Professor Yeti

As extended endeavors come to an end, they prompt a time of reflection. After I graduated last week, I’m sure I spent a few minutes pondering my time at college, but more importantly I was thinking about Star Wars. This was not only because I’d been to see Revenge of the Sith a few days earlier, but also because I’d watched all three original movies in sequence over the course of a lazy afternoon and most of the evening.

Of course, this was not the first time I’d seen episodes IV-VI of George Lucas’s life work. My first encounter was with a taped-from-TV version of Return of the Jedi. I was a little confused at the beginning, with all these characters in disguise who seemed to know each other from somewhere, not to mention the bizarre and disgusting aliens inhabiting Jabba’s palace. I suppose the story started to make sense over time, especially once my brother got the box set with the THX-remastered version of the trilogy. By the time the “special editions” came out in theaters, I’d played several of the video games and even read some of the tie-in novels, like Heir to the Empire and X-Wing: Rogue Squadron (have a look at the on-line chronology). Needless to say, not much room was left for critical reflection.

After being sorely disappointed by the first two of the new Star Wars films and needing some sort of emotional closure after the third installment, I made a solemn vow with my friend Charles, who out-geeked me discussing trivia after Episode III (he had the Star Wars trading cards), to see the original three movies again, much like the THX edition says at the beginning of each tape “ONE LAST TIME!” There are a number of ways to interpret that claim, and most of them make George Lucas a liar. Not that I’m a cynic.

The first thing that struck me about the earlier movies is how light-hearted the characters are. Who knows why this is? Perhaps Lucas was not yet able to take himself so seriously, without having amassed an enormous fortune, a private ranch, or millions of religiously devoted followers. Maybe Lawrence Kasdan and Benjamin Burtt, who shared writing credit with Lucas, thought it was supposed to be “fun.” Or could it be that Harrison Ford was the real key to the initial Star Wars box-office success? After all, Mark Hamill is legendarily vacant (after stormtroopers murder his parents, all he can muster is a dazed stare at the double sunset) and Carrie Fisher is basically just a foil for Ford’s Han Solo.

The difference in mood is most readily apparent when comparing how the scenes with C-3PO and R2D2 fit with the rest of each film. Their characters are the only constant throughout the series, and they maintain their understated humor at a consistent level. In the older trilogy, the robots fit right in with the fast paced banter, like a cybernetic extension of the humans. In the newer three films, though, the robots look like they’ve been edited in at the last minute, after the test audience fell asleep from boredom. While the humans grimace and fume and cringe, the robots go on their merry way joking and making oddly hilarious bleeps and bloops. It’s kind of like at the beginning of the first Star Wars (no, I’m not going to start calling it “A New Hope”) where the droids are comically trying to escape the ship while everybody else is fighting and yelling and dying, except that in the newer trilogy the heavy material is sustained for over two hours at a time. This contributes to a plodding pace and lifeless characters about whom it’s pretty hard to care. Seriously, how many other Samuel L. Jackson movies have you seen where you wish he just hadn’t gotten involved?

Another thing that really stuck out to me was the cutting. Lucas has always favored outlandish types of cuts between scenes, but in the older trilogy he tended to use short establishing shots and get to the action fairly quickly. With the computer-generated cities and planets available for the later films, it’s not atypical for him to spend 30 to 45 seconds swooping up, down, and around before he finally zooms the virtual camera in for more wooden, cliche-ridden dialogue. The first few times it’s impressive, but eventually the effect is like that of a Playstation game with a pretty “Loading” screen that you learn to loathe after spending 25 percent of your playing time staring at the progress bar creeping toward full.

The key to both the success and failure of the recent films, though, might be familiarity. Especially in Revenge of the Sith, the informed viewer is treated to a number of scenes that directly relate to the original trilogy: the birth of the Jedi twins, the emperor’s physical transformation, Anakin Skywalker’s multi-stage transmogrification into Darth Vader (the shot where his mask is first set into place is the most beautiful image Lucas has ever been responsible for), and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s custodial exile. However, we also get more dialogue from Anakin about how the world isn’t fair and how he wants to be a Jedi master NOW, we finally tire of Yoda’s peculiar sentence structure, and we realize that there are no surprises left. Even in Return of the Jedi, the scene with Luke, Darth Vader, and the Emperor eventually creaks under the weight of their monotonous, overblown declarations. We realize that we’ve been watching this movie, this series for too long, and perhaps we have just become fed up.

No matter how you look at it, after thirteen screen-hours of saving and/or destroying the universe, everyone needs a break.

Andy Slabaugh (andy.slabaugh@gmail.com) would like to learn to use the force, but he is too old to begin the training.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.