/sw/ - Star Wars

A FUCKING BLUE BANNER

OP is a joyless faggot who can't understand why people continue to enjoy something for years after his ADHD-addled mind had already moved on to the next shiny object.

>>31328

Lucas’s great achievement isn’t the conception of the “Star Wars” saga, the inauguration of the franchise, or his consignment of it to Disney for cloning ad infinitum. Those are for the movie books, for the pundits who reduce movies to such sociological oxymorons as “collective imagination,” the cultural counterparts to industry analysts who talk only about box office. What endures for the critics and their lay associates, for aesthetes who live for the beauty and the pleasure of movies, is Lucas’s directing—of two films, “Attack of the Clones” and, especially, “Revenge of the Sith.” If Lucas had done nothing else in his life, he’d have an honored place in my personal pantheon for that work.

It’s easy for me to say so, because I only just saw those films now, after a few days of not-quite-binge-watching of the Blu-ray set of the series. I’m nearly a “Star Wars” newbie. Prior to viewing “The Farce Awakens,” I had seen the first film in the series (the one belatedly renamed “A New Hope,” from 1977) some time in the nineteen-eighties, and none of the others. That’s because I was utterly underwhelmed by “A New Hope,” impressed solely by the world-making of the script—the delivery of a ready-made but minor mythology—but neither moved nor fascinated nor at all delighted by the filmmaking. Rather, I was shocked—that the director of “American Graffiti” could have constrained himself to create such a turgid, stilted, flat, and textureless movie. I wasn’t working as a film critic or journalist at the time (or when any of the subsequent five films came out). I went to the movies guided solely by pleasure, even curiosity, and nothing in the viewing of “A New Hope” induced me to catch up with the then-recent releases of “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,” nor to follow along with the three prequels.

>>31352

I was wrong not to watch. But it would have taken a couple of decades to find out how wrong I was, because the marathon watching of “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Return of the Jedi,” and “The Phantom Menace” was a chore (for the record, a self-imposed chore). “A New Hope” at least had the merit of coming first—it had the element of surprise—along with a comically flat direction that appeared to be a parody of the mediocre serials on which it was based. “Empire” and “Jedi” had nothing parodistic; their absurd earnestness and the bombastic banality of their direction (by Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, respectively) are a perfect match for the oppressive, hectoring John Williams scores that accompanied them.

My colleague Alex Ross recently wrote in praise of Williams’s music for the “Star Wars” series. I defer to Alex regarding the details of musical knowledge and craft that Williams displays; I differ with him regarding the emotional and sonic affect of the music. Hearing Williams’s compositions for “Star Wars” is like being ordered, loudly and aggressively, to feel, and to feel one thing. It sounds calculated to bludgeon a viewer into submission, to create a cowed unanimity of simple and narrow emotions that are the antithesis of imagination and fantasy.

>>31353

If there was nostalgic, faux-naïve whimsy in Lucas’s inaugural installment of “Star Wars,” it was gone from “Empire” and “Jedi,” replaced by a hegemonic bellow for devotion and belief. A friend—who happens to be one of the best critics around—says that the “Star Wars” saga has become the closest thing to shared religious belief among contemporary Americans. He told me this before I had seen “Empire” and “Jedi.” Now I believe him, but I’d add that it’s not a joyful religion, not a terrifying or awe-inspiring one, but a wet blanket of piety that replaces passions with palliatives, and mysteries with nostrums.

I watched the series in the order of release—4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3—because it makes no less narrative sense to do so. It’s the age of Christopher Nolan, not to mention the two “Godfather” films, so it shouldn’t take a Ph.D. in Alain Resnais to make sense of a series in flashback, especially because the series superimposes two time frames on each other—the characters’ evolution, and the evolution of the series itself. I’m much more interested in the latter, and that interest brought rewards that far exceeded that of the ostensibly grand narrative revelation at the end of “Jedi.”

>>31354

“The Phantom Menace” was depressing, perhaps because of the centrality of the child Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), whose perky earnestness in a holy cause makes the movie feel like a homiletic children’s broadcast. The actual emotional peak of the film—the “Ben-Hur” parody of the space-chariot race, which Lucas realized with obvious verve and delight—occurred early on, while the huge quantities of exposition and lengthy establishment of the conflicts underlying the episode and the series turned the film into a slog. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of that exposition, the invention of an intergalactic politics to counterbalance the quasi-religious story, impressed me even more than the mythology of “A New Hope”—even if Lucas here relied on even duller methods to deliver it. What’s more, one visual device—the red zone of the shield generator, which filled the screen to look like a faded and scratched color print running sideways—was utterly arresting (I watched it three or four times in a row) and it suggested realms of invention that Lucas was barely ready to tap.

>>31355

This peculiar contradiction began to resolve itself with the pleasures of “Attack of the Clones.” There, Lucas’s force awakens. The movie’s rich-hued palette alone is a jolt from the start, and the movie’s action scenes have an alluring, entrancing kinetic vigor and texture. The speeder chase with the paid assassin, with its swoops and spins and drops; Obi-Wan’s fight with Jango Fett; and the serial duels with Count Dooku—all of these display balletic gracefulness and dazzling rapidity along with closely-textured compositions in depth, surprising pictorial imbalances, and angles that are as expressive as they are surprising. The colossal scale of the assembled clones toward the end of the film has an awe-inspiring power greater than anything in any of the four films that preceded it. My hypothesis is that digital technology caught up to Lucas’s imagination. Finally, by 2002, digital technology, which he had begun to use in “The Phantom Menace,” liberated him from the limits of optical effects and, by means of C.G.I., could create the fusion of live action and animation that was implicit in the project, and in his vision, from the start.

