[The Scornful Roman]

Hi, new poster here! I'm not sure if everyone has read these Salon.com essays on the Star Wars movies, so I'm posting the links here, along with brief quotes, to hopefully inspire discussion and commentary. I look forward to reading your comments!

First up, the article by Jean Tang that asserted that Movie!Lord of the Rings is 'glorified video trivia' and doesn't compare to Star Wars.

http://archive.salon...wars/index.html

Far simpler than Tolkien's intricately crafted Middle-earth, the universe of "Star Wars" is more similar to our own. Fittingly, "Star Wars" is the more human of the two movies, infusing each major character with thematic clarity befitting flesh-and-blood action heroes. Recall Luke Skywalker's impatient dreamer, Obi-Wan Kenobi's involved and steady-handed mentor, Leia's spunky rebel princess, Han Solo's self-serving cynic, and remember that all four undergo individual transformation: Luke learns to use the Force, Obi-Wan sacrifices himself for the rebel cause, Leia thaws and Han learns to care about others. Lucas even delineates the Laurel-and-Hardy-esque droids: C3PO as the talkative killjoy, R2D2 the headstrong one, with a child's prankster sensibility. Undoubtedly, the dynamism of Lucas' pop icons have formed many a case study for Scriptwriting 101.

And...

In "Star Wars," humanity is the point. In "LOTR," with fans and followers in the tens of millions, Tolkien's world is the point. And clearly, this emphasis on alternate worlds is better equipped to feed today's appetite for sheer spectacle (see a long list of cinematic disposables, starting not least with "The Phantom Menace").

Fanatics in any realm are difficult to satisfy, but Tolkien's are the type who engage in prolonged, heated debate over authenticity, all the way down to the technical accuracy of props. (An unauthorized photograph of a spiked wheel taken on set created a global rift among faithful readers before the film came out.) Just in making the movie, Jackson shouldered enormous challenges safeguarding it against similar nitpicking.

So meticulous is Tolkien's Middle-earth, with its genealogy charts and linguistic consistency, and so loyal Jackson and his crew to its detail, "LOTR" becomes a sort of glorified video trivia game, with dense graphics and a relentless pace.

As a rebuttal, Eric Lipton offers his own story of how his disillusionment with Star Wars turned him to Lord of the Rings.

http://archive.salon...002/01/18/lotr/

It is the climax of the movie, and easily one of the most powerful scenes in the history of cinema. Luke Skywalker, facing Darth Vader at the end of "The Empire Strikes Back," losing both the battle and his hand, crouches precariously on a small bridge over a seemingly bottomless pit. Vader picks that traditional bonding moment to inform Luke that he is actually Luke's father.

Luke's whine of disagreement is understandable: His dad is a genocidal planet-destroying maniac, he just lost one of his more useful evolutionary tools and, let's face it, Luke generally whines about everything anyway.


Darth's revelation takes all the film's previous insistence on the easy dichotomy of good vs. evil and throws it, well, into a bottomless pit. Evil can spawn good, and good can become evil, and the lines in between are fluid and ever changing. Suddenly the "Star Wars" universe is much more real and interesting...

...Every night at bedtime, snuggled in my "Empire Strikes Back" sheets and sleeping blanket, I would imagine myself up on that bridge, confronting not just Darth Vader but all of the universe's complexities. I knew there would be no easy answers -- at least not until the third "Star Wars" film -- an agonizing three whole years away.

But I knew there'd be answers. The characters -- and thus the makers -- of "Star Wars" were my heroes. They wouldn't let me down.

I was so hooked.

Twenty years later, I find my mind has wandered back to Cloud City; same bridge, same pit. Again, I imagine myself as Luke, only now it's George Lucas wearing the heavy-breathing Darth mask, standing over my head. And he's reaching out to me, holding some crappy "Pod Racing" video game, contemptuously chanting: "Who's your daddy? Who's your daddy?"

Wow. That's pretty much how I feel.

And here's this last article, which basically says that Star Wars ruined the glorious post-Vietnam darkness of cinema anyway:

http://www.salon.com...wars970127.html

I posted a thread on this matter over at Godawful.net; here's the link: http://www.godawful....opic.php?t=5831

Enjoy.

[ernesttomlinson]

That "Star Wars ruined movies" canard (sometimes Jaws is blamed instead) has been around for heaven knows how long. It's one of Peter Biskind's motifs in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, for example. I got a different perspective on this from a good friend of mine who was in her teens in the '70s and saw Star Wars as the first movie in years that she actually liked, that had some real adventure to it. (She spoke contemptuously of the 1977 movie that beat out Star Wars for the Oscar, Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I'm inclined to agree with her.) But it looks like you covered the ground pretty well in the godawful.net forum.

