An Anxious Galaxy Holds Its Breath for the New ‘Star Wars’

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The New York Sun

For more than 30 years, George Lucas’s “Star Wars” franchise has offered itself up to new initiates for discovery, and to longtime fans as a kind of comfort food. The first three films, “Star Wars” (1977), “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), and “Return of the Jedi” (1983), have been theatrically rereleased in digitally enhanced versions, reissued in multiple VHS, laserdisc, and DVD packages, and aired on cable to the point of ubiquity. (Lucasfilm is reportedly preparing 3-D editions of all six “Star Wars” live-action features for yet another assault on the box office.)

The films have also spawned a licensed line of “expanded universe” iterations in which lesser characters or events not depicted in the features assume center stage. Next Friday, these briskly selling paperback novelizations, comic-book adaptations, video games, role-playing games, action figures, and other totems and interpretations will be joined by a new feature-length “Star Wars” film — for the first time produced entirely in computer animation — titled “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”

To date, the biggest, most elaborate, and spectacularly profitable expansion of the original saga has come in the form of the three feature-length, live-action prequels: “The Phantom Menace” (1999), “Attack of the Clones” (2002), and “Revenge of the Sith” (2005), which were numbered episodes 1, 2, and 3, respectively. The prequel trilogy extended back to the origins of the events and characters in the first films, and necessitated new number designations and subtitles for the original trilogy.

But the prequels offered as much awkwardness as entertainment. Mr. Lucas’s original film possessed a playful sense of wonder that was, frankly, absent in the new additions. Focused on convoluted, dramatically inert political intrigue, a clumsily portrayed romance between Anakin Skywalker (father of Luke and Leia, and the future Darth Vader), and weighed down by risible dialogue and occasionally excruciating performances, each outing in the “Star Wars” prequel trilogy felt as if it were pitched more toward actual children than to the child in all of us.

Dave Filoni, who was handpicked to direct “The Clone Wars,” has described the new film as “Episode 2.5” — that is, it takes place between prequels 2 and 3. With a story involving interstellar kidnapping and high-handed intrigue between the Jedi knights and the evil forces of Count Dooku and Chancellor Palpatine, “The Clone Wars” is also the feature-length introduction for a “Clone Wars” animated series that will be broadcast on the Cartoon Network and TNT in the fall.

This particular chronology has already been depicted in traditional cartoon animation via a short-lived series also shown on the Cartoon Network, in 2005. Mr. Lucas has been highly proprietary about making his vision available in every successive home video technology. But in keeping with his particular fascination with the opportunities offered by digital technology, the new “Clone Wars” feature has been created using a computer process intended to lend the animated characters more lifelike heft on the big screen than they would have in traditional small-screen animation.

In the past, Mr. Lucas’s devotion to digital enhancement has given him free reign to revise his original vision. The inclusion of a pre-emptive shot from the barrel of a bounty hunter’s laser gun in 1997’s 20th anniversary edition of “Star Wars” (which was redesignated “Episode IV: A New Hope” once production began on the prequel features) was particularly unsettling to adult admirers of the 1977 film. In the origi nal theatrical release, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) ruthlessly guns down an assassin bent on collecting a bounty for his death. By making it appear that the bounty hunter pulled the trigger first, Mr. Lucas made a good-guy character even nobler, robbing Solo of a redemptive story arc by removing any need for redemption.

Mr. Lucas has freely confirmed that he was and remains a story disciple of the folklorist and historian Joseph Campbell, whose diagram of the requisite turning points in all heroic myths proved inspirational to Mr. Lucas and his scenarist collaborators. Each new iteration and expansion of the “Star Wars” universe has been accompanied by increasing praise for Mr. Lucas’s supposedly neoclassicist modern mythology. But what this laudatory consensus overlooks is that the film that started it all was more the work of an obsessive film buff than a student of anthropology.

Regardless of what digital format, release edition, or title one views it in, “Episode IV: A New Hope” contains shots, scenes, and plot contrivances lifted right out of Akira Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress” and “Yojimbo”; John Ford’s “The Searchers,” and Michael Anderson’s “The Dam Busters,” to name just a few. In her memoir, “Waiting on the Weather,” Kurosawa’s longtime production associate, Teruyo Nogami, recounts a first meeting between the writer-director of “The Hidden Fortress” and the writer-director of the considerably better-known and more profitable film that bears an indisputable resemblance to it. Mr. Kurosawa had to reassure an anxious Mr. Lucas that he had not come to Lucasfilm’s Bay Area headquarters to collect a copyright royalty.

But each successive “Star Wars” sequel has demonstrated Mr. Lucas’s diminishing interest in mining his pre-filmmaking moviegoing past. By the time of “Return of the Jedi,” a movie that was ostensibly a remake of the 1977 original, the director appeared more inclined to visit his own more shallow creative well for inspiration.

Now, on the eve of the new film, hope in the galaxy springs eternal that the movie-mad spark of genius that initiated three decades of “Star Wars” will return in “The Clone Wars,” and that Mr. Lucas’s once-marvelous vision will no longer seem as though it only briefly existed “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”


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