Star Wars on Trial (32 page)

N THE BEGINNING, there was a spaceship. t

Then there was another spaceship. A really big one, chasing the first spaceship.

After that came the real fun. Guys in white armor firing blasters! Comic-relief droids! A beautiful princess with an attitude who kicks butt! A menacing figure in black with the voice of James Earl Jones! A colorful rogue! A wise old teacher who was what everybody wanted their grandfather to be like! A big, hairy Wookiee! Best of all, a typical teenager stuck in the middle of a nowhere place who just knows he's special, and turns out to be so special he's going to save the entire galaxy!

And the audience saw that it was good.

Star Wars made a lot of movie viewers happy, made George Lucas a lot of money and made dollar signs pop up in the eyes of movie studio executives everywhere. Perhaps most importantly, the original Star Wars movie (Episode IV: A New Hope) raised the bar for what an SF movie should be. Star Wars wasn't just fun, it wasn't just exciting, it was also a great story, well told and well acted.

This shouldn't have been a big deal, but it was. One of the unfair things about science fiction is that the field always seems to be judged by the general public based on the lousiest representatives of the genre. And (let's face it) SF has been cursed with some incredibly poor movies. The movie usually cited as the worst movie of any kind of all time is Plan 9 from Outer Space. Plan 9 has about the same relationship to SF that a Twinkie has to actual pastry, but in the minds of the public, SF is all too often the Twinkie of the movie world.

Star Wars: A New Hope blew that away Then came The Empire Strikes Back with the incomparable Leigh Brackett working the screenplay, and SF movie fans could strut into the local cineplex with their heads held high. Return of the Jedi wasn't up to the standards of its predecessor, but it was plenty good enough.

So what's the problem? Isn't it a foregone conclusion that the Star Wars series has been good for SF movies?

No.

Unfortunately, like a fantastic one-night stand without forethought, Star Wars produced some unwanted consequences. All too soon after the success of A New Hope, the children of Star Wars started appearing in our movie theaters and television screens. And all too often that, to put it mildly, wasn't good.

In fairness to George Lucas, who did a bang-up job on the first three Star Wars movies, there have been two phases to the saga of SF movies moving to the dark side. The first phase, built around those first three Star Wars movies (which are now the second three movies, but we'll get into that later) could be called the It's Not George's Fault period. The second phase (the What Was George Thinking? period) spread the fault around a bit more.

In retrospect, the negative fallout from Star Wars: A New Hope could've been predicted. Any movie that generates a good profit also results in a burst of copycat movies seeking to cash in on the first movie's success. Unfortunately (with rare exceptions), the copycats never bother to actually figure out what was really responsible for the first film's triumph. In the strange alternate reality known as Hollywood, spending tens of millions of dollars on a lousy knockoff movie is a lot easier than going to the mental effort of trying to figure out what really made the original so good.

As movie studios began churning out flicks allegedly inspired by the success of Star Wars, it was obvious that what passed for creative talent in Hollywood had actually seen only the first few minutes of the movie. They'd seen the big spaceship. Then they stopped watching, because to Hollywood's collective mind the big spaceship was clearly what had made Star Wars a success.

The ancient among us will recall that when old-timers like Gene Roddenberry started out doing SF, they came up with an idea for a story, then created some spaceships to match. After Star Wars succeeded so well, and Star Trek became a cult favorite with amazing legs, the movie studios decided to try to copy this success by reversing the process. They'd come up with spaceships and then, if the budget permitted, maybe a few ideas and maybe a story.

Then again, maybe not.

Enter: Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Enter: The Black Hole. Movies featuring endless shots panning across big spaceships, until you found yourself checking your watch and wondering if you could hit the restroom, then the snack bar to pick up some more popcorn, and come back to find the big spaceship shot still continuing. In the bad old days, this sort of thing was the filler a movie would gain to pad out a story that wasn't quite long enough. But after Star Wars: A New Hope, too many studios decided that the filler was supposed to take the place of the story. Viewers, dazzled by all of the special effects, weren't supposed to notice that there was a glaring lack of plot, realistic characters and intelligent dialogue in those scenes that didn't feature big spaceships.

In many ways, the epitome of these movies featuring big spaceships filled with a strange lack of substance was Battlestar Galactica (the 1978 version). (Yes, it appeared on TV, but the pilot was a movie. A movie appearing in the same period of time as Rescue from Gilligan's Island. The bar for high achievement in TV movies was not a lofty one in the late 1970s.)

The pilot episode, in between shots of big spaceships, actually did have a story of sorts for a while (don't sign peace treaties with homicidal robots), but even in that first movie the story sort of wandered off in the second half with a weird casino world interlude (which did, of course, feature spaceships). Worse was to come, though. After the pilot, the series apparently budgeted all of its funds for more big spaceship shots and decided not to worry about a comprehensible story line. The poor cast was left to wander through plots of weekly episodes which had been ripped off from old movies (such as The Towering Inferno, The Guns of Navarone and even Shane) with little regard for whether or not they made sense in the context of the series.

The lack of storytelling sense and dependence on special effects was in some ways epitomized by the apparently random decision to kill off the heroic male lead's love interest during the pilot. But that was okay, because they replaced the woman with a robot dog! Who'd want to watch a wife and mother character played by a real woman when they could watch a cute special effect? Because Star Wars had proved that viewers loved special effects, right?

Then there was the late 1970s incarnation of Buck Rogers, but the less said of that the better. About the only thing that movie and subsequent TV series did share with Star Wars: A New Hope was locking the cast (especially the men) for eternity into the hell of 1970s hair styles. ("Luke, use the hair clippers. ")

But, as said before, all of this was Not George's Fault. That'd be like blaming the Beatles for "Billy, Don't Be a Hero." Yeah, the Beatles changed the direction of rock and roll music, but the inspiring example of Abbey Road couldn't be blamed for whatever other people decided to do with that direction. The first three Star Wars flicks stood as examples of How To Do It Right no matter how many other films Did It Wrong. George Lucas couldn't be blamed for all the schlockmeister productions trying to cash in on the idea that SF movies could be moneymakers. He couldn't be blamed for producers and directors who thought the special effects were the movie and traditional storytelling things like plot were unnecessary.