StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Where do you turn when you want to keep your kids occupied for a half hour so you and your spouse can have uninspired missionary-style sex? You put on a movie they’ll enjoy, but not a movie you’ll miss watching. You put on a movie that doesn’t tax your imagination, keep you on the edge of your seat, or make you think about deep questions. In short, you put on a shit movie. And if you’re really looking to dredge the bottom of the barrel – I’m talking Manos, Hands of Fate or Battlefield Earth-style here, folks – you put on a movie that is full of clichés, New Age nonsense, mind-numbing dialogue, and yawn-inducing action. You put on Star Wars, which only succeeds in one thing: failing horribly.

From its beginning, with a limpid chase, unbelievable special effects (the explosions? Seriously – they look like somebody put a firecracker on the models), and a stilted performance from a presumed protagonist, Princess Leia, Star Wars tries too hard and disappoints. (Seriously, who made the names up? “Leia”? Darth “Vader”? Ooh, get it? Invader? Lame.) Just before being captured by a walking villain stereotype named “Darth Vader”, a tall man in black armor voiced by James Earl Jones, on the suspicion of high treason, Leia sends two robots to the surface of the planet on a “mission” as her spaceship is sucked into the maw of a larger one (by the way, the spaceships in this movie are so big that they simply kill suspension disbelief – but I’ll get into that later).

Then we meet our chief protagonist: Luke “Skywalker”, a whiny teen bitching about doing his chores instead of heading out to party with some friends. From the get-go, it’s not hard to predict the movie’s outcome: the boy who has spent his entire life on a farm will, over the course of ninety minutes, become the most able pilot in the galaxy, outflying the elite of the elite of a civilization-wide military-industrial complex to, against all odds, destroy a monstrous machine.

Of course, to facilitate the transition, the boy needs a teacher. A contrived robot escape leads Skywalker out into the desert; enter Alec Guinness, one of the movie’s two redeeming features. Stepping ably into the cliché of the warrior-monk-tutor, Guinness plays “Old Ben Kenobi”, an exile from a destroyed order of “Jedi knights”, who were the “guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy” before the Empire. After spouting a bunch of new-age bullshit about “The Force” and He takes Luke under his wing and guides him. It’s terribly convenient that, out of a 100 billion-star galaxy, with probably 100 million planets, on a desert planet with 200 million square miles, the single remaining Jedi knight just happens to be living within a day’s drive of Skywalker’s residence.

The Empire, meanwhile, has been doing its dirty work on the planet’s surface. Skywalker returns to find his home burning and his aunt and uncle charred skeletons. Without mourning, without even burying the dead, he returns to Kenobi. They decide to leave the planet, and to find a pilot to take them, enter a seedy pub filled with costumes and rubber prostheses – err, aliens. There, they meet two more walking stereotypes: the roguish smuggler named Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his loyal dog – err, sidekick hairy alien Chewbacca. The smuggler agrees to take them offworld and they escape the pursuing Imperial spaceships.

Meanwhile, Princess Leia has been abducted to a monstrous space station, the “Death Star.” (More imaginative naming from Lucas!) Darth Vader tortures Leia, and then his partner in crime, Grand Moff Tarkin, decides to blackmail Leia into giving him information on the location of the terrorist bases. He decides to test the Death Star’s main weapon on Leia’s home planet, Alderaan. She gives him a location, and, in a casual display of clichéd villainy of just the sort one’s come to expect in this movie, he blows up her planet anyway.

This is another point where the movie is just incredible, in the literal sense of the word. To blow up a planet like that, the Death Star released as much energy in an instant as the Sun has produced in the entire history of human civilization. One can handle superluminal speeds, but this magnitude of power generation is almost nonsensical in its scale.

Speaking of incredible, Darth Vader is also apparently a Jedi. After they destroy Alderaan, he interrupts a conference meeting to rant about how the power to destroy a planet is “insignificant” next to the power of the Force. When challenged (“has it given you enough clairvoyance to find the missing battlestation plans?”), he proves his point by … telekinetically choking his heckler. That induced some eye-rolling.

When Skywalker, Kenobi, and Solo arrive at Alderaan, their ship is promptly captured by the Death Star. Of course, the guards are apparently criminally incompetent: they escape by knocking out three stormtroopers – mini-villains dressed in white armor – and dressing up in the armor. (Quite a feat, knocking out three trained soldiers.) They escape to a conveniently unstaffed command center, and since the Galactic Empire apparently has no internal security protocols on the computer of their state-of-the-art battlestation, one of the robots manages to hack into the mainframe computer. There, they discover the power source of the tractor beam holding the starship (did I mention that it’s called the “Millennium Falcon”? Geez) in place. Kenobi decides to go turn it off, and he leaves.

Meanwhile, Skywalker, having been taken by an adolescent fantasy about Princess Leia, convinces Solo to help rescue her. They break into a prison chamber – not considering that they might not be able to get back out – and rescue Leia, only to be trapped by a horde of stormtroopers who are unable to hit the broad side of a barn with their beam weapons. So they jump into a garbage chute.

In the garbage chamber, there’s apparently a strange monster living in the shit and piss and trash and so on. It drags Luke under and starts to strangle him, but abruptly leaves. (What was it doing there anyway? Did some stormtrooper keep it as a pet and flush it down the toilet when it got too big? Some military discipline they’ve got there.) Finally, a competent commander has decided to just crunch the garbage and the interlopers along with it.

