Star Wars

Star Wars is on in the background. (No, it's not A New Hope, no matter how relentlessly Lucasfilm wants to bludgeon that Orwellian rewriting of history into our skulls.)

Tonally, there's something quite different about the 1977 original when compared to its five temporal successors. It's quieter and calmer than any of them except Empire. It has more non-moving camera shots, including my favorite, that of Luke staring at Tatooine's two suns while obviously pondering when and how he would ever escape his dreary life.

Little moments like that make Star Wars a better, sturdier film than the others (again, excepting Empire). I loved that we finally saw a real space battle between seemingly hundreds of ships in Return of the Jedi, but when you get right down to it, what everyone takes away from the film is the nauseating cutesiness of the Ewoks, even though they don't appear until about halfway through. As for the prequels, they're thoroughly unsuccessful attempts to meld high-concept political intrigue with kid-friendly incessant action and the occasional thud of leaden attempts at humor (poor C-3PO's "This is such a drag" being possibly the nadir of the writing for the entire series, even taking Jar-Jar Binks into account). The prequels show what happens when a creator has no check on his creative ambitions -- and, I regret to add (because George Lucas seems like a nice fellow), no taste.

Star Wars has a touch of street-toughness in it, courtesy of Han Solo. That can't be said for any of its 'quels. They all aspire to what I think of as a more operatic sensibility, where high tragedy is the order of the day. When you have characters of such enormous, supernatural power as the Emperor and Yoda, that sensibility is inescapable, and it's not bad in itself. However, Lucas didn't seem to embrace the high tone his story demanded.

The actors cast in Star Wars were perfect for what I'll call the scruffy feel of the film. The trouble is that none of those actors works well within the more elevated tone of the other films (or to which the films aspire, anyway). Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford do a creditable job in Empire but Mark Hamill's Luke comes off as pouty and self-absorbed when he isn't brooding and self-absorbed. Jedi is worse, as both Hamill and Fisher have to speak lines that are bad imitations of subpar Shakespeare, e.g., their conversation in the Ewok forest before Luke hands himself over to Vader and the Emperor. The dialogue is terrible and the actors aren't skilled enough to overcome it.

As for the prequels, while the older actors acquit themselves with as much honor as could be expected under the circumstances (i.e., given the scripts), Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman can't sustain their troublesome roles with anything approaching believability. Christensen's poor diction and lack of vocal affect are particularly obnoxious: he is a troubled teen from a mediocre afterschool TV special rather than Hamlet. Lucas evidently had an irresolvable conflict in his mind between the dialogue he wrote and the actors he envisioned speaking it, and his films suffer as a result.

Star Wars feels less deliberately constructed to pander to an audience than any of its successors. It set out to be a movie, not a brick in a mythic tower. That's why it endures and will age better than any of its successors.