It makes me feel old and yet strangely young to say this, but I saw the first Star Wars in the theater. It’s hard to imagine now, but it was a sensation.
It came out in May 1977 and ended up staying in some theaters for more than a year. I can’t recall whether I saw it early in its run, or later on, but I do remember that the theater was packed, the audience jubilant. At the time, it was like nothing else ever put on film.
With The Rise of Skywalker, the final film, the ninth in a trilogy of trilogies, opening in theaters Friday, and with a tween boy in my household, Star Wars and what it has wrought are on my mind. Objectively speaking, these are not great movies, and yet they have built up a cultural gravity that seems as inescapable as a black hole. How is it that the film I saw when I was 6 or 7 was the beginning of a story that’s still being told?
It’s hard to overstate how much Star Wars and its immediate successors changed cinema. As the first film in the space Western genre (although an argument could be made for Star Trek, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers as the first voyagers to that ultimate frontier), Star Wars birthed a new and all-American type of storytelling. It had all of the American optimism, which was a tonic in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam malaise era. That it was goofy, not particularly well written and kind of schlocky was over-ridden by the film’s energy, verve and special effects, which were amazing on the big screen.
Star Wars and its successors were meant to be watched with child-like wonder. There’s a reason George Lucas started that first film with “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …,” and every installment starts the same way, to divorce us from our earth-bound critical faculties. Think a little about the films and they all come crashing down, though I think the current trilogy functions better as a narrative than the previous ones.
My son wanted to watch Return of the Jedi recently, and I couldn’t ignore just how cringe-inducing the cute little Ewoks are, an animist native population stumbled upon by our white heroes. The effort to make the current films more representative, with the young female Jedi Rey and the former stormtrooper Finn, who is black, among other diverse characters, led to a petty, ugly backlash on the internet, that deep well from which all petty backlashes now spring.
And how is it that the fearsome Empire manages to bungle its every advantage? During the “global war on terror,” do the films read differently? As the old saying goes, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. Even as a child, I wasn’t sure the destruction of the Death Star and all the people on it was something to celebrate, but this was a war we were supposed to be happy about.
An argument could be, and probably has been made that Star Wars gave rise to our shallow culture of movie blockbusters, currently embodied most fully by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Those films, particularly the last two Avengers films, Infinity War and Endgame, were sprawling and preposterous, over-burdened with unearned seriousness, full of lame posturing and juvenile wordplay. These films are totalizing, if not totalitarian, in their unspoken belief that it’s fine to wield vast power so long as you’re on the side of the angels, forgetting the old maxim that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
For films that resist critical interpretation, the Star Wars saga has produced some excellent reviews, and by excellent I don’t mean “positive” but smartly written.
The New Yorker’s film critic, Pauline Kael, started her brief September 1977 review of Star Wars thus: “The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head; for young audiences Star Wars is like getting a box of Cracker Jack which is all prizes. This is the writer-director George Lucas’s own film, subject to no business interference, yet it’s a film that’s totally uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect with the mass audience. There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the double sunset. It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus.”
And A.O. Scott’s review of The Rise of Skywalker for The New York Times is a master class: “The struggle of good against evil feels less like a cosmic battle than a longstanding sports rivalry between teams whose glory days are receding. The head coaches come and go, the uniforms are redesigned, certain key players are the subjects of trade rumors, and the fans keep showing up.”
I can’t really argue with that, but viewers of Scott’s age, and mine, who grew up with Star Wars, each have our own relationships with this long story. What I love most about the films are the world-building scenes. The droids marooned on Tatooine, and Ben Kenobi saying, “Mos Eisley. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” And the workings of the Force and other details that make this movie universe what it is.
The beginning of The Force Awakens struck me as a beautiful piece of filmmaking, in which every detail counts. The dialogue is so sharp and the visual cues, such as the bloody handprint on the helmet of stormtrooper FN2187, soon to become Finn, convey meaning with an almost effortless grace. The introduction of Rey as a spirited, nameless young woman eking out a living among scavengers on a desert planet is a brief but glorious portrait of a life circumscribed yet still full of color and hope.
It’s fair to wonder, as I often do in watching these films, how do these characters find one another in the vast galaxy they inhabit? I suppose it’s the Force, which becomes a metaphor not for faith but for storytelling, for truth over falsehood and for the power of stories to forge connections.
What’s most surprising to me as I watch the films now is how much they resemble modern American life, albeit on a galactic scale. Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dustin’ crops, in the immortal words of Han Solo, but it isn’t unlike getting on a plane in Boston and getting out again only hours later in Sydney or Hong Kong, voyages that until relatively recently would have taken weeks of perilous sailing. Even interstate driving is like interstellar travel in our human scale. The difference between Luke Skywalker’s land speeder and a Toyota Land Cruiser isn’t an apples and oranges kind of thing. Who hasn’t thought of the jump to hyperspace while driving on a snowy night?
Above, I called The Rise of Skywalker the “final” Star Wars film, but that notion is as laughable as calling Return of the Jedi the final Star Wars film would have been in 1983. There’s too much money on the table to stop making these movies now.
Not that I’m complaining. I’m not going to see the movie the night it opens, or even in the first week, but there will be a new episode of The Mandalorian, a spinoff set just after the fall of the empire, on Disney Plus.
I could sign off with “May the Force be with us,” but it looks like it will be whether we want it to or not.
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Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