>>31356

The labyrinthine opening shot of “Revenge of the Sith”— of Anakin and Obi-Wan giving chase to Dooku through the space vehicles on the planet of Coruscant—is a mighty and audacious gauntlet-throw, the digital equivalent of the opening shot of Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” It wheels and gyrates and zips and pivots with a vertiginous wonder that declares, from the beginning, that Lucas had big visual ideas and was about to realize them with a heroically inventive virtuosity. And the rest of the movie follows through on that self-dare.

If I had seen “Revenge of the Sith” in real time, in a theatre upon its release, in 2005, I think that, at the moment when Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), sizzling in the blue lightning that Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) reflects back at him, cries out to Anakin (Hayden Christensen), “Power! Unlimited Power!,” I would have leaped out of my seat yelling with excitement. The entire movie is filled with an absolute splendor of the pulp sublime, and that moment is its very apogee. Lucas reaches historic heights in the filming of action: the martial artistry of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s double duel versus Dooku, the gaping maw of outer space and of the airshaft into which the heroic duo drops, Obi-Wan’s light-sabre fight with the four-armed Grievous, and, above all, the apocalyptic inferno of the confrontation of Obi-Wan and Anakin (which, regrettably, cuts back to Yoda and Emperor, a much duller battle). I watched these sequences over and over—happily, with the sound off to get rid of the musical score—and was repeatedly and unflaggingly amazed by Lucas’s precise, dynamic, wildly imaginative direction.

>>31358

The scripted politics of the conflicts have a grand imagination to match. What Lucas brings to the script of “Clones” and Sith” is a quasi- (or pseudo-) Shakespearean backroom dialectic of power-maneuvering. The dialogue is just heightened and sententious enough, just sufficiently rhetorical, to convey the grave moment of ideas in conflict and the grand mortal results of that dialectical clash—the making of a villain and the unmaking of a republic.

No, Lucas isn’t Shakespeare; I’m not inclined to throw around the lines as newfound poetic gems, and there’s nothing in his direction to throw the language, such as it is, into high relief. It’s in language that Lucas’s limitations as a director reveal themselves. When he films people talking, his inspiration seems to grind to a halt. “Clones” and “Sith,” for all their merits, slam against what I’d call the problem of baroque opera: like the operas of Handel, they’re just series of dazzling arias (in Lucas’s films, visual arias) that are punctuated by long stretches of recitative to advance the action.

If the mark of the modern cinema is its approach to the word, the great modern directors are also like opera composers, who, with the compositional comprehensiveness of Verdi or Wagner, set the text cinematically and seemingly turn words into images. In the classic action films that served as inspirations to Lucas, such as those of Howard Hawks and John Ford, the directors found distinctive and personal ways to turn apparent exposition into dramatic action and visual expression. The question is why Lucas—whose genius burst into brilliant flower in “Clones” and “Sith”—didn’t (or couldn’t) extend that artistry to the entire spectrum of his material, textual as well as physical.

>>31359

I suspect that the world-making, the narrative architecture of the self-extending mythological power of the “Star Wars” series, got in the way of its own realization. Could the word be too sacred to Lucas for him to subordinate it to the profane cinematic image? Could the import of the invented mythology be too great, in Lucas’s mind, for him to subject it to the ambiguities of visual transformations? Did he know, or surmise, that the enduring authority of the series would be based not in his direction—however original and distinguished—but in his stories? And, if so, did he conclude that he wasn’t prepared to submit them to the all-too-readily misunderstood realm of the image?

Lucas is a complex person whose great talents are at war with each other. His gift for serial form—his skill as a writer and producer, as an inventor of stories that will be remembered as cultural artifacts when only a small cult of aesthetic enthusiasts will recall his directorial artistry—is a mark of his will to power. Lucas the producer, a man of the world, is a man of the word. Lucas the director, the still-aspiring avant-gardist whose own pleasures in ecstatic confections and delirious conjurings seem, to the lovers of his myth-world, like a merely incidental idiosyncrasy, is oppressed by Lucas the storyteller and Lucas the showrunner of his own long-term series. In effect, his mighty lust for power clashed with his mighty artistic inclinations and abilities. His great talents and his great desires, his will to create and his will to control, came into conflict—a conflict which, judging from his recent remarks, he hasn’t happily resolved to this day. Anakin Skywalker’s Faustian story is, in a way, Lucas's own.

>>31328

for what person

>>31360

>second image

What is meant by the text under the OT?

>Enjoyment requires no specialized learning but viewing ca be enhanced by fully immersing yourself in the sewer of contemporary entertainment - this makes the otherwise mind-numbing original features look sophisticated in comparison.

The line "mind-numbing original features" is describing the OT, no? But it's not totally mind-numbing. Sure, you don't have to think very hard, but mind-numbing implies there's nothing there at all but fast-paced action and other thrills, no? Sure, they do have plenty of fast-paced action, but there's plenty of emotion there too, and you do have to listen closely to the dialogue at times. I wouldn't call it cinema or film but a movie, if this second picture is actually accurate, at least from a fa/tv/irgin perspective anyway.

Actually if anything I would have listed contemporary sci-fi or just contemporary films, as well as maybe a good documentary to explain why so many people found the first film refreshing, though for all I know that's based on lies by fags trying to change the past, though it would make some sense. (Perhaps some blame Vietnam and Civil Rights whereas others say they're sick of faggots complaining about all that, besides all that as well as hippies and pretentious "art", and just wanted a nice simple story with lots of action and excitement; 1977 is a bit late, though.) But I guess having retarded shit in comparison is good and fine too.

>>31369

I agree. Boomer/zoomer is cancer. Fuck newfags.

>>31382

*purpose lel