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May 18, 1999 The Force Returns |
To be more precise, it was late May of 1977, at the Mall Garden Twin in Albertville, Alabama. We were visiting my mother's parents, and most of my extended family went out one warm night to catch a movie. I was eight, fresh out of the second grade, and the movie, of course, was Star Wars.
Even at that age, I was already a science fiction fan. My grandfather worked for NASA, my then-teenaged aunt had introduced me to "Star Trek" on television, and my bedroom was filled with all the space paraphernalia that one little boy could amass without getting into serious trouble. The cliche would be to say that none of that prepared me for Star Wars... but the truth would be saying that all of it prepared me for the experience.
That movie was all I'd ever wanted, even before I knew what I wanted out of a movie--it was flash and bang and glorious vistas and scary monsters and fantastic spaceships and grand heroes and diabolical villains and magic and laser swords and a princess and a knight and talking robots, all wrapped up in stirring music and a vast, epic scale. Star Wars hit me, with all its extraordinary, playful velocity at just the right age. I--and most of my contemporaries--have never been the same. In retrospect, we never had a chance.
There have been many--far too many--columns like this written over the last few months, with misty-eyed scribblers in their twenties and thirties waxing rhapsodic about the film and the childhood memories associated with it. To be perfectly honest, I'm about as sick of them as you are--so I'll say no more about my own youthful obsession with these movies.
But it's worth asking ourselves, on the eve of the first new Star Wars movie in sixteen years, why are so many of us so captivated by these films? What has the power to keep drawing untold millions back to those long ago, far away worlds? It's an oft-repeated but true statement that this year's Episode I: The Phantom Menace is the most eagerly-anticipated movie of all time. People have literally been waiting in line to see it for weeks. Why? Nobody acted like this over, say, The Godfather Part III, or Jurassic Park: The Lost World. (And a good thing, too, since both of those movies were awful.)
Over the last 22 years, far too many people have written off the popularity of these movies on their special effects. At first blush, it's easy to see why--in 1977, nobody had ever seen anything even remotely like the images rocketing across those theater screens, and every early report about The Phantom Menace agrees that it is visually astonishing.
Yes, but... so what? Hollywood has tried for over twenty years to duplicate the success of Star Wars by dumping millions into movies with stunning visuals and lousy plots: The Black Hole, Tron, Flash Gordon, The Fifth Element, Batman And Robin, The Lawnmower Man... the list of bad science fiction movies since Star Wars could go on for page after page. Even entertaining movies with great effects like Independence Day and the original Jurassic Park have come and gone, generating millions in box-office receipts during their summer releases, but barely leaving a mark on the culture.
Star Wars is different. There's something about these movies that touches a very primal chord in people--and not by accident. When he originally conceived of his epic, creator George Lucas spent years studying the heroic myths of cultures all around the world (he was greatly influenced by the late Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a philosophical consideration of heroic sagas). The underlying story itself--the hero's journey--has antecedents in cultures as diverse as Japanese, Hindu and American Indian legends, as well as the western classics. There's literally something in these movies for every culture--because they were written with themes taken out of ancient legends from all over the world. Star Wars unabashedly celebrates the values of friendship, family, self-sacrifice, loyalty and love. It's very difficult today to find many popular entertainments that even take such things seriously, much less hold them up as worthy ideals.
These movies are special, though, not just because of the grand themes or the mythic underpinning--they reach us by honestly appealing to emotions rarely appreciated in this pessimistic age. These are stories that, for all their extra-worldly trappings, celebrate the most basic elements of humanity.
When I look back over the first three films, two individual scenes have always stood out for me. In terms of purely emotional impact, I don't think you can top farmboy Luke Skywalker watching the sunset in Star Wars, or Yoda lifting a spaceship out of a swamp in The Empire Strikes Back. Both are short scenes, with no dialogue or sophisticated special effects to speak of. Their power comes from the simply but perfectly shot visuals and the soaring John Williams score--and from the primal emotions of wonder evoked by them.
And last, but maybe best of all, these are great entertainments. I still remember my dad walking out of the first film and exclaiming, "It's been forever since I went to a movie that was fun!" Lucas has deeper things to say, certainly--but he's wise enough to worry about telling a great story first, as well as he possibly can, and let his messages lie comfortably beneath the surface. In the meantime, the rest of us can step out of the everyday and have a grand time for two hours.
It's difficult to express how much I'm looking forward to seeing the new movie. When Lucas released a two-minute preview of The Phantom Menace last November, I remember being literally stunned as I watched it for the first time--after all these long years, I was really watching some new Star Wars! This wasn't a rumor any more--this was going to happen. Tonight, with the first showing almost exactly 24 hours away as I type these words, I can scarcely believe that I'm going to walk into a theater tomorrow, and step back in time, to long, long ago... as I said, about 22 years.
I don't know whether this movie will be everything I want it to be. I don't know if it's humanly possible for any movie to live up to the expectations for The Phantom Menace. But I do know that there's an eight-year-old somewhere inside who's going to have a hard time sleeping tonight. I'll tell you all about it (with appropriate notices so as not to spoil the plot) on Thursday.