So, after my talking up the original trilogy for days, and the girls thoroughly depressed at the last film, we pressed on. The film begins at a very weird spot compared to the last ones. The girls were really eager to find out what happens with Anakin, Obi-wan and the twins, but A New Hope started off with... C-3PO and R2-D2. When someone watches the originals first, starting with these two makes more sense. They have a little comic relief to them, but they also provide a helpless observer point of view for the audience to connect with in this strange universe they've just been thrust into. We stick with them for a good fifteen minutes as information is gradually and slowly presented to the audience, then we spend another 15 minutes with Luke on Tatooine before he finally gets involved with the galactic plot. Now, as we were coming off the prequels, we had a lot of information on the universe already, all we needed was the details of what happened in between films (revealed in the opening crawl) and then we were good to go. By the time we got to the scene of Obi-wan FINALLY explaining what The Force was and how it worked, Berri declared, rather matter of factly, "This movie is boring." To my horror, I realized I agreed with her. The spectacular display of special effects, and the high stakes galactic intrigue of the prequels were what they had gotten invested in, and now they were very impatient as Luke wandered around the desert waiting for things to be slowly explained to him.
The B story of the film of Leia aboard the Death Star was of greater interest to them, as it involved the galactic plot line established from the previous films, but they were often distracted during the scenes with Vader and Leia. The question, "Does he know that's his daughter?" came up several times, along with, "Are those clones or people?" in regard to the stormtroopers. I didn't really have a verifiable answer to the latter.
About halfway through the film, the two stories converged and it felt more "like a Star Wars film" again, and it held their interest until the duel between Obi-wan and Vader. Originally, this was a magnificent scene that set the baseline for future duels as well as great drama, Now it's been reduced to an old man fighting a cylon with a glow stick. Kat immediately commented how "unepic" this duel was. The scene was completely destroyed by the over-the-top the episode III duel. Fortunately, the shock of Obi-wan's defeat remained intact.
My final note for this film is on the battle over the Death Star. It's the one scene that, despite the weaker special effects, outdoes similar scenes in Episode III when watched back-to-back. Remember in the last post, I said the opening battle of III was very confusing. The ships were unidentifiable and there was no emotional investment in either the clones or droids. The Death Star battle literally does the exact opposite, making it the stronger scene. The audience is clearly shown which ships are "good" versus "bad"; the pilots are actual characters with their own personalities and reactions to the battle that we care about; and there is a very clear objective that everyone is working toward. Granted, everyone usually snickers when "the fat guy" (i.e. Pork-ins) dies, but after that, every time a pilot died, I heard an "Oh no!" or a gasp or some reaction from the girls. They cared about what was happening to everyone and not just the central characters. An interesting lesson that was forgotten in the prequels.
Since this post is so long, I'll save my final thoughts for next time in order to have a complete discussion on George Lucas, Rick McCallum, and Gary Kurtz.
