Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  Now, it's possible to make perfectly good and even great movies based on the principle that everybody in the movie is stupid. There's been a lot of great horror movies built on that concept ("Something is out there hunting us, so let's all wander off by ourselves so it can kill us one by one"), though a great many more very bad horror movies have also used it. Alien used a people-doing-stupid-things plot. So did the even better sequel Aliens. (This worked particularly well in Aliens because so many of the characters were in the military, and anyone with any experience in the military knows that as sure as the sun rises, you're probably going to get ordered to do something stupid at least once a day) But Aliens generated more tension and drama with a scene containing no special effects ("They're inside the room!" "Where?") than all three of the latest Star Wars films did in their ponderous special effects-laden entirety.

  But then the Colonial Marines in Aliens wouldn't have been at home in the latest three Star Wars movies. The Marines were great characters, interacting in a very real way with each other. That's what made the movie real, too, not the cool special effects. Kind of like Luke and Han and Leia.

  Contrast that to what state-of-the-art digital filmmaking allows. Everyone has read George Lucas's descriptions of how he'd pull one take with one actor and insert another take with another actor into the scene. Two takes, one scene. Assume for the sake of argument that really does allow the insertion of each individual best performance. What's missing is actual human interaction, all the countless visual and verbal cues that one or more humans are really dealing with each other. There's a disconnect when that interaction is broken and two different interactions are stuck together. Our minds, designed to process how people communicate, consciously or subconsciously spot the problem. It makes the whole thing look phony, and makes even good actors look bad.

  The negative effects of the godlike powers of digital editing didn't stop there. Creativity remains an undefined and poorly understood aspect of human genius. In movies, it's also all too rare. A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back had gobs of creativity; Return of the Jedi less so but still an acceptable amount. Where's the creativity in the latest three Star Wars films? Could it be possible that creativity doesn't flourish when a director is focused on making sure every single pixel is doing exactly what the director wants? Watching the latest three Star Wars movies, it's impossible to erase the image of the director using a digital hammer to pound every trace of spontaneity and inspiration out of the film and the actors' performances.

  The great distinctive things about the original Star Wars movies also went away. Remember tough girls with guns? By the time The Phantom Menace appeared, the girls in Star Wars had lost a lot of their mojo. The princess in that film got in some gun time, but was memorable mostly for incredibly elaborate clothes and for giving the eye to a little boy (the sort of scene that unites the audience by making everyone go "ew" at once). By the time Revenge of the Sith showed up, the new princess had regressed to the point of wandering around weepy-eyed and pregnant, powerless to change a tragic course of events (how are you going to be a good mother when you can't even keep your husband from going over to the dark side?). Blame it on the plot, blame it on the actors, blame it on the direction-the sad truth is that at her toughest, the princess in the latest three films couldn't shake a blaster at the princess in the first three films. In contrast to Amidala the overdressed, Leia looks tougher even when she's in a brass bikini. (Or maybe that should read Leia looks tougher especially when she's in a brass bikini.)

  Thus the What Was George Thinking? period, the time span when great storytelling was digitally erased from the Star Wars saga. Instead of being "A New Hope" for better-quality SF movies, Star Wars became the ultimate example of special effects over story, over acting and over dialogue. Yes, A New Hope resulted in lots of rotten SF movies hitting the screens, but it also inspired some good stuff and it taught a generation of moviegoers that SF and good movies are not incompatible things. The success of the original three Star Wars films at least illustrated that good SF movies could make good money.

  Now Hollywood knows (or thinks it knows) that lousy SF movies with great special effects can also make good money. The one positive effect of Star Wars, the good example it offered, has vanished. If we got lots of bad movies out of a good example, what will happen in years to come after the financial success of the latest three Star Wars movies? We'll see more and more really bad SF movies, because everybody knows SF movies don't need plot, character, acting, dialogue or any of that other stuff that other movies need. No, they just need big spaceships and explosions.

  We're already seeing this today, when we no longer have to shell out ten bucks or more to sit in a movie theater to watch an SF movie with bad acting, bad plot and bad dialogue. Now we can watch the same kind of bad SF movies anytime we want to in the comfort of our homes on the Sci Fi Channel, which is cranking them out at a dizzying pace. It's a Lovecraftian tragedy, really, of good examples spawning bad imitators, and then spawning even worse prequels which will themselves spawn unspeakable imitations.

  In the bad old days before Star Wars: A New Hope, when people thought of SF movies they thought of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Now, after the latest three Star Wars films, when people think of SF movies they think of Plan 9 From Outer Space and Jar Jar Binks. Not just bad, but stupid, too. That's the SF movie legacy of Star Wars.

  John G. Hemry also writes under the name Jack Campbell and is the author of several novels, including the first and so far only legal thriller military SF series (a.k.a. JAG in space), which includes A just Determination, Burden of Proof, Rule of Evidence and Against All Enemies. His latest space opera is The Lost Fleet: Dauntless (August 2006) under the Jack Campbell pen name. John loves the first Star Wars trilogy but wishes George had stopped there. He wanted to marry a woman like Leia and ended up with one who's pretty darn close but even better. He's also the author of the Stark's War series and numerous short fiction stories, as well as nonfiction articles on topics like interstellar navigation. A retired U.S. Navy officer, he lives in Maryland with his wife "S" and three children.

