Okay. As a nine-year-old kid – and long before I learned to appreciate Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as the truest work of science fiction cinema possible, Star
Wars was a really big deal to me, and that’s putting it mildly. George Lucas was
a kind of film making god, on the level of George Pal. What Lucas said about
the Star Wars universe was not to be questioned because it simply had to be
true! How simple life once was.
We all know Star Wars fans can be an extreme and wonderful kind of crazy. In spite of knowing that universe
doesn't make perfect sense, some still try to
project order and make it make sense. Nutters, right? What many forget - or perhaps don't realize
in the first place - is that Lucas was merely emulating the gaudy, mawkish and
often politically ham-fisted '50s sci-fi serials he worshiped as a kid, though
armed with advanced film-making techniques of his time. Inconsistencies were
bound to turn up.
Yet the same sort of scrutiny and
vain attempts at rationalization happens with H.G. Wells' earliest novels.
Certainly I spent many hours of my youth going through The War of the Worlds
with a highlighter, notepad and army of almanacs in a vain effort to establish
the invasion year, hours in my school library pouring over maps of greater
London in an attempt to pinpoint where Martian cylinders landed, and of course tracing
the paths of the narrator and his brother. To this day fandom around The War
of the Worlds continues this tradition, reverse engineering Martian
fighting-machines, handling-machines, cylinders, all while humming the music
from Jeff Wayne’s musical version.
Of course Wells didn’t dream as he
wrote those early novels that they would eventually be scrutinized for practicality. To him they were parables, cautionary tales, social commentary
disguised as satire.
Eventually I discovered the
impressive body of literary criticism about Wells, with much attention given to
his early scientific romances. At the same time I was reading every biography
of him, not to mention his own autobiography, and learned and how and why these
novels reflected his contemporary social and political views.
Despite this lifelong hobby of identifying
and contextualizing Wells’s ideas, I’ve never had much interest in filling out
the Star Wars timeline or character subplots beyond the most casual
conversation. No, not everything in episodes IV, V and VI made sense. Episodes
I, II and III had some seriously cringe-worthy moments and characters, but I
was satisfied with the overall story the same way I am satisfied by a great
steak dinner. I feast on the meat and potatoes, and push aside the Ewok and Jar
Jar parsley.
So here we are on the eve of a new
era for the Star Wars universe. Beyond finding myself missing a lot of the
enthusiasm for these next chapters that I had for episodes I through VI, I feel
not a little bit of skepticism about them. Perhaps it’s because Lucas checked
himself out of the Skywalker universe and turned over the keys to the kingdom
to one of my generation, J.J. Abrams. Checking Abrams’ filmography on IMDb, I
realize I have only seen one other film listed among his credits – and seen by accident,
I have to admit, Cloverfield, a mindless sci-fi movie about a
monster wrecking New York City, as seen through the eyes of forgettable late
gen-X hipsters that I enjoyed seeing expire one after the other. The movie I thought
was enjoyable if viewed as a ‘couple of wasting hours of mindlessness.’ Abrams
was a producer, which gives me hope. Why?
My biggest worry has to do with
applying too much grime and realism to the Star Wars storyline. It’s a strange
worry I suppose given that I’ve never had interest in comic book super heroes
and tend to ignore the movies Hollywood churns out these days. The one
exception was the recent Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. Of course part of
it could be sympathy for my son’s Batman phase which coincided with the movies.
I took him to see the last installment, The Dark Knight Rises, which
to my great surprise I enjoyed precisely because of its grimy appeal to realism.
That said, and as hypocritical as it
almost certainly is, I don’t think I’ll be able to tolerate much of that in the
new Star Wars movies. Give me another steak dinner and trust me to push aside the
parsley. It doesn’t all have to make sense. Lawrence Kasdan, a writer for The
Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, is directly involved in at least
the first of the new installments, so there’s a one place to pin my skeptic-tinged
hopes.
But above all, the biggest deal
breaker to me is if Luke Skywalker did or does turn to the dark side, an idea
that has Star Wars fandom abuzz. This simply cannot happen, as far as I’m
concerned.
So, too much realism and the new
installments will be regarded by me just as simple fan fiction.
Make Luke a Sith, and the ‘J.J.’ in director
J.J. Abrams’ name might as well stand for Jar Jar. And I say that knowing Jar
Jar Binks was recently mentioned by George Lucas as one of his favorite
characters. Ouch, now my head hurts.
This post was mostly off the cuff
and barely edited. It probably makes as much sense as Star Wars itself.
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