Star Wars

Jun032005

Alien Sunset

For the record, my favorite scene in all six Star Wars films is also perhaps the most iconic one, the moment in the very first movie when Luke Skywalker watches two suns sink toward the barren horizon of Tatooine. It’s a beautiful scene no matter how you examine it: visually, thematically, musically, emotionally. It’s a powerful evocation of youthful restlessness, both melancholy and hopeful. And it’s magical because it takes something that is mundane, if beautiful — a simple sunset — and transforms it into a novelty, the double sunset of another world. We identify with the image because we see something similar all the time, but we thrill at its strangeness. It is simultaneously familiar and unearthly.

How’d you like to see something like that scene, only for real? Something as close to standing in Luke Skywalker’s boots as we’re likely to get any time soon? My friends, please click “Continue Reading” to experience the unspeakably cool…

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May262005

Movie Review: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

[Ed. note: Sorry it’s taken me so long to post my thoughts on ROTS, but like I said in a comment for an earlier entry, this movie is a big deal for me and it’s taken a while to absorb and process it. Given that it’s been out for a week and the box office returns for last weekend were flat-out astounding, I’m going to assume that half the planet’s population has already seen it. If, however, you are one of the handful of folks who didn’t come down with “Jedi flu” last week, be warned that this entry contains more spoilers than my usual movie reviews. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it can’t be helped in this particular case.]

I finally got to see my long-imagined lava-pit duel as well as the planet of the Wookiees (although the latter amounted to little more than a teasing glimpse). By themselves, these bits of fanboy wish fulfilment would probably be enough to earn Revenge of the Sith my personal thumbs-up. But as it turns out, the sixth and final Star Wars movie gave me a lot of other reasons to like it, too. It was, in fact, everything I was hoping for, a redemptive finish to the generally lackluster prequel trilogy and a successful, plausible bridge into the “next generation story” told in the original trilogy.

That’s not to say that Sith was a perfect movie, or even a perfect Star Wars movie. But I thought it was a surprisingly good movie, and, for me at least, a completely satisfying one.

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May202005

The Circle Is Now Complete

I just got home from the theater. It’s late, and I’ve got a heavy day of work tomorrow, so any kind of detailed review will have to wait. But I will say this much:

Twenty-two years ago, I cried at the death of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi.

Tonight, I cried at his birth in Revenge of the Sith.

This movie is everything I hoped for, and probably not at all what most of the people going to see it are expecting. It’s not heroic summertime derring-do, as all the other Star Wars films have been. This one is nothing short of a Greek tragedy.

As far as I’m concerned, Uncle George has redeemed himself, at least as far as the prequel trilogy goes. As for the Not-So-Special Editions of the original trilogy, well, that’s another case entirely…

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May192005

Time to Line Up Myself

Just a quick note to let you all know I’m heading off the theater to line up for my 8 PM screening… because advance tickets may guarantee a seat, but they don’t guarantee a good one!

See you all on the other side of the galaxy!

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May182005

Almost There… Almost There…

A little under one hour from now, the long wait will be over and the die-hard fans will walk into the first 12:01 AM screenings of the last Star Wars movie ever. And then I’ll do the same eighteen hours after that.

I have to admit that my feelings at this moment are bittersweet. In a way, it’s like the last day of high school. I’m eagerly looking forward to signing yearbooks, accepting my diploma, and having the time of my life at the all-night graduation party, but I’m also sad because I’ve realized that a really big chapter of my life is coming to an end. As the Emperor once said to Luke Skywalker — or will say, depending on how you look at it — “Only now, at the end, do you understand.”

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May182005

My First Experience with “Spoilers”

It was the springtime of 1980, and the future was bearing down on me like a runaway bantha.

I was ten, the school year was winding down, and very soon the fifth grade would be behind me. So would elementary school. Come fall, I’d be spending my days in that great, fog-shrouded unknown called middle school. I’d been hearing rumors about what I could expect when I got there, and frankly I wasn’t looking forward to it. No one could tell me the point of changing classrooms and teachers multiple times during the day. There were stories about massive amounts of homework. Some said they held activities where they made you dance with girls. (I was never one of those stereotypical boys who disliked girls on principle, but the thought of dancing filled me with terror.) Then there was the transportation issue. My elementary school was within a stone’s-throw of my house, and I’d always walked to and from home; now I’d have to take the bus, one of those big, rattling, smelly yellow things that you always had to worry about missing. And what was this nonsense about having to take a shower… with other boys… at school? Revolting!

