Star Wars Trilogy
October 2, 2004
Man alive, I just love the Star Wars trilogy. I have for a long time now, but having the original three joyrides from the brain of George Lucas finally, oh finally, out on DVD, wrapped together in a neat black and silver boxed set, complete with gobs of extra material, makes me jump for joy, with my promotional light saber in one hand, Chewbacca pez dispenser in the other, and my Darth Vader Halloween mask secured tightly on my oversized dome. There is so much imagination running throughout these three films that you almost wonder how on earth Lucas came up with it all without being declared clinically nutty. I mean, you take the basic fabric of any swashbuckler or western, send it back, yes back, in time (“a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”), set it in deep space on planets of ice, swamp, forest, and desert, with a showdown as simple as good vs. evil, and populate it with creatures ranging from absurd (Jabba-the-Hutt), wise (Yoda), funny (C-3PO), annoying (Ewoks), and downright wickedly cool (Vader), and out of it you get a trilogy of films that not only changed the face of modern day filmmaking and advertising, yet that completely reinvented the vast science-fiction genre as we know it.
From it all, this long, utterly serious, slightly campy space saga, was born the most famous 3-film arc in film history, and boy, don’t we just dig it. Seriously, who doesn’t love Luke Skywalker, and his training with the backwards speaking 900-year-old Jedi master Yoda in “The Empire Strikes Back”, Han Solo shooting down a bounty hunter at the beginning of “Star Wars”, C-3PO and R2D2 arriving at the big steel gate of Jabba-the-Hutt in “Return of the Jedi”, Darth Vader’s paternal admission at the climax of the middle chapter, Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi at the onset, and Princess Leia’s brilliant gold slave bikini near the end? This is more than just geeky obsession (okay, maybe the part about the gold bikini is), it is some kind of philosophic lesson in storytelling via popular mythmaking, and even if Lucas takes more than a few pages from Tolkien, Joseph Campbell, Kurosawa, John Ford and Buck Rogers, he was able to grab the collective child’s conscious of an entire generation of moviegoers, in three adventure stories no more realistic than the Saturday afternoon serials of yesteryear, and really, nothing has been the same since.
In the legends of Luke, Han, and Leia, who can’t relate to their universal position as stock heroic figures, even if the situations are farfetched and borderline psychotic. Right, at one point in our lives, don’t we all yearn to be the freshman who learns from the seasoned master, like Luke (Mark Hamill) does when the robot tandem of C-39O and R2D2 come into his possession, pointing him to Obi-Wan, and the freedom fight of the rebels alliance against the Emperor’s Evil Empire. Luke’s journey from orphaned farmhand to Jedi warrior is the stuff of childhood fantasy, and his reconnection with his lineage (a twin sister, an absent, potentially evil father) and his role in life is the ultimate in teenage lesson learning, while his cocky partner, the wanted smuggler, and ship captain Han Solo (Harrison Ford, fully on his way to Indiana Jones), represents everything we’d love to be, but never will, because we’ve learned better. Solo, like his name suggests, is a self-centered blowhard with a doglike ape for a sidekick (who doesn’t love Chewbacca?), but his too, through the films, is a journey of self discovery, eventually turning softy with the love of Leia (Carrie Fisher), and the pride of defeating the Empire at the end of “Star Wars”, the film that started it all in 1977. The three characters are near textbook myth creations- the young hero, the self assured leader, and the spunky, headstrong, gorgeous female- and they fit in just right, which is an absolute necessity in a long series where characterization is just as important as creature construction and special effects.
Talk to any big time Star Wars fan, or frequent any impossibly informative (and how) website, and there will always be the debate about which of the three is the best. Some purists who knock the basic idea of film sequels would suggest that “Star Wars” is the best, simply because it was so original, thus anything after it would just be adding to its originality. Then there are those- usually younger fans- who love 1983’s “Return of the Jedi”, not because it successfully wraps up the long battle, but because the rebels win with the help of the furry, too-cute Ewok race, who defeat the Empire soldiers with rocks, vines, and spears, though most actually think it’s the weakest film in the trilogy. Ewoks? Come on now, I’m sure many thought in ’83, the rebellion is won by Ewoks? Nah, let’s move on to the general consensus, one that I second whole heartedly, that 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back”, directed by USC cinema professor Irvin Kershner, and scripted by Lawrence Kasden and Leigh Brackett, is the absolute masterpiece of the trilogy, one, because it doesn’t need to establish anything, two, because it’s the darkest, three, because there was more freedom, considering Lucas primarily funded it himself with his profits from “Star Wars”, and four, because it’s simply a beautifully spun action yarn that takes us from an ice planet, to a cloud city with breathless stops at a foggy swampland, and a cavernous space hanger, where Luke confronts Vader, and learns, ever-so-famously, that (imagine James Earl Jones voice now), “I AM your father.” Oh my, if Freud could only see the expression on our beloved hero’s face, he’d have enough fodder for two encyclopedias on father-son relationships and deep seeded repression.
Ultimately, I think what makes Lucas’ brainchild so everlasting is that it’s simply an entertaining escape from reality. In Luke, Han, Leia, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Chewbacca, and company we’re not watching our world or cell phones, Starbucks coffee, and presidential politics, we’re watching a fantasy world where good can prevail over evil, where X-Wing fighter jets can speed through space faster than light, where a green sponge puppet can expound profound philosophy while butchering basic English sentence structure (“always in motion is the future”), and a world where a brash smuggler can win the heart of the princess, just before he is frozen in carbon. The Force, the Dark Side, the Rebel Alliance, the Imperial Empire; it’s religion and war, philosophy and entertainment, and it’s absolutely dazzling cinema of the highest galactic order.
by Adam Suraf