  THE COURTROOM

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: (checks his notes; mutters indistinctly)

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover? Your cross-examination?

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Uh, let's see ... this is where I'm supposed to come up with some questions to make the case that the prequel trilogy is actually brilliantly written, with sparkling performances all around?

  DROID JUDGE: Yes... ? And ... ?

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: I'm thinking! I'm thinking! Give a guy a month or two, huh?

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover-

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: I mean, Revenge of the Sith won the People's Choice Award for both Favorite Movie 2005 and Favorite Movie Drama 2005-so it's clearly indefensible-

  DAVID BRIN: Objection! Defense counsel is trying to argue facts not in evidence!

  DROID JUDGE: Sustained. Remarks regarding Revenge of the Sith winning the People's Choice Award for both Favorite Movie 2005 and Favorite Movie Drama 2005 will be struck from the record.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: All right. Fine. I'll take one for the team. Mr. Hemry, as I understand your testimony, you don't actually blame Star Wars or Mr. Lucas for the slew of embarrassingly bad big-budget sci-fi disasters that befouled eighties cinema. That you place blame instead on the lemming mentality of the Hollywood shit factory. So the actual crux of your argument-the crux of the Prosecution's entire case on this charge (lacking similar bigbudget lemming die-offs following the prequels)-is that madefor-Sci Fi-Channel movies pretty much suck. This, the Defense is willing to stipulate. In fact, it seems as though many of them suck on purpose, but that's another issue. Mr. Hemry, you write SF legal thrillers, can you explain to the Court the logical (and legal) fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, and explain how this fallacy is the entire basis of your argument? Or would you like me to do it?

  JOHN G. HEMRY: Will the judge kindly remind the Def
ense counsel that this is a court of law, not a basketball court, and trash talk won't score any points for him?

  DAVID BRIN: I agree, Your Honor.

  DROIDJUDGE: Sustained. Let's keep it PG-13, Mr. Stover.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: (mutters indistinctly)

  JOHN G. HEMRY: The Prosecution is deeply saddened that the Defense has grossly misstated the Prosecution's case in a blatant attempt to mislead the Court. Nor will the Court be fooled by the Defense's attempt to impress the jury by showing that he can recite a Latin phrase which, in fact, has nothing to do with the Prosecution's case. Contrary to the claims of the Defense, the Prosecution did not directly link such brilliant films as The Empire Strikes Back to the current crop of "Sci Fi" movies. No, such films reek of (and "reek" is an appropriate term in this case) the example created by the unholy union of the once-great Star Wars legacy with jar jar Binks. The inspiration (if I may use such a word in relation to Sci Fi Channel movies) for those awful creations is to be found in the prequel trilogy. The Defense can't argue with a straight face that the movers and shakers in the movie industry haven't been looking at the financial success of the films in the prequel trilogy and paraphrasing the famous line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: "We don't need no stinkin' writers."

  This is the Wookiee in the room that the Defense is trying to ignore, the Sith behind the curtain, the alien in the egg. As the Prosecution agreed, the original Star Wars trilogy can't be directly faulted for the junk that attempted to cash in on its success. But the prequel trilogy must bear responsibility for what it has done, making bad writing, bad acting and bad stories not only profitable, but also once again the image of SF in the eyes of the general public.

  The Prosecution is willing to stipulate that Revenge of the Sith won the People's Choice Award for 2005, but challenges the De fense to name the last five films that won that award. This is not a mark of immortality, but of fan enthusiasm. Professional wrestling has many devoted fans as well, but that doesn't make it art.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: The Defense is not willing to stipulate anything about professional wrestling, having no expertise on the subject; it appears to the Defense to be a violent variant of commedia dell'arte. And while the Defense admittedly cannot name the last five films that won the People's Choice Award, the Defense is similarly incapable of naming the last five films that won the Golden Globe Award, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Film Critics Circle Award or the award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, also known as the Oscar. Defense counsel is notoriously dim on this subject, as he is on so many others.

  Post hoc ergo propter hoc means "This followed that, therefore that caused this." A car ran over my foot after George Bush was elected, therefore the Republican victory broke my toes. In other words, simply because a slew of crappy SF flicks showed up on basic cable after the prequel trilogy came out does not in any way show that the prequel trilogy caused that slew of crappy SF flicks; all it shows is that special effects technology has become cheaper, that the Sci Fi Channel has been making money off the Stargate franchise, and that not enough decent screenwriters live in Hollywood.

  DAVID BRIN: Objection! Defense is again trying to argue facts not in evidence!

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Oh, fine. Withdrawn. This whole trial thing is too damned complicated, anyway. Can't we just have a couple drinks, stand around and argue?

  DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover-

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Yeah, I know. Call Bruce Bethke.

