Star Wars: Special Edition Rating — Worthless Directed and written by George Lucas With Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew, David Prowse, Eddie Byrne, and the voice of James Earl Jones.
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Star Wars launched its own set of enduring pop personalities, only some of them belonging to people. But the prospect of spending quality time with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), C3PO, Han Solo (Harrison Ford), R2-D2, Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), Chewbacca, or even Ben “Obi-Wan” Kenobi (Alec Guinness) is at best incidental to the pleasures the movie has to offer. None of these characters has any depth, and they’re all treated like the fanciful props and settings–as pulp staples that keep the action going. In this respect, Star Wars stands a universe apart from such SF touchstones as Forbidden Planet (1956) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to which it’s highly indebted for many details. Star Wars is grounded in the short-term rewards of TV watching, where every moment tends to be equal in emotional importance to every other and where the only serious continuity is in a consistency of mild diversion rather than in a persistence of personality. This form of entertainment can only be called lite–constructed out of ersatz familiar materials meant to be admired for their momentary cuteness or for details of their design.
Twenty years ago Star Wars postulated itself as both the beginning of something (a new way of marketing toys) and the end of something (an older way of moviemaking, commemorated by a heap of favorite bits plundered from movies ranging from King Kong to Triumph of the Will)–an ingenious form of doublethink echoed in the very premise of a fantasy of the future beginning with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” Today it relaunches itself as a “special edition” in the middle of a nightmarish continuum, with a trailer for both of the retooled sequels, an entire ad (rather than a mere logo) for the technology of THX sound, and, after “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” the suggestive and ominous title: “Episode IV: A New Hope,” heralding three future prequels.
Now let me be fair. Star Wars may be a wall, but it doesn’t surround a concentration camp. It surrounds a kind of moviemaking and a kind of humanity that it has been supplanting and making irrelevant (and milking) for the past 20 years. The success of this movie convinced studio heads that movies should be made to sell merchandise (the major point of Mel Brooks’s underrated lampoon Spaceballs), that antisocial ten-year-old boys are the viewers to target, and that anyone who thinks otherwise about movies can take a hike. If every existing print of Star Wars were burned to a crisp, just like Luke’s aunt and uncle, I doubt that the world would be a much better place, because the changes it has helped to usher in are already part of the modern world. But I don’t think I’d shed any tears.
