Let’s do it… let’s criticise ‘Star Wars’!
Yep, the first one. Or the 4th. You know, A New Hope or whatever. That one that came out in 1977. It ain’t all that and neither are the other Star Wars films. Here’s why.
Firstly, Star Wars is a skin-deep riff on a very well-trodden fairytale. I mean, sure, if you simplify any story enough then you’ll invariably find that it matches up to an ancient story archetype. Boil away enough of the extra flesh, and the skeleton will always be identifiable as one of a handful of existing stories.
Campbell summed it up in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (1949) and, in the process, gave every nerd who thinks they’re a writer the hammer with which to hit any nail: The Hero’s Journey. The “hero’s journey” has been so well honed in the decades since, as a structured set of story beats and events, that it’s possible to predict, to within a few minutes, when key events will happen in modern films like those from Marvel.
The specific fairytale that Star Wars (1977) works to is, as described by noted ass-hat and asbestos spokesperson Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots (2004), “overcoming the monster”. Specifically, this is Star Wars’ story:
Stable boy meets a good wizard. Good Wizard tells him he’s the chosen one. Bad Wizard destroys stable boy’s home. Good Wizard trains stable boy to become Hero. Hero has crisis when Good Wizard is killed by Bad Wizard. Hero sucks it up and saves the day by defeating Bad Wizard.
This, here, is a very important note so I shall pitch it with emphasis: archetypal stories aren’t bad because they’re archetypal. Any story, no matter how detailed, can be put at enough distance from one’s eyes to see it as only a basic, archetypal fable.
The fact that Star Wars follows a generic “overcoming the monster” plot isn’t the problem with it. Plenty of great movies, and lousy ones too, use the same legend.
Where this film, and everything that came after, falls down is that there’s very little to focus in on. There’s no protein in the sandwich. No detail under the microscope. Sure, there are individual scenes where characters move around; talk; swear in R2D2-language or find themselves in trash compactors, but none of that relates to the characters or their arcs — the internal journeys they make as people, from start to finish.
It has often been said that George Lucas is a “big picture” fellow, and I think that is definitely true. He’s always been exceptional at painting a big, vivid, vibrant world against which his characters can do big, vivid, vibrant things.
Where he gets into trouble is letting his audience in to occupy that world, because it very quickly becomes clear that everything is only a thin veneer of paint against a canvas backdrop.
Just selected from a hat, let’s consider a few big staples of Star Wars, both the ’77 movie and what came after.
Darth Vader. He’s the baddie. He wants to do… something with the Death Star. Like, bad stuff, obviously, but his actual goal isn’t really clear beyond “killing the Rebels”. Even after the ’77 film and what feels like a thousand movies and a billion TV shows, across nearly five decades, we never learn anything more about him than that, in terms of his character and his goals. As a kid he was a slave, and he was scared. Being scared somehow enticed him into becoming Darth Vader so he could… so he could… err… anyone?
Emperor Palpatine. Doesn’t do much in ’77, or indeed after. We know what he is — manipulative, deceitful and power-hungry — but we never find anything close to why he’s like that, why he’s a “Sith”, or what he’s trying to achieve. He just wants to be in charge, like a Space Boris Johnson.
Han Solo. As a kid, I not only legitimately thought his name was “Hand Solo”, but I was also too young to understand why that was a problematic term for a six-year-old to use. Anyhoo, Han is the rogue! He’s a pirate! He’s all action and quips! He’s just trying to get enough money to pay off his hot sugar daddy, Jabba The Hutt! But at the end he’s all like “aw shucks I guess I’ll join the rebels!”. Why? That’s a great opportunity to take the guy on some sort of arc, but it’s ignored. He’s just the same bloke as at the start, but now he’s officially one of the good guys.
C3P0. Not only the sexiest, most bang-able character, but also clearly a tender and thoughtful lover. Threepio, as he’s dubbed, is a slave in a world where robots (droids) are not only objectively sapient and conscious but also disposable and cheap. Does that factor in anywhere? Nope. He’s a pompous fusspot at the start and a pompous fusspot at the end. His characterisation is “occasionally bickers with R2D2 like a washerwoman, but secretly cares about him as a pal”.
You get my point. The characters have great elevator pitches and then nothing of consequence is done with their individual growth or evolution as thinking people. They run around, they do stuff, but none of it seems to change them in any meaningful way and it should. Instead, the film gives us some quippy dialogue; a couple of sword fights and then stuff blowing up.
My point isn’t that those things can’t be fun or that the film is bad, it’s that — if we’re being honest with ourselves for a moment — it isn’t even remotely deep or resonant, despite decades of mining the material.
The best example of the characters just going through the motions actually comes from the sequel: The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The walking exposition-machine, Yoda, tries to teach the hero, Luke, about controlling his temper and his impulsivity.
