Cinema
Star Wars
(U, selected cinemas)
Battle weary
Mark Steyn
Ididn't take in much of Star Wars in 1977, mainly because I was preoccupied with my date. Now it's back with a facelift in a technologically enhanced `special edi- tion', digitally remastered, with additional computer-generated inserts — so I sup- pose, in order to replicate the experience, I should have taken along my original date, technologically enhanced with additional silicone-generated implants, collagen lips, etc. Instead, I went on my own and, finding myself at a loose end, wound up watching the movie. In a flash, it all came flooding back. There's that guy with the bucket on his head, there's the dog with the stick-on moustache, and that wheelie-bin — what's it called? RU-1-2? No, hang on, R2-D2 and there's Princess Wossname with a cin- namon Danish glued to each ear, an inde- structible Seventies coiffure apparently immune to all digital enhancement. So, too, is the amazing Beige-O-Vision in which 90 per cent of the movie appears to have been shot.
Star Wars is the most successful movie ever; merchandising spin-offs alone have made George Lucas $4 billion; in America, on the first few days of its reissue, it out- grossed all five of this year's Best Picture nominees' entire take to date — combined. It's supposed to be `epic' and `primal', but, if so, it beats me. Fred Zinnemann, who died a few days ago, made a film that takes place in real time — 90 minutes — on one dusty monochrome main street lined with plywood house fronts and whose only spe- cial effect is Tex Ritter's plaintive rendition of the title song. Yet the forces that drive High Noon are truly primal and epic: it's big at its core. Star Wars, it seems to me, is epic only in the sense that the telephone book is epic.
If anything, it's the world's first video game: there are goodies and there are bad- dies, but, aside from the fact that their roles have been pre-assigned, there's little else motivating them. Alec Guinness as the retired Jedi knight Girlfrom-Ip Anema sorry, Obi-Wan Kenobi — harks fondly back to the `Old Republic, before the Empire', but, although this would seem to cast the film as an intergalactic version of a straightforward colonial liberation struggle, the Republican rebels are led by a Royal Family.
Cunningly, Lucas begins the film like a comic book or radio serial that's already been running ten years. Most movies are concerned to simplify — eliminate this character, combine those two — but Lucas hooked his Star Wars groupies with a Tolkienesque multitude of creatures, most of whom are entirely superfluous. For this `special edition', he's inserted Pizza the Action — sorry Jabba the Hutt, a sort of giant computerised cowpat — into a scene with Harrison Ford, but for no particular reason. Every background now teems with computer-generated Jurassic Park dinosaurs, out for a stroll, retrieving newspapers, looking for Jurassic lamp-posts. Though distracting, they complete the sense that this is a film constructed wholly from bits of other films. There's a Tin Man — the droid C-3P0, though he comes over like a gold-plated John Inman — and a Cowardly Lion — Chewbacca the Wookie; there's a bearded, robed Biblical sage — Obi-Wan; there's a Bogart figure, a strictly cash cynic played by Ford. `I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anybody,' muses Princess Leia about Han Solo — not an inappropriate name, given that it sounds like a euphemism for masturbation. Late in the movie, Lucas suddenly remembers he's forgotten to introduce the hero's best pal, so belatedly shoves in Luke Skywalker's chum Biggs Darklighter purely for the pur- pose of killing him off two minutes later.
If the characters are generic, the dia- logue barely makes that grade: at the height of battle, Luke's squadron comman- der instructs him, `Stabilise your rear deflectors.' I've been trying to stabilise mine for years, but even as sci-fi techno- babble that barely passes muster.
Nothing dates quicker than futuristic visions, and today Lucas's alternative uni- verse seems almost quaint: Luke's Shaun Cassidy hairdo, the soi-disant Stormtroop- ers looking like members of the Young Generation accompanying Lulu in a partic- ularly vigorous dance number. At the time, I felt the acting came in somewhere around the level of a Monogram B-western. But I've opened your e-mail, Mr Brompton.' that's unfair to B-westerns: the clunky ban- ter between Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill is more like the badly dubbed chat- up scenes of a Swedish porn film. 'Either I'm gonna kill her or I'm beginning to like her,' says Ford, as if he's been practising the line in front of the mirror all night and is now offering it for dictation to his stenographer. From, respectively, the `like her' and the `kill her', I think we're meant to deduce that this is what they call a love/hate relationship. Ford's acting improved over the years; for Fisher and Hamill, this was as good as it got. Such acting honours as there are here go to our own Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Divin' — sorry, Grand Moff Tarkin — and Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan. In that sense at least, to coin a phrase, the Empire strikes back.
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