Trollheart

II: Old Friends and Family Reunions

The second movie showed us Luke growing up. Yes, you can say that he had to grow up real fast once those Stormtroopers came calling, and reduced his aunt and uncle to a Kentucky Fried consistency, but really, throughout Star Wars he’s a wide-eyed kid, taking his first steps in the great big galaxy, hero-worshipping Han Solo, falling in love with Leia (oh dear; we all know where that leads, don’t we?) and taking on the bad guys. By the end of the movie he’s the hero and all is well with the world. To some extent, Star Wars could be taken as a self-contained movie, and can be, if you wish, viewed as one. Local kid finds himself in space, takes on the empire, beats them and blows up their big bad space station, wins the girl. Although of course, not actually. But as a standalone movie, hell, it works.

But then of course, while Star Wars is not about reality, it’s not total fantasy either, and while the Death Star may be destroyed, it can, somewhat like a popular space astronaut in the same decade, be rebuilt, though probably for a lot more than six million dollars. So the menace is back: somewhat like Jason or Michael Myers or Trump, or any bad guy you can think of who just won’t stay dead, the Death Star (minus Governor Tarkin, last seen stroking his chin in classic evil genius pose before it all went spectacularly tits-up) is back, and so - sigh! - the rebels have to go through it all again. But that’s for the third movie, which we’ll come to. For now, it’s more a case of hit-and-run, as the rebels leg it from their latest base, Yavin having proven too hot to go back to, and the Empire, poor sportsmen that they are, in full pursuit.

Look, I don’t know about you, but the one glaring (pun very much intended) memory I have of The Empire Strikes Back is this: “Oh my fucking EYES! Why is everything so WHITE?” Well, of course it was all white because the rebels chose an ice world, for some reason, on which to set up shop, perhaps in the belief that Vader would never think of looking there. I mean, all that white would surely clash with his tasteful black armour, no? Well, no: fashion faux pas aside, the Dark Lord of the Sith certainly did go after them, and rather downbeat in a way, the rebels are defeated and must beat a hasty retreat from Hathor.

But the white!

For surely about twenty minutes of the movie (which to me seemed an hour) your eyes are assaulted by glaring, blinding white - snow is everywhere. Ice is everywhere. Fucking white stormtroopers are everywhere. It cuts the eyes out of you - or at least, it did me: like staring too long at the sun, my eyes were forced to squint. And then, when, mercifully for me, the rebels are routed, the sudden contrast of pure black in deep space is so jarring that I could still see the bright white surface of Hathor superimposed on space for a while. It did a lot to ruin the opening sections of the movie. For me, anyway.

But while a lot of people laud TESB, personally I have some issues with it, not least the annoying glare. It takes itself a little too seriously. We get mysticism, self-exploration, almost a vision quest for Luke, and the action divides between he and R2D2, as they head to Dagobah to find Yoda, and the rest of them, who end up with their heads (and bodies) in the clouds, in the lazily-named Cloud City. Look, there’s no doubting the two sections of the movie dovetail quite beautifully at the end, and that next-to-last scene, after Luke falls into the chute and improbably ends up holding onto an upside-down flagpole (what’s it there for? Who’s going to bother risking their lives, or flying up there, to run up a flag that’s the wrong way around?) and is saved just as he falls by the Millennium Falcon, is a thing of beauty.

And who can fault the confrontation between Luke and Vader, with the - at the time - galaxy-shaking revelation of their relationship? This was originally in an era when something like the internet wasn’t even thought of, much less in use, and so there really was no way for the secret to leak, so I doubt anyone really knew what was going to be revealed, and I think we were all gobsmacked. The scene of course gave us a future pop culture reference: "[insert name here] I am your father!” Right. And the fight between the two of them? As the skinny jerk who always argues with the big tub of lard once said, mmm! Classic movie history.

But does the movie itself try to do too much? Star Wars had a lot of moving parts, but they were all moving in the one direction: a final (we thought) confrontation with the Death Star and Darth Vader, and the realisation of the destiny of a young boy who was to become a Jedi knight. This one? I don’t know. There are subplots - there’s Han being frozen, Lando betraying them for some reason (money I guess) and Luke, um, fighting himself in a cave. A bit existential for the kids, which is why I think Lucas had figured out by now that his movie was appealing more to adults than kids, so he could go a bit more cerebral with it.

