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Thursday, May 19, 2005
What I Won't Be Doing Today
I'm not really what you could call a Star Wars fan. I used to enjoy the original trilogy when I was a kid, but sometime in my early twenties, when I rewatched the movies, it suddenly hit me that, on the whole, the films really weren't very good. Yeah, Harrison Ford put in a half-way decent performance, but most of the rest of the actors were struggling to sell really goofy lines. And while the silly creatures and special effects worked for me as a kid, as an adult I just felt that I had outgrown the whole thing. When the "revised" editions came out, I went to see the first one out of curiosity, and what I suspect was the first sign of Lucas growing out of touch with his intended audience began to show. Lucas, it seemed, was starting to take his universe too seriously. When The Phantom Menace was released, and I took my young cousins to it on the grounds that, hey, I liked Star Wars when I was their age, they might like it too. Those "this is serious drama, dammit! and you will take it seriously!" elements were written all over it. And when I got dragged to Attack of the Clones by the boyfriend, over my objections, I had to keep my face stuffed with popcorn and soda to stop myself from giggling nonstop at the pompous, over-blown and melodramatic seriousness of it all.
So, no, I won't be going to see the latest Star Wars movie today, or any day. Pal John recently wrote a piece for Orkut, Google's attempt to meld LiveJournal and Slate into a web-site that will be inexplicably popular in South America, that I think sums up a lot of the reasons why I won't be going to see the movie. You can read the full piece here, but this excerpt is choice: "Whereas any rational human being would know what creative bankruptcy to expect in a "Rocky 6" or an "Alien6" or a "Death Wish 6," the cult of "Star Wars 6" refuse to see the mice scurrying around the Bank of Bespin, persisting in believing that George Lucas could still do something new and fresh with this material, if only a few things were touched up on the outside."