Day 16 - A Film You Used to Love, But Now Hate
Here we go. If you didn’t already hate me for disliking Aliens be prepared to quit reading in disgust.
When I was young my mother purchased me the VHS box set of the original trilogy. I watched these films over and over and over again. They were some kind of wonderful. Then the re-done versions came to theaters and I saw all of them. It should have been magical but I don’t recall any of it. When The Phantom Menace came out I loved it. My friend and I (both 11) returned after a Friday night showing and busted out the broomsticks to play at being Jedi and Sith. Because The Phantom Menace was so awesome. What I’m saying is that I was young and stupid. I mostly stopped watching Star Wars after Episode III arrived (and I thought that one was pretty good, too). I returned to the original series recently and, while there are moments of greatness (“I know.”) it’s mostly just poorly written nonsense for kids. Now, let me be clear, there are plenty of movies ostensibly made for kids that are great in their own right; Where the Wild Things Are and the majority of Disney and Pixar films are still great to this 23 year old, among others. But Star Wars is just stupid. From the annoying main character to the horrible dialogue and the silly robot characters, everything is just too dumb for me to enjoy. If this movie wasn't so well loved I’d just be indifferent to it. But if I tell somebody that I don’t like Star Wars they’ll get all red faced and try to punch me. It’s happened. I really hope that as the generation of people that saw it as a kid in the theater dies out it will be recognized as mostly bad.
Notes:
- That’s not to say nothing good came from Star Wars. Knights of the Old Republic is a terrific video game and there are some books I recall liking in the Expanded Universe (of course, I was a kid when I read those, too).
- If you want to see something better than Star Wars I’d suggest the Indiana Jones series. It takes the only good part of Star Wars and gives him his own thing to do.
- Most of the reason why Indiana Jones is better than Star Wars is that it’s directed by Spielberg instead of Lucas and Lucas didn’t actually write the scripts. As Harrison Ford said about Lucas’s dialogue, “You can write this shit, George, but you can’t say it.” Agreed.
Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong...
ReplyDeleteThe bad thing is that you make a claim that it is bad film making and then follow it up with absolutely no reason as to why it is bad other than your personal feelings of it. That's all fine and dandy, but there are reasons why it's a landmark other than just cultural ones. The art production, the cinematography, the film editing, the inventiveness, the sheer scope of it all is unlike anything that came before it. It's the first film to create a strong enough universe to make a franchise out of itself. Others have tried and failed, none succeed as much as Star Wars does and it all starts in the original film. Personal feelings are fine, but the film is unlike anything that came before and even after. It's a movie making landmark. Also, if Star Wars didn't exist, then ILM wouldn't have made the technology possible for Pixar to happen. This is much bigger than a cultural phenomenon. I digress, though. The opening shot of Star Wars tells us everything we need to know about the story. As a pure film making technique, how can you not find even a shred of respect for this?
Harrison Ford's comment was more so tongue-in-cheek than anything. He was commenting on the nature of acting; people need to say stuff that's out there sci-fi and it's usually hard for actors to sell off a world that is not the viewer's own. Saying stuff like, "I used to shoot wombats in my starspeeder" or whatever sounds goofy and he was commenting on how goofy it sounds. He wasn't actually saying the dialogue was bad.
The whole point of this is to write about the topic of the day. So if I don't go into great detail about how poorly made Star Wars is I'm sure you'll forgive me as that is not the reason for the post. If anything, I give Star Wars a lot of credit for the production design and such. There's a lot of cool ideas in it that are expanded in to well made things in the EU. I really don't care about the landmark quality of the film. Historicity is meaningful for history books. As a movie it mostly fails. The plot too generic, the people too boring or poorly written. The action not exciting enough (that lightsaber duel, while iconic, is slow and boring as all get out. Thankfully they upped the ante on that front in the prequel films). As a movie it fails at everything except being popular and having some good ideas. There are few movies that can thrive on ideas and looks alone. Star Wars isn't one of them.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't care about the original context for Ford's line. It rings true when applied to the poorly written excuse for dialogue in the film.