Kermit’s Great Grand-Uncle explicitly warns him against rushing off to save his friends, gravely telling him that doing so would destroy all they are fighting for. Harry-Potter-walker then rushes off to save his friends and there are no consequences to their cause as a result. At all.
Let’s pick another, from Return of the Jedi (1983). Here, Peter-Parker-walker confronts Uncle Ben Kenobi for not telling him that Darth Octo-vader was his father. He not only lied to Luke, but then tries to defend it with some pompous twaddle about it being true from a certain point of view.
Star Wars’ reputation for terrible dialogue is will deserved, but if we look beyond that to what this means for the characters, what does it tell us? It tells us that the great, good, noble Jedi Knights will cheerfully lie for spurious reasons and will not even be honourable enough to own it when caught. This gets re-emphasised in later movies, too, where we see the Jedi Council effectively ruling through the threat of violence; snatching away children to train them; interfering in politics and so on.
The characters just kind of do things, sometimes with only very hazy justification. As Ryan George on Pitch Meeting would say: “we need that for the movie to happen”. The characterisation of these people can’t even effectively portray them as good through their choices, they’re just good because they’re good regardless of what morally questionable things they actually do.
But what do these characters get up to, then?
The answer is that these people, living these extraordinary adventures on a stage set with extraordinary places, just go around in circles — never moving nearer to or farther from a different trajectory. These vacuous shadow puppets play out, over and over again, the same beats of war, peace and revolution. This all starts in 1977, but it’s been carried through over into nigh-on every instalment since:
The baddies will always have resistance fighters looking to topple them, because the baddies are bad and the resistance is good! The goodies will always have plotters looking to topple them, because the goodies are good and the plotters are bad!
Apparently that is a truism so grand and deep that it bears repeating, movie after movie.
We’re never shown anything more than that. We don’t see why the good guys are good, we’re just told. There’s no specific reason the villains are doing what they do, just that they are villains is explanation enough.
For a single film, I could forgive this. After decades of films, I just can’t grasp why anyone would care. The characters would need to double their daily calorie intake to even dream of becoming two-dimensional, and the repetitive, self-justifying plot is pointless and lacking in stakes.
Because the films go on like this, with each “saga” just adding a lap on the merry-go-round, it doesn’t feel like anything matters. Oh, the bad guys got blown up? Well, it doesn’t matter — they’ll be back for the next macro plot beat. Oh, the good guys are on the ropes? Well, it doesn’t matter — they’ll be back for the next macro plot beat.
I’ve scoped out from the original Star Wars to start hurling opprobrium at the whole package, so let me rein it back in to just the original film.
Even in the 1977 movie, as a standalone feature, the story has a hard time conjuring any real stakes. A super-powerful weapon about to destroy the rebels should lend itself to some tension, there’s definitely the kernel of something there… but, as is the Star Wars way, it gets left to rot in the corner as weightless characters meander back-and-forth, because their meandering is considered the much more important story.
Let me give you three examples of what I mean by this.
The planet Alderaan is blown up in the first act by Darth Vader. This is Princess Leia’s home, apparently a peaceful world, and millions upon millions die. The consequences of this last approximately ten seconds: Leia looks upset, and Obi Wan has some mild indigestion “as though a thousand colas caused acid reflux and then were suddenly silenced by milk-of-magnesia”. That’s it. Alderaan is never mentioned again except as a debris field, and even then nobody really seems to care much.
I’m not getting the vibe that Alderaan really mattered that much, or that anyone is particularly cut-up about the deaths of everyone there. It doesn’t affect anyone in any long-term way.
Here’s another. Obi Wan Kenobi sacrifices himself in a light sabre fight with Vader, allowing Luke and his motley crew to escape. It’s supposed to be a meaningful moment and, to his credit, Mark Hamill goes some way to selling the importance and gravity of it. He’s sad at losing his mentor. But then, turns out, Obi Wan’s back! First as a voice-over, and then as a g-g-g-ghost! He’s not really dead. He’s still around, he regularly pops in and you can hold lengthy conversations with him. His only restriction is that, now, Obi Wan can’t touch anything… except he can kinda do that too — sitting on logs etc.
Suddenly, that massive sacrifice looks less like an important, emotional character moment and more like someone mildly inconveniencing themselves to move the film forward so that the characters can do some more meandering.
Here’s another. R2D2, who incidentally holds the records for most f-bombs ever beeped out in a motion picture, does the same thing as Obi Wan. On the Rebel’s last, desperate run against The Death Star — trying to destroy it before it can annihilate their base — R2 is hit! Oh no! Sparks explode everywhere! The lovable little bastard is silent, scorched and smouldering! With great victory, comes great sacrifice… truly, this world was not worthy of one so beautiful as- oh, no, wait, he’s fine. False alarm, everybody.
See what I mean? Characters die and either it doesn’t really matter much or they just come back again, so what’s so big a deal about them dying? It’s hard to believe these are hugely important things when put against that context… that context being the context that the film itself puts them in!
