There are things in this life that always grab my attention. Things that get me to pause, notice, savor and enjoy. Maybe it lasts hours, maybe it lasts a few seconds.
I’m talking about the smell of cookies baking in an oven. I’m also talking about midday summer sunlight that glistens off of the clear water of a swimming pool. There’s also the sight of an awesome spring storm cloud. A sip of good fresh coffee on a rainy morning. The charm of a friendly baby that stares and smiles at me in the supermarket checkout line. The quick sound of a needle dropping onto a vinyl record. A pretty girl in short shorts bending over to pick up something that she dropped.
… And silly old Star Wars playing on a TV, anytime, anywhere. I never get tired of it. Every scene in this movie is a shot fired from 1977 into my 1980s childhood and that ricochets into my adult years. It’s a simple machine that takes one to another world.
Now, I’m not a TOTAL geek. The prequels lost me. I’m barely familiar with them enough to even have an opinion. All I remember is that they went hog wild with the computer effects and that they needlessly complicated the story. I look forward to the upcoming new movie because I trust this J.J. Abrams character, but I didn’t live tweet my response to every second of the teaser trailer, I don’t care what Harrison Ford ate off the craft services table and I won’t read any of the gossip dug up by desperate Yahoo News writers.
I’m an adult when it comes to that garbage, but I’m eternally a kid when it comes to the original 1977 spectacle (George Lucas’s digital revisions twenty years later and beyond don’t exist in my little world).
From an objective standpoint, Star Wars is remarkable as one of the few fantasy films of its time that isn’t Cheeseball City when it comes to the effects. It convinces us. Through 100% analog effects, a powerful John Williams score and memorable,sets, this George Lucas bastard yanks us into his world. It’s real movie magic, the kind that doesn’t exist much anymore. If this was made today, everything from C-3PO to the numerous alien races in the famous cantina scene to Princess Leia’s outrageous hair buns would be computerized CGI effects. And CGI isn’t magical any more than HTML is magical. It lacks that human touch. It’s a computer program that simply does what it’s told. It wows us for about a minute and then it becomes as mundane as our neighbor’s car alarm.
The story itself is an intelligent reduction of folklore, fairy tales and movie history as viewed by George Lucas, a child of the old school Saturday matinee and student of the old cliffhanger serials. Here, a humble fatherless boy goes up against an intimidating evil empire and holds his own because he has something special about him, like we all feel that we have something special about us.
I buy it. I buy all of it. I can’t help it. I’m sucked in by this film’s tractor beam. Han shot first. Imperial stormtroopers couldn’t shoot the broad side of a barn. I still want a real lightsaber for Christmas. The Force is real. RIP Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru and all of those poor souls on peaceful Alderaan.