I've already posted a link to this Salon.com article about Star Wars but I'll post it again as an addition to your list. A fellow named Steven Hart wrote skeptically about Lucas's "modern myth" claims for the Star Wars movies:

http://archive.salon...ucas/index.html

[The Scornful Roman]

I've already posted a link to this Salon.com article about Star Wars but I'll post it again as an addition to your list. A fellow named Steven Hart wrote skeptically about Lucas's "modern myth" claims for the Star Wars movies:

http://archive.salon...ucas/index.html

Thanks, I haven't read that one before.

[Just your average movie goer]

The Scornful Roman... welcome to the forum, mate.

Those articles were fantastic reading, guys. Thank you for posting them. I just finished reading them now, hence the late reply to this thread. But there was a lot of good stuff in there, that covered a large amount of territory too.

[Chefelf]

Welcome to the forums, The Scornful Roman! Thanks for posting the articles. Salon.com always has a lot of great articles on many different topics.

Thanks again for posting the articles!

[azerty]

Very interesting reading...

Its a bit rough to say that Star Wars ruined movies though. George maybe opened that door a little, and a lot of wankers ran through it with their cameras blazing, (and George himself came running after them a little later on), but remember your history!

George wanted to make his Star Wars movie. Most studios thought the idea was ridiculous. He managed to make it anyway, everybody giving him shit the whole time about how stupid it was. He showed the finished product to "professional critics" who agreed it was total rubbish. He was so convinced by everyone else that the movie was crap that he hid in Hawaii on opening day. And of course it was such a hit that it played non stop in some theatres for over a year. I think at first he was gratified and humbled by it all.

Now if it hadn't been a hit, people would look at that film as a fine example of a driven guy who just determined to try his own bizarre experiment. The problem is that every damn movie coming out these days is the SAME damn experiment. But that is our fault for going to see the movies, not his fault for making the first one. I mean come 0n! People complain about Van Helsing as if they felt it was going to be a good film and they were jipped. Of the two choices - (pay and complain while the corporation laughs all the way to the bank, or don't go and see it); well nobody chooses the second, except me.

If you want to blame someone (other than our miserable selves) for ruining the movies, we have to find out who made the NEXT blockbuster movie after Star Wars and blame them. And the next one after that.

But George really had some balls back in the old days. What movies were around then? Billie Jack, Island at the Top of the World (for kids), Logans Run, Krakatoa East of Java, etc. Movies which were designed so that you could arrive late with your popcorn and since nothing happened for the first 20 minutes it wouldn't matter. George was like punk rock arriving in the 70's. It's going to be fast, loud, and fun! We're not even going to have credits at the beginning. In fact, the very first scene is going to blow away anything you have ever seen before in the movies, so WAKE UP! To hell with that pointless pontificating about the futility of life etc... And just like you can't blame Jonny Rotten for all the wankers with pink mohawks you see prancing around these days with obligatory tattoo and nose ring, you can't really blame Star Wars for today's big budget mindless crap. Now maybe you can blame the "later Lucas", but in my opinion that is not the same thing. He became a follower. But a follower of who?

If you really want to blame someone, them blame Spielberg. For over the top, sappy, formula movies without any subtlety at all, whose only purpose is to take your money, well he is the king. So personally I blame E.T. as being the cause of everything bloated, stupid, illogical, boring, tear jerking, manipulative, overbearing, and ridiculous in modern movies. But didn't you cry when ET died, only to be brough back to life 2 minutes later? Didn't you cheer when the bicycles started to fly? Yeah, like I cheered when Artoo started to fly.

[The Scornful Roman]

Chefelf and... um, Average Movie-Goer: thanks for the warm welcome. For the sake of completeness, I thought I'd add this link in too:

http://dir.salon.com...ucas/index.html

I have to say, whether you think that Jar Jar Binks is a racist stereotype or not (and didn't you notice the Chinese accents that the Nemodians had? ), I think that Mr. Lucas's response to the author posing the question to him shows where his head is at.

"You hurt my feelings," he told me privately after the discussion ended. And I suppose that's a possibility. But Lucas, as he had shown, isn't willing to extend his viewers the same courtesy.

I assume that he felt attacked. Maybe it was the setting: There were dozens of university students seated before him in rapt attention, eager to learn from him, the George Lucas. And I had burst his bubble -- again. Back when "The Phantom Menace" came out last summer, several critics accused Lucas of perpetuating racist stereotypes, particularly with the Gungan character Jar Jar Binks. Joe Morgenstern, writing for the Wall Street Journal, called Binks a "Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit on platform hoofs, crossed annoyingly with Butterfly McQueen."