What to do? Only one solution: radio the three foot tall deus ex machina – literally – on wheels and have it hack the mainframe again, this time to turn the garbage crusher off and unlock the maintenance door. Some computer security they’ve got; I bet they hacked it together with Lisp. Since, naturally, no stormtroopers are waiting for them at the single door to the garbage crusher into which the protagonists dove in full view of their assailants (why didn’t they just drop a grenade down into the chamber, anyway? Or poison gas?), the protagonists leave the garbage chamber, shower, change back into their ordinary costumes, and exit the locker rooms, only to be met by – you guessed it – chronically late stormtroopers. A chase ensues, along with stereotypically improbable hijinks, concluding back at the Millennium Falcon.

Meanwhile, Kenobi finds the tractor beam power source. It is sitting isolated in an unpatrolled area, surrounded by a bottomless pit. (More stereotypes – I’ve lost count.) He uses New Age bullshit to distract the nearby patrol and edges out onto a catwalk around the tractor beam power source. What a maintenance nightmare (“Eh, Jim, you gotta take care of dat tracta beam today. Bawss needs it back online tomorra.” “Gawdammit, I’ve been puttin’ dat awff. Dey gotta give us hazad pay for dis shit –two workas fell down the bawttomless pit befoa they installed dose hahnesses, didn’t give the families shit. Gotta talk to the union.”) Demonstrating intimate knowledge of technology he’s never seen before, he successfully turns the tractor beam off and heads back toward the Millennium Falcon.

On the way, who should he meet but his (conveniently) former pupil Darth Vader? The two sole surviving masters of the Jedi order of warrior-monks, able to wield power “insignificant” compared to the ability to destroy a planet, engage in combat by … pulling out dinky little glow-swords and hacking at each other. This is one place where a real stereotypical confrontation,might have been forgivable – hell, this scene could have saved the entire movie.

VADER and KENOBI pull out guns and dive at each other, firing and dodging each other’s shots, while using the Force to manipulate the very fabric of space and time itself as a weapon, so that their conflict envelopes them in a ball of pure, crackling energy. Spacetime begins to tear around them as they hammer at each other with unimaginable weapons of unspeakable power created ex nihilo from the void by the power of creation itself, and the DEATH STAR trembles with every blow.

But this is the director who thinks that telekinetic choking compares to the destruction of a six billion trillion ton ball of iron that has been spinning in the same orbit for five billion years, so I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.

It ends by Vader killing Kenobi as the other protagonists look on. The protagonists make their escape good, fight off a couple of fighters (one of the few subtleties of the movie – the escape was not prevented because a homing beacon had been planted on the ship), and escape to the rebel base. Of course, the Death Star follows right along.

At the rebel base, Solo decides to make his escape, loads up on precious metals, and takes off. Skywalker, meanwhile – according to my prediction! – is given an expensive piece of military equipment based on his ability to pilot a rusty old cropduster back on his farm. As the Death Star approaches, they launch an attack on the space station which has a very low chance of success (hah, yeah right). Darth Vader decides to take his squadron of crack fighters out, and one-by-one destroys the rebel pilots.

That is, until in the final seconds before the Death Star destroys the rebel base, the intrepid Skywalker, piloting his fighter down a trench on the Death Star’s surface, closely chased by Vader, is saved at the last instant by Solo’s return – who destroys Vader’s wingmen and sends the villain spinning off into interplanetary space – and manages to against all odds shoot two missiles at supersonic speeds down a six-foot-wide hole. Just as it’s about to fire, the Death Star blows up in a shower of glowing metal and heavy elements.
Yeah, didn’t see that one coming.

This movie is full of bad clichés, stereotypes, New Age nonsense, cringe-inducing dialogue, and slow action. Lucas missed a beautiful chance to deconstruct the age-old “hero’s quest” archetype and instead fell right into the cliché. Why were we given a journey of black-and-white, good-and-evil, when Lucas could have painted a richer and more nuanced canvas depicting the Empire as a complex social construction trying to find a balance between collective needs like security and individual needs like freedom? The rebel alliance as an organization torn between its democratic ideals and the necessity to commit terrorist acts in the name of its fight against what it sees as totalitarian repression? The Jedi as a nuanced priesthood of individuals, rather than a mythical idealized order? The movie’s stunning lack of scale (humongous spaceships and battlestations and power output) and its inconsistency within that scale (the Force is lame) only compounds the deep issue, and the poor acting (save Jones and Guinness, who perform admirably in miserable roles) and poor effects are just icing on the cake. Star Wars is the worst kind of bad movie: the gem of an idea that could have been, but was horribly not.

Surlethe wrote: This is another point where the movie is just incredible, in the literal sense of the word. To blow up a planet like that, the Death Star released as much energy in an instant as the Sun has produced in the entire history of human civilization. One can handle superluminal speeds, but this magnitude of power generation is almost nonsensical in its scale.

VADER and KENOBI pull out guns and dive at each other, firing and dodging each other’s shots, while using the Force to manipulate the very fabric of space and time itself as a weapon, so that their conflict envelopes them in a ball of pure, crackling energy. Spacetime begins to tear around them as they hammer at each other with unimaginable weapons of unspeakable power created ex nihilo from the void by the power of creation itself, and the DEATH STAR trembles with every blow.

Guardsman Bass wrote: Assuming you're joking, Surly Boy (pun intended), that's a pretty amusing review. You had me thinking you might, might somewhat serious in this amidst the humor right up to this point -

Surlethe wrote: This is another point where the movie is just incredible, in the literal sense of the word. To blow up a planet like that, the Death Star released as much energy in an instant as the Sun has produced in the entire history of human civilization. One can handle superluminal speeds, but this magnitude of power generation is almost nonsensical in its scale.