STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE (SPECIAL EDITION)
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Go. Now.
What a movie this is!
STAR WARS did for the movies what Elvis Presley did for popular music: broadened its scope, intensified its appeal, caused a shattering impact on public consciousness. For every American under thirty and a good many over thirty, STAR WARS stood as *the* cultural landmark (aside from maybe "Star Trek" and Madonna) in its time.
What is most astonishing, twenty years later, is that STAR WARS has not aged one bit. It has the same romantic sweep and unabashed audience-rocking joy that made it stand out like a boulder amongst grains of sand. Audiences in the Seventies were getting fed up with anti-heroes and unpleasantness for its own sake; they still had a thirst for heroes, for a real sense of good guys 'n bad guys. STAR WARS slaked that thirst, but by playing straight and sweet rather than stupid.
Aside from being possibly the ultimate movie experience -- emotional and visceral -- this time, STAR WARS surprised me with how subtle a good deal of it is, something I attribute to seeing the movie after what feels like a whole other lifetime of experience. Many of the movie's best moments are sub-verbal and even subliminal. When Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi (the inimitable Alec Guinness, in a role he at first refused to take) presents Luke Skywalker (Mark Hammill) with his father's lightsaber, Luke turns it on without even being told how. Such is destiny. And when Ben perks up at the mention of the name Obi-Wan, and Luke asks him "Is he dead?", Ben looks sidelong and says, "Oh, he's not dead. Not yet," in a way that forebodes everything and nothing.
Han Solo (Harrison Ford, looking impossibly young) is another character who's easy to misread as a stereotype. Look carefully at the scene between him and Luke before the attack on the Death Star. Han does not sound like he's convinced of his own greed; he sounds angry and recriminative, and his parting line to Luke -- "May the Force be with you" -- tells us that his thoughts and his actions, and his heart, are very deeply divided indeed. The relationship with Leia (Carrie Fisher) is divded between bickering and backslapping, but it's the germ of the developments to come between them in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. (Another thing that comes to mind on watching the movie is how well it fits in as part of a larger whole. We learn just enough to know there is a larger story, and sidelong references get spun out into a great deal more in the succeeding movies.)
There has been a good deal, both good and bad, written about the way the movie has been reworked. For the most part, the changes are positive -- they didn't change anything that wasn't broken to begin with, so to speak. I will not ruin any surprises (of which there are more than a few), but I will say that the best scenes, the ones that worked as is, are all still the same: The lightsaber duel. The chess game. The 'droid scrapheap. All of these touches were technology in the service of a carefully deployed story. In a couple of places, there have been changes to more thoroughly evoke an atmopshere (the changes to Mos Eiseley are jawdropping and nicely done), or to replace an effect which didn't work as well the first time (the ships leaving from the rebel base to attack the Death Star).
In many cases, they left in things that were just pure craftsmanship. The now-primitive computer animation used to render the Death Star attack plans, for instance, were considered state-of-the-art then, and were more or less designed by hand. They were a labor of love for those who created them, and updating them would have been pointless; hence, they have been left intact. Also untouched: a good deal of the modelwork, which was groundbreaking then and still terrifically exciting now, probably because we *care* about what's happening to these people. It's not just another sound-and-light show.
This is the real reason this movie commands such joyful respect. In a way which is still unique and unmatched, George Lucas put together a high-tech fireside to tell us a hell of a story. And it is still a hell of a story.
Four out of four lightsabers.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://serdar.home.ml.org another worldly device...
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