Thankfully, though, I had things to distract me from my middle-school anxieties. There was a whole three months of summer vacation coming up, and with them was the promise of all the bike-riding, Slurpee-swilling, and treehouse comic-book reading I could stand. My parents were planning to take me and my cousin Stacey on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon as soon as school was over. And, oh yeah, there was a new Star Wars movie about to premiere.

I could hardly wait.

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May172005

The Dark Side of Marketing Clouds Everything

Up until a couple days ago, I was thinking that the hype machine had been curiously subdued on the matter of Revenge of the Sith. I just wasn’t seeing the kind of overheated, artificial hysteria that preceded The Phantom Menace back in ’99 — all the fast-food tie-ins, the TV commercials, the billboards, the collectible Pepsi cans, the flood of new toys. That was overkill, even for someone like me, a compulsive collector who loves a good graphic design that incorporates beloved characters and logos.

I thought maybe we were getting a different approach with Sith, something more organic and natural, based on word-of-mouth like the buzz that fueled the success of the original Star Wars in 1977. I thought perhaps the bean-counters had realized that they really didn’t need to advertise this one much, aside from the usual movie trailers, because everyone already knew it was coming.

Apparently I just wasn’t paying attention.

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May142005

It’s Like We’re Living in the Future!

I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone to know that I’ve already got my tickets for Revenge of the Sith:

Tickets from the future? But how?

I would like you to note that even though I’ll be seeing the movie on opening day, I’m not attending the very first midnight screening, or a wee-hours-of-the-morning screening, or even a matinee. I’m going to an evening show like a civilized human being. It’s not that I’ve gotten too old to do the midnight shows; I just choose not to in this instance. Because I’m not that much of a fanboy. I can be patient, just like any other grown-up who has a real life and who doesn’t think that a most-likely inferior prequel to a movie he saw almost thirty years ago is some kind of highlight of the whole frakkin’ year.

Besides, all the midnight shows were already sold out.

Incidentally, I would like to briefly note how amazing it is to me that you can order movie tickets a week in advance over the Internet, then walk into the lobby of your local Megaplex, stick a credit card into a machine, and watch the machine automatically print out your tickets for you without you having to do another thing. I remember when I was working at a theater a little over a decade ago and we thought same-day, in-person advance ticket sales were pretty cutting edge. This, however… this is real “twenty minutes into the future” kind of stuff, kids.

Now, if only somebody would get to work on those flying cars. Or even just levitating cars, like Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder. I could really get into driving a landspeeder. Or better yet, one of those snazzy speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. Yeah, there we go…

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May122005

A Wallet Full of Bread Cards

I was seven years old in the summer of 1977, the prime age of susceptibility to a story featuring young, swashbuckling heroes, strange-looking creatures, and scary — but not too scary — villains. (See also Potter, Harry, modern kids and.) I’m sure I must’ve seen a few movies on the big screen before then — I vaguely recall a couple of early-70s live-action Disney films about people in really bad polyester knits — but the first truly memorable film I saw in a theater…
Wait. Stop.

I’m not going to continue with that thought. My experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time couldn’t have been much different than a lot of other people’s. We were all kids, we’d never seen anything like it, we stood in lines that went around the block (literally, in my case — I saw the film at the long-lost Centre Theatre in Salt Lake; there was no lobby to speak of, and the only place to queue up was outside, on the street), big spectacle, big excitement, tiny little brains melting, lifelong obsessions forming, blah blah blah.

We were all there, weren’t we? And those of you who weren’t have probably heard about it from someone who was. It was the defining communal experience of our generation, at least until the towers fell.

But here’s the thing that was unique about my personal experience: I didn’t actually want to see Star Wars. I had no interest in it whatsoever, and, in fact, I remember being frightened of it. I don’t recall why, but something in the TV ads gave me a major case of the willies.

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May102005

Yeah, But Will I Like It?

The Sith reviews, both professional and otherwise, are starting to trickle in, and, so far, they’re generally positive. Just about every one I’ve read takes the obligatory potshot at Uncle George’s less-than-stellar dialogue-writing abilities, but the emerging consensus is that ROTS is the best of the prequel trilogy — a dubious distinction, I’ll concede, but hey, you take what you can get. A few reviewers are even enthusiastic enough to rank it alongside the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back as the best of the entire saga.

That’s good to hear. Because of those reviews, I am finally beginning to relax a little. There’s never been any question that I would see this movie regardless of the reviews, nor have I worried about whether everyone else in the theater hates it except me. I figure I’ve been in the position of defending the indefensible plenty of times before, so what’s one more battle? But I have worried that maybe I wouldn’t like Revenge of the Sith. And I really, really want to like this one.

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