Star Wars on Trial (33 page)

A good single example of the difference between the original three Star Wars movies and the many knockoffs they inspired lies in the female characters. Star Wars: A New Hope had a wonderful female character in the strong, smart and dynamic Princess Leia. What did other movies and TV series do with that? They created lead female characters who were prostitutes (Battlestar) or fashion models who looked great in their skintight outfits (Buck Rogers). Not so much characters as eye candy, an extension of the special effects concept to the leading women in the shows. Even the Star Trek movies maintained this trend, keeping the female characters very much second ary in terms of plot, action and significance. (Quick, name a female character from a Star Trek movie. Uh ... Uhura?)

It's baffling but (at that time) also Not George's Fault that Hollywood keeps forgetting one of the enduring mysteries of the male mind, namely that tough girls with guns are as sexy as it gets. SF has always had a natural ability to exploit this since it can set stories in other places and times where such female characters are plausible. Who can ever forget Han Solo declaring, "I love you," in Return of the Jedi when Leia flashed her blaster at him? Yeah, baby. This important social dynamic wasn't lost on everybody. When Ripley showed up to start kicking alien butt she was in the same mold as Leia, a smart and tough lady who might not be a superwoman but wasn't going to give up and wasn't going to be beaten.

Unfortunately, all of that was about to change, in the form of the second Star Wars trilogy, which is now the first Star Wars trilogy even though it's the second. (Right here you see part of the problem. Placing films in proper order shouldn't sound like a time travel paradox.) Little did those awaiting the new trilogy realize that The Phantom Menace didn't refer to the Sith, but rather to what the film itself was going to do to Star Wars as a shining example of good SF and good movies.

The ugly truth was that George Lucas had painted himself into a corner with the first/now-second trilogy. An evil galactic empire with scads of star destroyers and hordes of stormtroopers (plus, not one, but two Death Stars) had been defeated by one (count 'em, one) Jedi helped by his oh-my-gawd-I-kissed-my-brother sister, a tribe of cute, merchandisable aliens, one big Wookiee, that lovable rogue, another lovable rogue (this one ethnic), and various other humans and aliens wearing the Star Wars equivalent of red shirts. In a series of films on the downfall of the Republic, how could Lucas possibly explain how the bad guys had triumphed in the first place over a whole mess of Jedi with mind-powers and lightsabers (even if one of those Jedi did sound like Grover)?

That was the basic problem posed by The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Good writers could've come up with some plausible and exciting explanations for all that in a Fall of Rome-type epic spanning the three films. Instead, Lucas chose to solve it by a story arc that actually had been predicted by none other than Mel Brooks in a single short phrase years before. In Brooks's SF movie parody Spaceballs, there's a scene where the villainous Dark Helmet has just tricked the hero, and gleefully declares that evil is certain to triumph because "good is stupid."

For reasons known only to him, George Lucas took "good is stupid" and ran with it. Even worse, Lucas decided to expand the concept to include "good can't act good" and "good has lousy dialogue." Just to make it abundantly clear that stupid was the theme for the new trilogy, Lucas introduced the character of jar jar Binks. In a remarkable advance since the days of the original Star Wars trilogy, and thanks to the wonders of the latest digital technology, a filmmaker was finally able to bring to life other worlds, fleets of spaceships, alien creatures and the walking/talking personification of stupidity.

As might be expected, this overall concept had some negative effects on the films. When wooden acting and cliched dialogue don't hold the audience's interest, and when everybody watching knows the bad guys are going to win, that leaves only two things to hold the audience's interest. One is the age-old game personified by Mystery Science Theater 3000: finding so-bad-it's-sort-of-funny things to comment on ("What the hell is a midichlorian?" "Just steal the damned thing like Han Solo would've done!" "Whoa, nice abs on the princess! "). The other is (you guessed it) special effects.

In a throwback to the days of Captain Video or Radar Men from the Moon, the latest three Star Wars movies became about the special effects. The stories were lame, with characters who often seemed to be wandering through, barely interacting with each other. The Jedi powers were rendered as both awesome and ineffectual so as to prevent those powers from actually influencing events. ("The girl we thought was a handmaiden is actually the princess! I wonder why my mind-reading powers didn't pick that up!" or "Drat, yet another alien species my mind-control powers don't work on!") How did the incredibly wise and powerful Jedi triumph in The Phantom Menace? By accident. When the cute little Anakin flew through a special effects spectacular space battle and just happened to sail through a protective shield that keeps out weapons but not enemy spaceships and just happened to pull the trigger that destroyed the robot con trols conveniently left in the most exposed possible location. Not exactly "use the Force, Luke."

But, hey, look at those giant underwater creature special effects. Why are the Jedi in a submarine in the first place, anyway, when it doesn't really have anything to do with the story? Oh, yeah, so the film could stick in those giant underwater creature special effects.

I could go on with the next two films but it'd be a depressing litany of similar stupidity and special effects-driven plots. I suppose in one way the The Phantom Menace, Attach of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith trilogy did succeed as a story. When evil is certain to triumph in the third film, one thing that helps keep the viewer looking forward to that ending is constantly demonstrated idiocy by the good guys. If somebody's too dumb to win, watching them lose does generate a certain perverse satisfaction. (It's possible to argue that this represents a triumph of the dark side of the movie viewer.)