  1. INTRODUCTION

  The history of American cinema can be described as a case study in evolution by means of punctuated equilibrium. The "equilibrium" part of this expression is fairly easy to understand: making movies is a hellishly expensive and labor-intensive business, and whenever you have that much money and that many people's careers on the line, the innate conservatism of the group always comes to the fore. There is a film industry truism that nothing succeeds like success, and another that holds that the quickest way to find success is by clinging tightly to the coattails and following closely in the footsteps of someone else who's already found it. The net result of these two ideas is that movie studios quite naturally have an ingrained tendency to become cinematic sausage factories, churning out mile after mile of motion picture by-products while very rarely departing from the established recipes.

  It's the "punctuated" part of the expression that makes for an interesting discussion. Every now and then, while the rest of Hollywood is busy making remakes of adaptations of old TV sitcoms, a filmmaker comes along with a movie that is so fresh, so different and so seemingly original that it makes everyone else spill their kiwi frappuccinos in their rush to grab its coattails. More to the point, every now and then a film comes along that upsets the paradigmatic fruit cart and so insinuates itself into the larger zeitgeist that it becomes a cinematic watershed, and in some way the history of movies is forever after defined in terms of those films that came before, versus those that came after.

  As you may have guessed, I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that Star Wars' is one such film. The original 1977 movie had such an enormous impact, and left its footprints so far and wide across our popular consciousness, that there is simply no ignoring it now. The social phenomenon that is Star Wars is like a granite mountain or a law of physics; any work of fiction that comes afterward must either acknowledge its presence or find a way to work around it. For good or ill, Star Wars is a movie that has changed the world.

  In being this, it joins a rather elect and somewhat peculiar company. The Jazz Singer (1927), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Ten Commandments (1956), Psycho (1960), The Graduate (1967): all of these are films that changed their respective worlds, and all changed them in different ways and for different reasons. Nor is there necessarily a correlation between being a "great" film and being a "good" film: George Romero's original 1968 version of Night of the Living Dead, for example, is almost universally regarded as a lousy picture, but ever since, it's been impossible to venture into the same territory without either paying homage to it or working against it. D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, on the other hand, is generally considered a great film that forever changed the way dramatic narratives unfold on screen-but watch it as I have, with a roomful of African American film students, and you might come away with a somewhat different impression. And while Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 masterpiece Triumph of the Will is unquestionably a great film, it is equally unquestionably an evil film, right down to the blackest depths of its utterly rotten core.

  What, then, makes Star Wars both a great film and a good film, and one that's been both very good to its creator and a positive influence on the films and other works of fiction that have come after? Well, to assess the impact of something, you must first determine how to establish a baseline, and in this case I believe the proper way to start is by asking one question: what was the state of sci-fie in films in the years immediately preceding the release of the original Star Wars?

  II. BEFORE STAR WARS: THE CREATION MYTH

  George Lucas is on record as saying that his original script for Star Wars was heavily influenced by the writings of Joseph Campbell, and that his intention all along was to create a modern mythology that recapitulated the archetypal "monomyth" described in Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Given Lucas's self-conscious myth-making, then, it is entirely fitting that another creation myth has sprung up around Star Wars, and it goes something like this:

  Before Star Wars, sci-fi movies were the redheaded stepchildren of low-budget B-grade drive-in horror films. In those dark days cinematic sci-fi was a wasteland, populated only by mad scientists, giant insects, invading aliens, robots resembling ambulatory jukeboxes and the occasional oversized Japanese reptile.' The scripts were universally awful, the acting even worse and the special effects laughably bad. The story always revolved around some sort of homicidal monster and the new and exciting way it killed its victims, and the plot always centered on the two-fist
ed, square jawed hero and the clever way that he and his screaming lady love interest found to unmask and defeat said monster. After the 1950s ended, the situation got even worse, and you could count on your fingers all the serious, big-budget sci-fi movies made between 1960 and 1977-and even then, some of them were pretty dicey in their claims to be "major" pictures.

  After Star Wars sprang fully grown from the brow of Lucas, the field of science fiction experienced a great renaissance, and sci-fi writers and filmmakers alike finally got the attention they deserved. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at last began to recognize the long-standing creative genius of sci-fi filmmakers and issue Oscars accordingly, major stars at last began to take roles in scifi movies, and studios around the world finally began to give their sci-fi filmmakers serious budgets to work with.

  In making Star Wars, then, George Lucas single-handedly revitalized science fiction, led it out of the tawdry drive-in wilderness, and made it the loved, respected and highly profitable member of the family of creative arts that it is today4

  The problem with this creation myth, of course, is that its central assertion is easily proven false. While there certainly were plenty of low-budget films in the 1950s, with titles like The Crawling Spleen and Attack of the 50-Foot Tapeworm, there were also serious-message pictures such as The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), This Island Earth (1955) and On The Beach (1959); taut and effective thrillers such as The Thing from Another World! (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1953) and Them! (1954); and big-budget effects pictures such as Destination Moon (19505), When Worlds Collide (19516), War of the Worlds (1953'), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (19548), and Forbidden Planet (1956). Nor were the 1960s the doldrums that the creation myth would make them out to be: in those years we saw The Time Machine (19609), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Fantastic Voyage (19661°), One Million Years B.C. (1966"), Planet of the Apes (196812), 2001: A Space Odyssey (196813) , Charly (196814) and Marooned (196915)