Introduction: A new hope of striking back for revenge
I: Some time ago, and quite distant from here…
I’m just going to assume that every living being on this planet, indeed in this galaxy knows the plot lines of the first three movies. If you don’t, well then I really can’t help you. So I’m not going to go over them. However I will talk about the movies in more general terms. While it’s true to say that
Star Wars (I’m not going to call it
A New Hope: for the purposes of this journal
Star Wars will refer to the first movie as well as the actual franchise) was a groundbreaking movie, it’s in some ways a little hard to call it a real trailblazer, as it built on so many tropes that had been used before, not only in science fiction. I guess the main thing it did was introduce, as I mentioned above, a sense of fun into science fiction, which had up till then been a very serious business. It’s also perhaps - I’d have to check - the first science fiction movie that really doesn’t bother itself too much about actual science. Nobody worries about how hyperspace works, or the engines that drive the X-Wings. Nobody asks what exactly a lightsaber is, or how the droids are put together? Put simply, nobody cares.
Star Wars, at its heart, both movie and franchise is, or was, all about escapism and having a good time. It’s far more a fantasy/adventure story that just happens to be set in space than a “hard” science fiction one.
It was also, I believe, the first science fiction trilogy, (at least, I don’t remember any before it) and therefore the first to follow the hero and his companions through successive movies. Now, I could not say with any certainty it was the first trilogy per se, but even so I kind of think it was. Either way, almost certainly the first one in the science fiction sphere, so that was a new thing. It gave a starring role to essentially a kid, which was also unusual, and made stars of most of its cast. It used old fantasy tropes of good versus evil, and I’m certainly not the first to remark on its similarities to, and usage of themes from, the legend of King Arthur and of course The Lord of the Rings. Hell, when Luke Skywalker rescues Princess Leia from the cell on the Death Star, not only is he a knight in literally shining armour - as he’s wearing a white Stormtrooper uniform - with a space-age equivalent of a horse waiting, (or at least a Falcon!) but he is armed with a fu
cking
sword!
Lucas seems to have been the first to consider the idea of his heroes using swords in the future (yes, yes I know, but you get the idea). Every other science fiction movie - and series - up to then had the characters armed, if they were armed, with everything from lasers and phasers to blasters and zap guns. Swords were seen, by most writers (can’t speak for those in literature, but certainly on the big and small screen) as archaic, belonging to an older time, not in step with the future, and not anything their heroes would be using. But Lucas made the case, through Obi-Wan Kenobi, for the lightsaber very well. The old Jedi says “anyone can use a blaster, but a lightsaber takes skill and finesse.” That’s not an actual quote, but you know the one, and the implication is of course that in order to use a lightsaber, like a knight of old, a man (or woman) had to have certain skill and discipline. So the lightsaber became a symbol almost of class, the weapon of choice for those who were the more skilled fighters, the true galactic aristocracy, or as one of the games based on the series would have it, the Knights of the Old Republic.
I think it may be fair also to credit Lucas with the usage of hyperspace in movies. Yes,
Star Trek had warp speed, but the actual mechanics of how the Enterprise got from one point to another were never explained.
2001 showed us a sort of hyperspace sequence in the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” section, but
Star Wars was the first to actually take us into hyperspace and show us what it was like. It’s possible too that the movie was the first to pioneer, or at least popularise, the phrase "light speed", though Lucas didn’t always get it right, as we know from the extremely embarrassing speech by Han Solo, where he mixes up parsecs as a measure of time rather than distance. The attempts to “explain” this later on only made it worse, as the writer, producer and other commentators dug themselves in deeper; they should just have admitted, sorry we got it wrong, and left it at that.
But these elements aside, basically
Star Wars was nothing really new. It was Errol Flynn, but in space rather than on the Spanish Main. It was Arthur and Lancelot, but on the Death Star instead of in Camelot. And it was, to some degree also, John Wayne fighting off the Indians and saving the girl. It was, to put it bluntly, every adventure movie you’ve ever seen, just transported to space. But it worked for one reason really, and that was that it was the first time this had been done. Science fiction movies up to then had concentrated on either dystopian futures or bleak alien planets, exploration and invasion. Nobody had ever thought you could have fun with the premise. But Lucas did.
Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m privy to the man’s thoughts, and knew what he intended, how his movie came about, if it achieved all he set out to or changed radically, or if the success was too much for him. All that I could find by researching, but I won’t, because I don’t care, and I’m sure others have done it much better than I. The point is the impact
Star Wars had on the movie-going public, on youth and on science fiction. Really, it’s no exaggeration that none of the three would ever be the same again. Kids were now growing up wanting to be Jedi warriors, there was a reawakened interest in robots (which had been all but completely absent prior to this - can you think of one significant robot or android character in film before
Star Wars? What? Robbie the Robot? Do me a favour!) and later adults would unashamedly attend conventions and collect figures, videos, posters and other memorabilia in a way nobody had other than Trekkies.
Hollywood noticed, sitting up and blinking in the darkness, and movies which had been unable to even get a second look were suddenly being screamed for and inspected with interest, probably. Without question, the idea of science fiction in film, as a major earner and a for a mainstream audience, was born in 1977 with the success of
Star Wars. Witness the popularity of such “soft” science fiction blockbusters as the
Back to the Future trilogy,
Tron or
Independence Day. Sure, these are different movies in tone and scope than
Star Wars, but would any of them have been greenlit without its success? Given the, at the time, thinking prevalent about science fiction movies among producers, I venture to say they would not. Of course, some other science fiction blockbuster could have led the way, but was there ever anything quite like
Star Wars in science fiction?
The Matrix, Terminator, Robocop, even the
Star Trek movies all owe a debt of gratitude to
Star Wars, a movie which took the conventions of what was accepted as a science fiction movie and went “Nah”. A movie that dared to look beyond the dark, often sterile, doomy and quite frequently baffling nature of science fiction movies up to then, a movie which catered not only to kids or geeks, but to everyone - or perhaps it might be fairer and more accurate to say, to the kid or geek in all of us, however well hidden or denied - and dared to show them that science fiction could be enjoyable, that you didn't need a degree in quantum physics to understand it - that in this case, you didn't’ even have to understand it! - and that you could have a really good time with the kids, or on your own, or with mates, watching a movie that took you out of yourself, said forget about the factory, the school or the union boss, and just let yourself go. Listen, let me tell you a story. No, not once upon a time: a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…