understand. Indifference or mild distaste, OK. But the over the top screeching is just … weird.
It’s a few Hollywood movies, out of something more than two million made, but it seems to generate more complaints than all the rest put together.
Maybe it has to do with dashed hopes?
I think part of it is that so many people got very deep into the mythology and majesty of it, thinking the story was much deeper than it really was, and then were presented with the awful truth that it was a cheesy, incoherent, poorly written piece of schlock.
On a deeper level, I find it fascinating that so many people in a post-enlightenment, technological, Western democracy could embrace a story that was antithetical to all their beliefs, just because of framing, a cheap hero narrative, and a good soundtrack. I don’t think Lucas even realized that he had his good guys and his bad guys backwards, and that may be the root cause of the story’s failure.
It reminds me somewhat of the way Star Trek fans can remain convinced that the Federation is good and Star Fleet is a band of peaceful exporers, despite what’s actually shown on the screen, just because every episode has their crews insisting that they are peaceful explorers – right before they launch a full spread of high-yield nukes at yet another alien species and add another couple of planets to the expanding Federation.
“…a story that was antithetical to all their beliefs…”
Not to my beliefs. But, then, I’m the twisted fellow who thinks Henry F. Potter was the hero of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Where would Bedford Falls have been if he hadn’t been there to keep it all together?
Back in 2005 I wrote a geeky two part blog post for the Rott explaining why we used a Sith theme. It used lots of cursing. 😀
Funny stuff! OK, yeah, the SW ‘verse doesn’t hold up very well to close inspection. But, the overarching message that came across was resistance to an all powerful government by a grassroots organization of freedom fighters. It was the mindless collectivists, insouciant and officious bureaucrats and their robotic stormtroopers, pitted against a mass of freely organized individualists, and the individualists won. That works for me.
That’s what the original movie portrayed, but then Lucas kept on writing scripts, unfortunately.
When the story started, the Jedi were democracy’s guardians who had opened their minds to the universe, but were cast aside as obsolete, crushed by a tyrannical bureaucracy and its army of clones. Against all odds, our intrepid and unlikely heroes struck back and won against the forces of evil.
Then came the prequels, and we learned that the Force was an inherited bacterial infection, the Jedi Order was an absolute theocracy of child kidnappers who banished love and ran around assassinating anyone who disagreed with them, that the clone army was actually under their command, and it was used to crush free trade and any planet that didn’t toe the party line.
We thought we were going to watch Anglo-American freedom fighters toppling the Third Reich, and it turns out they were really SA Brownshirts trying to restore the Nazi Party to the 1934 status quo prior to the Night of the Long Knives.
Combine that with Jar Jar binks, incompetant producing, an incoherent plot, gratuitous and overwrought CGI, and horrible dialog, and no wonder so many people say “George Lucas raped my childhood.”
He should’ve quit after “Howard the Duck.”
Pure win. This always seemed like Lucas’s BDS-inspired eliminationist fantasy: “Master Windu, you’re going to ‘arrest’ the Supreme Chancellor in the middle of the night…with no witnesses? Really?” “Yeah, I’ll just take a couple of dudes. He’s only the Dark Lord of the Sith — I’m sure it won’t come to blow…”
Yea, in the Plinkett review he mentions something about how that the war in Iraq is what had possibly got Lucas stuck on stupid. There are no clear bad guys through most of the prequels. Hell even in the rolling text at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith it says that there are “heroes on both sides” of the war. WTF??
Oh and I just remembered that Lucas did the same thing to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. In the other movies Indy is like, “Nazi’s, I HATE these guys!” But in this one he’s just goes, “Russians….” And then it bends over backwards in the first half of movie to equivocate the rampant McCarthyism in America as being just as bad as the Communism itself. Complete with a 2012 style Occupy protest out in a university lawn during the 1950’s.
Wow. Deepest sympathies to the unfortunate nurse tasked with wiping the drool from Lucas’s beard…
Oh, and Orson Scott Card came to the same conclusion. link.
