Star Wars (1977)

Director: George Lucas                         Writer: George Lucas
Film Score: John Williams                    Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor
Starring: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Alec Guinness

Dare I say it, but the more I think about the Star Wars franchise, the more I think that Star Wars actually ruined George Lucas’s film career. Oh, he’s made tons of money and all, but if you think about it, the last non-Star Wars film he actually directed was American Graffiti, almost forty years ago. If you make the analogy to other arts, it seems almost ludicrous. Famous musicians complain all the time about having to recreate their “hits” when performing live, but it’s actually more like an author who keeps writing the same book over and over or asking DaVinci to paint the Mona Lisa again. Star Wars, ironically, turned Lucas from a director into a money-making machine and as a result we’ll never really know what kind of a director, or what masterpieces of modern cinema, he would have made.

What’s fascinating about Matt Zoller Seitz’ review in The A List, is that he has almost nothing good to say about the film itself. Aside from an unsubstantiated claim that although “the story and mood were willfully primitive, it’s conception was sophisticated.” In fact, immediately after making that statement Seitz goes on to tell how the film was actually derivative. There’s no denying that the film, in its day, struck a chord with American audiences that has never really been equaled by any other film series, but seen today the cracks in conception really show. While touted as something bold that embraced the ideas of the Western, the war film, the swashbuckler, the adventure serials, and the epic at the time, it now seems more like a 70s TV mini-series than something worthy of being an all-time essential film.

I recently had the opportunity to see the entire series last weekend, when they ran them on the Spike Network in order (of story, not production). But I could only make it halfway through The Phantom Menace before dragging out my DVDs to avoid the commercials. What struck me more than anything else was the simplistic nature of the story, and by the time I had reached episodes four through six it became maddening. Not so much for the films themselves, but for the stunted nature of Lucas’s idea. Seitz brings up the far more successful (artistically in comparison) directors who came up at the same time as Lucas: Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, and others who have managed to balance money-making features with more artistic successes, and it’s a telling comparison.

There’s little need to recount the plot or characters in this review, as even Seitz’ own single paragraph summary was tedious. Alec Guinness was already a star at the end of his career, and even though Hamill and Fisher would work steadily thereafter, it was really only Harrison Ford who would go on to superstardom in a way that matched the original success of the films. And that leads to my biggest problem with The A List: the criteria. In my review for 2001: A Space Odyssey I questioned whether technical innovation alone was requisite for greatness, and Start Wars begs the question of whether box-office receipts are as well. My contention, in both cases, would be a resounding no.