Now, it's possible to make perfectly good and even great movies based on the principle that everybody in the movie is stupid. There's been a lot of great horror movies built on that concept ("Something is out there hunting us, so let's all wander off by ourselves so it can kill us one by one"), though a great many more very bad horror movies have also used it. Alien used a people-doing-stupid-things plot. So did the even better sequel Aliens. (This worked particularly well in Aliens because so many of the characters were in the military, and anyone with any experience in the military knows that as sure as the sun rises, you're probably going to get ordered to do something stupid at least once a day) But Aliens generated more tension and drama with a scene containing no special effects ("They're inside the room!" "Where?") than all three of the latest Star Wars films did in their ponderous special effects-laden entirety.

But then the Colonial Marines in Aliens wouldn't have been at home in the latest three Star Wars movies. The Marines were great characters, interacting in a very real way with each other. That's what made the movie real, too, not the cool special effects. Kind of like Luke and Han and Leia.

Contrast that to what state-of-the-art digital filmmaking allows. Everyone has read George Lucas's descriptions of how he'd pull one take with one actor and insert another take with another actor into the scene. Two takes, one scene. Assume for the sake of argument that really does allow the insertion of each individual best performance. What's missing is actual human interaction, all the countless visual and verbal cues that one or more humans are really dealing with each other. There's a disconnect when that interaction is broken and two different interactions are stuck together. Our minds, designed to process how people communicate, consciously or subconsciously spot the problem. It makes the whole thing look phony, and makes even good actors look bad.

The negative effects of the godlike powers of digital editing didn't stop there. Creativity remains an undefined and poorly understood aspect of human genius. In movies, it's also all too rare. A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back had gobs of creativity; Return of the Jedi less so but still an acceptable amount. Where's the creativity in the latest three Star Wars films? Could it be possible that creativity doesn't flourish when a director is focused on making sure every single pixel is doing exactly what the director wants? Watching the latest three Star Wars movies, it's impossible to erase the image of the director using a digital hammer to pound every trace of spontaneity and inspiration out of the film and the actors' performances.

The great distinctive things about the original Star Wars movies also went away. Remember tough girls with guns? By the time The Phantom Menace appeared, the girls in Star Wars had lost a lot of their mojo. The princess in that film got in some gun time, but was memorable mostly for incredibly elaborate clothes and for giving the eye to a little boy (the sort of scene that unites the audience by making everyone go "ew" at once). By the time Revenge of the Sith showed up, the new princess had regressed to the point of wandering around weepy-eyed and pregnant, powerless to change a tragic course of events (how are you going to be a good mother when you can't even keep your husband from going over to the dark side?). Blame it on the plot, blame it on the actors, blame it on the direction-the sad truth is that at her toughest, the princess in the latest three films couldn't shake a blaster at the princess in the first three films. In contrast to Amidala the overdressed, Leia looks tougher even when she's in a brass bikini. (Or maybe that should read Leia looks tougher especially when she's in a brass bikini.)

Thus the What Was George Thinking? period, the time span when great storytelling was digitally erased from the Star Wars saga. Instead of being "A New Hope" for better-quality SF movies, Star Wars became the ultimate example of special effects over story, over acting and over dialogue. Yes, A New Hope resulted in lots of rotten SF movies hitting the screens, but it also inspired some good stuff and it taught a generation of moviegoers that SF and good movies are not incompatible things. The success of the original three Star Wars films at least illustrated that good SF movies could make good money.

Now Hollywood knows (or thinks it knows) that lousy SF movies with great special effects can also make good money. The one positive effect of Star Wars, the good example it offered, has vanished. If we got lots of bad movies out of a good example, what will happen in years to come after the financial success of the latest three Star Wars movies? We'll see more and more really bad SF movies, because everybody knows SF movies don't need plot, character, acting, dialogue or any of that other stuff that other movies need. No, they just need big spaceships and explosions.

We're already seeing this today, when we no longer have to shell out ten bucks or more to sit in a movie theater to watch an SF movie with bad acting, bad plot and bad dialogue. Now we can watch the same kind of bad SF movies anytime we want to in the comfort of our homes on the Sci Fi Channel, which is cranking them out at a dizzying pace. It's a Lovecraftian tragedy, really, of good examples spawning bad imitators, and then spawning even worse prequels which will themselves spawn unspeakable imitations.

In the bad old days before Star Wars: A New Hope, when people thought of SF movies they thought of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Now, after the latest three Star Wars films, when people think of SF movies they think of Plan 9 From Outer Space and Jar Jar Binks. Not just bad, but stupid, too. That's the SF movie legacy of Star Wars.

John G. Hemry also writes under the name Jack Campbell and is the author of several novels, including the first and so far only legal thriller military SF series (a.k.a. JAG in space), which includes A just Determination, Burden of Proof, Rule of Evidence and Against All Enemies. His latest space opera is The Lost Fleet: Dauntless (August 2006) under the Jack Campbell pen name. John loves the first Star Wars trilogy but wishes George had stopped there. He wanted to marry a woman like Leia and ended up with one who's pretty darn close but even better. He's also the author of the Stark's War series and numerous short fiction stories, as well as nonfiction articles on topics like interstellar navigation. A retired U.S. Navy officer, he lives in Maryland with his wife "S" and three children.

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