Cast: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford

Director: George Lucas

Screenplay: George Lucas

Running time: 2 hrs 10 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure



CRITIQUE:


Let’s face it: George Lucas’ Star Wars isn’t exactly a serious piece of cinema. It picked up a Saturday matinee concept of outer space opera and made it bigger, louder and more epic in scope to overwhelm cinema silverscreens. Kids were its target audience, but even this generation-spanning blockbuster of 1977 had drawn even adults, luring millions of fanboys that when one declares ‘Star Wars sucks’, you’d be whacked by a lightsaber stick by a teenager wearing a Darth Vader helmet. Sure, it’s a wondrous piece of entertainment that has probably changed the face of technological special-effects wizardry like no other film produced that time, and along with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Star Wars has deeply penetrated the consciousness of the mass film-viewing that defines ‘spectacle’ and ‘blockbuster’. The sights are magnificent to behold, but then this is flawed, ridden with clunky dialogues and the plot predictability factor is as noticeable as Jabba’s tremendous body mass. Nevertheless, there should be an element of respect given to Lucas for having the fantastic imagination to kickstart this cultural groundbreaker into a trilogy (and even more cashing-cowing of its prequel trilogy).


The story is fine. Darth Vader is legendary. Obi Wan Kenobi is awesome. But enough of fanboy talk; Star Wars is an unashamedly a postmodernist take on the Arthurian legend: Kenobi as Merlin, and even the interplay between Princess Leia, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker is that of Guinevere, Lancelot and Arthur. And of course, they have lightsabers instead of swords, and they have Jedis instead of Knights of the Round Table. The comparisons never stop. The film’s save-the-girl plot histrionics is reminiscent of John Ford’s The Searchers. It’s easy to say that Lucas had adopted the Westerns and put these cowboys into space. But Star Wars is indeed an important film because of its cultural influence. It preceded the BIG, BOISTEROUS action movies of our time. It defied the ambiguities and anxieties of New Hollywood, the tragicomic countercultural Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Riders and The Graduate and brought back new morally cleansed, squeaky black-and-white pictures of the battle between good and evil. And it heralded the blast-off of Hollywood’s obsession with franchise, sequels, and blockbuster mentality.


VERDICT:

A technical special-effects showstopper, Lucas’s original Star Wars is as magnificent a picture that has been profoundly embedded into popular culture as Spielberg’s Jaws and Raider of the Lost Ark. But alas, its plot is nothing profound.


RATING: B+