Star Wars... again

I went to see Episode III again yesterday, and when I got home, I watched the DVD of the original Star Wars (now also know as Episode IV, or A New Hope), and it really made it clear to me what's missing from the prequels (besides Harrison Ford, and a sense of humor). As visually stunning as the prequels are, the excessive computer-generated imagery gives the viewer the sense that what they're seeing is ultimately made up, obviously just a pretend world. But in the original trilogy, everything (sets, ships, even the aliens) has such a physical presence and tactile reality that you get the feeling if you went out into space, you could actually find these places. That kind of lived-in reality is a big part of what made the original movies so appealing, and what is sorely lacking in the new ones.

That being said, I actually enjoyed Revenge of the Sith more the second time around, largely thanks to Kevin Smith. He wrote an article for the latest Rolling Stone (read Part 1 and Part 2) in which he basically calls every Star Wars nerd to the carpet for blaming George Lucas for not bringing their childhood back. And he's exactly right: nobody is going to make me feel like I did when I was 4 or 5 and seeing Star Wars for the first time in the theater, especially not some 60-year-old director who's 30 years removed from that first movie. So with that mindset, I went into the theater to just enjoy the movie for what it is: a big, loud spectacle of lightsabers and space battles. Yeah, it's not perfect. There's some crappy acting, and some bad dialogue, and the whole "Darth Vader as Frankenstein's monster" scene at the end is just plain wrong. But there's also some amazing stuff in there. If you strip away all the expectations and hopes and hype attached to it, it's a pretty damn good summer movie. And really, that's all Star Wars was ever intended to be. The fact that it did well enough and survived long enough that we got five more movies, well that's just gravy. As franchises go, four out of six ain't so bad.