Empire does make some telling observations: it ain’t necessarily over when the fat lady sings (or in this case, the fat space station blows), enemies don’t give up as long as they’re live enemies, and sometimes, splitting up is not the best idea. I personally could live without all the bullshit Jedi training in the swamp - all it was missing was a montage and an eighties AOR affirmation tune such as Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” or Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” - and I may be in the minority here, but my Star Wars world could stand without Yoda in it. Don’t like the little guy, and other than playing the role of sensei to Luke, what does the little fucker do? Yes, he has a lightsaber fight in I think Attack of the Clones, but (so far) that’s been about it. Damn muppet. Literally.

But of course this was three years later, everyone was salivating for the follow-up movie, and the box office returns proved there was an appetite for more Star Wars, with Empire making back almost twenty times its already considerable budget, pushing the revenues to almost half a billion dollars. Not bad for 1980! It’s a far cry, though, from the original, which made over seventy times its much smaller budget, but a lot better than its successor, which only managed a paltry tenfold return on a budget that was very similar to Empire. Hmm. Is it possible that by the time the original trilogy wrapped, people had had enough of Star Wars? Well, there was a gap of sixteen years between Return of the Jedi and the first of the “prequel” trilogy, The Phantom Menace, so you know, maybe. By now, perhaps other science fiction movies had picked up the baton and run with it, and left the original far behind.

This wouldn’t of course stop it becoming one of the biggest and most profitable and well-known franchises in film history, and there can hardly be a kid or adult alive now who had not a figure, bedspread, poster, toy lightsaber, model Millennium Falcon or some merchandise from the movies. It’s as ingrained in the human consciousness now, and as much a part of human culture and history as, well, as James Bond, or The Magnificent Seven, or any movies you care to name. It may have been, today, a long long time ago but it is never going to go far, far away again.

Another interesting thing about Empire is the reduced role in it for Leia. Well, I say reduced: she didn’t exactly have a lot to do in Star Wars, beyond stand with a blaster in her hand and proclaim she was not just a damsel in distress, while unable to avoid the very clear fact that that is exactly what she was. After an initial snarl at her would-be rescuers, she pretty much fades into the background of Star Wars, until she’s there smiling at her heroes as they’re awarded their medals for being Really Great Heroes (sorry we never had any Really Great Heroine medals made; just didn’t seem any point and it would have cost extra, besides, what did you do, Your Highness?). I mean, let’s be fair here: Lucas does not exactly fly the flag for women in the, um, past (when is this set? Does anyone know? Does he?) - well, in space then. It’s pretty much lipservice when we meet Leia, but she’s more or less pushed into a corner and told to stand there and look pretty for the majority of the movie.

And in Empire. Well. Can anyone remember what she does? I mean, I know she goes with Han and Chewy to Cloud City, I know she sees Han encased in Carbonite (we always thought he was cool enough, to be honest) but, you know, what does she do? Not a lot. And the next movie is no kinder to her. So really, when it gets down to it, Star Wars - at least, the first and original trilogy - is really a boys’ adventure tale, with some girl tagging along and getting in the way, having to be rescued - twice - and just, well, being a girl in the end. Damn women. Also, as was caustically pointed out in Family Guy, she is, if not the only woman in the galaxy, one of a very few. I can’t remember any others, apart from the smoking skeleton of Aunt Baru, and let’s face it, there’s not much sex appeal or girl power in a charred pile of bones, is there? I can only assume later movies addressed this, but for a period from 1977 to 1983, women are pretty much conspicuous by their absence, other than Leia. And in the third movie she’s in chains. I mean, how much more pointed could the irony be?

You definitely have to give Empire continuity points though. Whereas, as I said, Star Wars could be watched as a one-shot deal, you certainly could not do that with Empire. Possibly the first movie, certainly the first science fiction movie to end on a cliffhanger, or at the very least with loose ends trailing from the fleet like the tendrils of a jellyfish as the movie ends, you couldn’t help but want to see what happens next. So the scene is set for the third and final movie in the trilogy, and the wrapping up of the story.