I’ll repeat myself again, because this is an important point: Star Wars isn’t a bad film. Bits of it are quite fun. It’s a vividly etched story, just not a very detailed or moving one, about some people running around in space kinda-sorta trying to stop James Earl Vader from being a big ol’ meanie.
That’s all fine — and saying it out loud isn’t cause for alarm or despair. You, I, everyone: we’re all entitled to derive pleasure and fun from things that aren’t necessarily world-beatingly good. All of us have films, or television programmes, or comics, or whatever that bring us pleasure even if, objectively, we’d have to concede that taken on their real merits they ain’t Citizen Kane.
Love Star Wars? Fill your boots! It makes you happy so go and be happy! My gripe isn’t with that or you. Live and let live.
My problem is that Star Wars, the original and everything since, is now a cultural touch-stone, with the second (or fifth…) instalment The Empire Strikes Back (1980) voted the greatest movie ever by Empire magazine. It’s mentioned almost daily in film reviews in comparisons to contemporary sci-fi. I don’t dislike the original film or its two sequels, nor do I have anything against people enjoying the rest of the franchise. What I dislike is this enormous, ten-mile-tall, stark naked emperor bestriding the film world like a colossus. It just isn’t that good.
“Ah, but what of its effects? All those special visual camera tricks, and models, and lighting work? Wasn’t all of that groundbreaking and worthy of canonisation?”, one might ask.
Yeah, the visual effects were pretty impressive, back in nineteen dickity-seven. They were hardly groundbreaking, though. For something to break new ground it must genuinely deliver a visual feast the like of which our eyes have not, previously, sampled.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is groundbreaking. Forbidden Planet (1956) is groundbreaking. So is Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), The Gold Rush (1925), Modern Times (1936), A Trip to the Moon / Le voyage dans la lune (1902), Toy Story (1995) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). All of them did things that were legitimately new to an audience’s understanding of visual effects. It’ll take a while to see, but I wonder if I’ll be mentally adding Oppenheimer (2023) to that list, for its combined use of IMAX; real explosions; modified lenses and film for miniatures work and its deeply unsettling soundscape.
Star Wars builds on what came before, particularly the static model-work and camera movement from 2001. It’s good, and very effective, but that isn’t the same as groundbreaking, is it? If we’re being honest?
I love and adore The Transformers: The Movie (1986) but I’d never describe it as groundbreaking. It doesn’t mean I don’t love it and have a wonderful (borderline religious) experience watching it.
If, then, the emperor has no clothes… if Star Wars (1977) is, at turns, fun; derivative; trend-setting; goofy; pacy; vacuous, vivid and imaginative but no more, how, then, has it and its entourage of media become this artistic behemoth? Why is it a monument to (allegedly) genius writing, never-beaten characterisation, unforgettable character journeys, incredible filmography, avant-garde and radical visual effects and unmatched storytelling — the like of which all of us should worship, pay homage to and burn incense for?
Because it was a hit film. A big box-office win. That’s why it spawned sequels, too. And then a prequel trilogy. Then another trilogy. Then TV programmes and, in the coming years, inevitably, more films.
It helps that lots of people saw it when they were young, and that rose-tinted nostalgia can cover any number of flaws [see previous re myself and The Transformers].
Some big names were also involved — or people who went on to become big names. Big studios sidled in for a cup and a slice, too. They have every motivation to encourage reactions to the movie to tend towards superlative.
And the merchandise! Oh, the merchandise. The toys, as far as my own eyes and experience can attest, have never been off the shelves. Then there’s the comics, the books, the games, the repulsive Funko Pops… Spaceballs the lunchbox, Spaceballs the T-shirt, Spaceballs the flamethrower!
Remember, studios exist to make money — not to make films, that is just a means to an end — and in the first quarter of the 21st Century there is nothing we regard so highly as profitability. Indeed, the lines between something being artistically good and profitable are intentionally blurred a little more with each passing year.
No cause for wonder, then, that we’re encouraged to talk about Star Wars like it’s the second coming! It’s a multimedia juggernaut — that must mean it’s artistically brilliant!
But, you know what? The biggest loser, out of all of this, is those three original Wars movies. Before the franchise got gobbled up by its own hype. Before it got regularly voted into the upper percentiles of so many Greatest Movie Ever Made lists, to rub shoulders with the likes of 12 Angry Men (1957); Some Like it Hot (1959); and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Before we collectively chose to misrepresent it as some massive work of genius on par with the Sistine Chapel and accept its profits as a placeholder for artistic achievement.
Before all that, it was just a fun little trio of films. They weren’t life changing or incredible works of cinema, but what they were was fine. They were enjoyable kids’ movies that inspired a generation to stretch their imaginations out into space — just like Christopher Reeve made them think, for a moment, that maybe a man could fly. That is most definitely not nothing: that is something beautiful and worth celebrating and it’s an achievement that Star Wars legitimately does merit.
So let’s cut the crap and just do that.