For the definitive review of the latter Star Wars – http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/
Warning: cursing and laughs
The core problem is the false equating of “Star Wars” with “Science Fiction” (if you use Harlan Ellison’s term “Speculative Fiction”, then there’s more relevance). “Star Wars” (the 1977 movie, not the series) is space opera, not SF. Highly enjoyable space opera, but space opera nonetheless.
What Kathy Shaidle apparently doesn’t understand is that SF is a genre with a rich history, almost exclusively written. With very few exceptions, films from the ’30s to the 80’s that purported to be “science fiction” were really monster movies, space opera, horror flicks, etc. Very few filmmakers are willing to come to terms with SF in order to make good SF movies (Stanley Kubrick is the notable exception). Hence, there are very few good SF movies, and “Star Wars”, as enjoyable as it is, doesn’t remotely qualify. (Interestingly enough, Lucas’ earlier “THX-1138” is a much better SF movie, rooted in Bradburian themes.)
The core of SF is to make projections of technological change, and then develop a story that shows how that affects humans (or other entities). Take Fred Pohl’s Gateway: the core idea is that humans discover a half-a-million-year-old space station left by an unknown alien species; said station contains several hundred spaceships capable of traversing interstellar space, but the humans have no idea how to control them, so every trip out is a leap into the total unknown. The story revolves around how humans deal with this situation, balancing the chance of unimaginable riches against a large chance of death. Sure, Pohl makes two potentially unsupportable scientific projections: FTL travel and advanced alien civilization, but that’s the kind of story enablers that fits within the bounds of SF; they aren’t arbitrary, like “the force”.
And don’t get me started on “Star Trek”…it’s insane that people like Shaidle think that stuff like “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” are exemplars of SF. It’s like people thinking that Agatha Christie novels are the cream of the mystery genre and have never heard of Chandler, Hammett, Stark, Ellroy, etc.
Actually, Agatha Christie mysteries are really good — they’re just not noir-type mysteries, though some of them have their surprisingly harsh, downbeat elements (the “cozy” type mystery, as her novels are supposedly the chief example of, can be quite uncozy at times). I mean, what we think about a story like Murder On The Orient Express is probably based on half-watched movies, but actually it’s a cold little story of [SPOILER WARNING]
vigilante justice where everyone did it, the victim deserved it, and the detective let them get away with it.
Movies have ruined a lot of stories in peoples’ eyes this way. For example, everyone thinks of Rebecca as this love story with a dash of mystery & suspense, with a Heathcliffish hero and a delicate ingenue heroine, but actually it’s a psychological thriller where all the characters are rather grayish when it comes to good and evil, and it also has a not-entirely unjustified murder that the murderer gets away with.
I want to add that the movie versions of Murder on the Orient Express of course kept the plot points about the murder because it was the point of the story, but all anyone seems to carry away from the film versions is it’s about a train and a silly-looking Belgian detective and a bunch of English people. For some reason Europe, trains, costumes, and British accents add up to “not serious” in the minds of mystery movie watchers. It’s like Sherlock Holmes — those stories are often about murder and psychologically twisted people, and the hero is practically a sociopath (we’d say Holmes had high-functioning autism today and want to medicate him with something less fun than cocaine), but everyone just thinks of the stories as light-hearted fun.
Seconded. Actually Star Trek and Star Wars have damaged the image of Science Fiction in popular consciousness quite a bit.
It creates the perception of “oh, the stuff you read, its just all lasers and spaceships” and puts many people off from what could otherwise be mind opening literary explorations.
Star Wars is fun to watch, and it came along at a time when people were getting tired of 70’s films–they’d had enough of the grit. But Star Wars was nothing except a pastiche of Golden Age SF, and it was never, repeat never, meant to be part of a multi-part epic saga, as George Lucas would have one believe. Lighting struck with the original, which was not originally “Episode IV”, and Lucas showed good sense in handing the story off to talented people who made something worthwhile out of the subsequent two (2) sequels.
Starlog had a blurb on Star Wars a few months before it was released. At that time it was supposed to be a trilogy of trilogies.