Like I said in the previous entry, Star Wars was the first science fiction movie to showcase robots as other than just machines that did work and nothing else, or as comic relief. Certainly, the relationship between R2D2 and C3PO, skillfully handled by both actors and the writer, in a way that should not have been possible (one of them only emits indecipherable beeps, for god’s sake! How did we come to love him?) is something of an Odd Couple/Laurel and Hardy deal, mostly thanks to Anthony Daniels’ fussy, English-butler-style manner (something Family Guy called, unkindly but hilariously accurately, the gay robots of Star Wars) that makes us laugh and grow to love them. But it’s more than that.

They’re agents of the plot. It’s the message recorded on R2 that alerts Luke, a farmboy dreaming of adventure in space, to the presence both of the “beautiful” (I’ll agree to disagree with you there, young Skywalker!) Princess Leia and the mysterious Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom he knows only as Ben. Without these droids (these are the droids you’re looking for) the story would not exist. As it proceeds, through three movies, R2 and Threepio are an integral part of it, and it really would not be the same without them. When the stupid little metal barrel gets damaged in one of the fights while in Luke’s X-Wing, we worry for him, and Luke himself shows his affection for the tub of circuits when, offered a replacement for the “beat-up R2 unit”, he refuses, saying he and this one have been through a lot.

Even the word we now use often for robots, “droids”, comes from Star Wars, where Lucas clearly wanted them to be thought of as more than just machines or automatons, and robots would not cut it. But to be fair, and annoyingly so, they’re not. At least, R2 is not. Droid being short for android of course, this refers to a robot with a humanoid appearance, such as Data in Star Trek, or Kryten in Red Dwarf. Nobody could say R2D2 looks human. But that’s beside the point: for Lucas, droids referred to any robot, and so it was written into science fiction lore.

One character I have never had time for - with respect to the late Peter Mayhew, and no slight meant on his acting - is Chewbacca. Other than roar and look threatening, what is his role in the movies? Is there a single scene, other than maybe the one where he’s playing chess with R2D2, from which he could be removed and that scene suffer, or not work? I find him totally superfluous, and I get that Lucas wanted an alien co-pilot and friend for Han Solo, but I nevr thought they explored the relationship between the two in enough, or even any, detail for me to warm to the Wookie. We never even found out how the two got together (though maybe the later film, Solo, covers that?) and to me, he was, to quote an annoyed Leia in the first movie, a big walking carpet, who did nothing and contributed nothing to the movies. Any of them. And yet the fucker got a medal! Well, I guess he did fight alongside them. And who’s going to tell a seven-foot Wookie he can’t have a medal? But as a character, for me, just did not work. Definitely my least favourite. Until the horrific advent of Jar-Jar Binks, of course.

In fact, when you think about it, over three movies (which should be enough time for anyone to write a decent backstory) we get hardly any character development. Yes, Luke learns what it is to be a Jedi - sort of - and Han realises there’s more to life than money - maybe - but if you look at the characters in Star Wars and compare them to those in Return of the Jedi there’s not a lot of difference. You can recognise them as the same people, and even though they’ve been through adventures together, suffered and triumphed together, and blown up the Death Star together (twice!) there’s really no massive change that I can see. So you kind of have to ask yourself, what did they learn?

But more to the point, what did we learn? Taking, of course, only the first three movies as our base, what are we told about Han Solo? Leia? The droids even? Vader? Kenobi? Surely somewhere along the way there would have been time for someone to at least hint at their life story? Why did Solo become a space pirate? What planet does he, or did he, call home? What about Leia’s family? Does she even mourn them, other than one short scene after Alderaan does a very good impersonation of a bunch of floating cinders? And how does the daughter of the emperor’s chief enforcer end up living the high life with a royal family that hates his guts on another planet?

So many questions, and maybe some are answered in the later movies, but that’s beside the point. If the first trilogy had been all we ever heard of the franchise, if the prequel movies had not been made, we would be in the dark about these characters we have come to love, seeing them only as the barest sketches of the people they are. Even so, it appears that’s where they’re left, for at least thirty years, as the next movies go back even a longer, longer time ago, to tell us the prehistory of some of the other characters, and Luke, Leia and Han appear to have been forgotten about, done with.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018