Is the Force still with them? Trollheart explores the legacy of Star Wars

[Trollheart]

Is the Force Still with them?
Trollheart Explores the Legacy of


I'm old enough to remember queuing to see the original release of the first Star Wars movie, now titled Episode IV: A New Hope. I remember the line stretched all the way down the street, and even for my time this was unusual. People queued for movies, yes, but generally you were talking maybe fifty or so people max; for the line to run down the street (this being O'Connell Street, the main one in Dublin city centre) you would need a few thousand easily. But that was what it was like when Star Wars was released in 1977: everyone wanted to see it, and that included adults and a whole lot of people who wouldn't even watch a science fiction movie.

As I've noted elsewhere, for a very long time - up to the release of this movie, in fact - science fiction was seen as the purview of two types of viewers: kids, and nerds who enjoyed science-y stuff, and almost always by default wore glasses, had bad unfashionable haircuts and lots of acne. One thing science fiction movies at least were not was fun. Look at the ones before this time - even relatively light fare such as Logan's Run (released only a year before this, and look how different it is, the audience its writers were catering to) had a dark, almost fatalistic element to them, and others such as Planet of the Apes and Silent Running were really meant to be taken seriously. You had the serials of course from the 1930s and 1940s, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers flying around in unrealistic spaceships in tight-fitting costumes, the hatches of the ships specially widened to admit those strong, lantern jaws. Nobody took these things seriously. Nobody could, and maybe nobody was meant to.

And of course you had television trying to make science fiction "respectable", with shows such as Doctor Who and Lost in Space, and the big one, Star Trek. But while these managed to divest science fiction somewhat of its geeky/kids-only trappings, at the cinema folks still went to see westerns, romances, comedies and adventure movies. Horror was okay too. But science fiction? What am I, seven?

All that changed with the release of George Lucas's blockbuster. It's not in any way hyperbole or overstating the case to say that Star Wars - the first movie as well as the later franchise - changed the face of science fiction cinema forever. After this, everyone would jump on the light-hearted, family-friendly adventure in space, and hundreds, if not more, clones would copy the success of a man whose movie had not even been expected to be a success. A blueprint for science fiction movies had been laid down, and with slight variations, still drives most of the movies of that type today. It wouldn't be true to say that every science fiction movie owes its existence to Lucas, but as a whole, science fiction film came of age under Lucas's then-young hand, and a movie about far-flung empires, bad guys in black and princesses set the tone for what was to follow.

I was, of course, a fan of Star Wars, and for a long time there were only the three movies. We thought that was all there ever would be, and to be fair, the third one had wrapped up the story pretty well. Nevertheless, Hollywood is a hungry beast, and rumours abounded of "prequel" movies, but nobody really ever believed they'd get made, never mind see the light of day. Lucas was tight-lipped, dropping hints and giving knowing winks throughout the late 1980s and into the next decade, and indeed the millennium was nearly out before we got the "next" movie, which was indeed a prequel, and was indeed pants. Like a lot of fans, I found myself wishing he hadn't bothered. Sometimes a classic (even three) is best left alone.

Although I've seen, only once each, the "first" three prequels, I never went any further, and this journal aims to do just that. With a total now of eleven movies (including the originals), a staggering seven separate animated TV series (and this doesn't even include a further seven micro-series, whatever they are!) and three  live-action TV series, it's safe to say Star Wars, the franchise, is giving the other big name in the science fiction TV and film universe, Star Trek, a real run for its money.

So, hell: there's a lot to get through, and I'm sure you'll appreciate it when I say do not expect major episode or film synopses. What I intend to do here (and it's going to take some time, let me tell you!) is watch all the movies (starting from The Phantom Menace, as I know the other three backwards and in the original Klingon, sorry, wrong series) though I will be talking, of course, about the original trilogy, and the TV series, and comment on them, where I see there being major changes, how they impact the overall storyline set out in the originals, or don't, how they fill out the history or mythology of the franchise, and how, in general, they add to, or detract from the franchise.

I feared for Star Wars when Disney bought them out, and I think my fears have been more or less justified, with the emphasis more on games and toys that can be squeezed out of the movies and series now than the actual stories, but we'll see as we go along. I will do everything in order, sticking to a strict chronology, so if for instance there are two movies with a series in between, I'll do one movie, then the series, then the second movie, so that the timeline is maintained.

Of course, it should go without saying, comment, discussion, debate and bare-knuckle fist fights are all involved (please deposit any light sabers or blasters at the door, thank you) and if we can get a discussion going and some interest, maybe this will be fun. If not, well, at worst it will allow me to catch up on the many, many elements of the Star Wars universe I've been either missing out on, or have mercifully escaped. At the end of this project, I will at least have formed a proper, informed opinion of how the franchise has gone, and how things have developed, for good or bad, since I stood outside the Savoy Cinema in O'Connell Street with my brothers and my ma, munching on a Kit-Kat in the rain, a geeky fourteen-year-old, wondering if it would be worth it.

Forty-five years is a long time - most of my life, in fact: let's see what Lucas - and Disney - have been up to during that time.

[Trollheart]

Introduction: A new hope of striking back for revenge

I: Some time ago, and quite distant from here...

I'm just going to assume that every living being on this planet, indeed in this galaxy knows the plot lines of the first three movies. If you don't, well then I really can't help you. So I'm not going to go over them. However I will talk about the movies in more general terms. While it's true to say that Star Wars (I'm not going to call it A New Hope: for the purposes of this journal Star Wars will refer to the first movie as well as the actual franchise) was a groundbreaking movie, it's in some ways a little hard to call it a real trailblazer, as it built on so many tropes that had been used before, not only in science fiction. I guess the main thing it did was introduce, as I mentioned above, a sense of fun into science fiction, which had up till then been a very serious business. It's also perhaps - I'd have to check - the first science fiction movie that really doesn't bother itself too much about actual science. Nobody worries about how hyperspace works, or the engines that drive the X-Wings. Nobody asks what exactly a lightsaber is, or how the droids are put together? Put simply, nobody cares. Star Wars, at its heart, both movie and franchise is, or was, all about escapism and having a good time. It's far more a fantasy/adventure story that just happens to be set in space than a "hard" science fiction one.

It was also, I believe, the first science fiction trilogy, (at least, I don't remember any before it) and therefore the first to follow the hero and his companions through successive movies. Now, I could not say with any certainty it was the first trilogy per se, but even so I kind of think it was. Either way, almost certainly the first one in the science fiction sphere, so that was a new thing. It gave a starring role to essentially a kid, which was also unusual, and made stars of most of its cast. It used old fantasy tropes of good versus evil, and I'm certainly not the first to remark on its similarities to, and usage of themes from, the legend of King Arthur and of course The Lord of the Rings. Hell, when Luke Skywalker rescues Princess Leia from the cell on the Death Star, not only is he a knight in literally shining armour - as he's wearing a white Stormtrooper uniform - with a space-age equivalent of a horse waiting, (or at least a Falcon!) but he is armed with a fucking sword!

Lucas seems to have been the first to consider the idea of his heroes using swords in the future (yes, yes I know, but you get the idea). Every other science fiction movie - and series - up to then had the characters armed, if they were armed, with everything from lasers and phasers to blasters and zap guns. Swords were seen, by most writers (can't speak for those in literature, but certainly on the big and small screen) as archaic, belonging to an older time, not in step with the future, and not anything their heroes would be using. But Lucas made the case, through Obi-Wan Kenobi, for the lightsaber very well. The old Jedi says "anyone can use a blaster, but a lightsaber takes skill and finesse." That's not an actual quote, but you know the one, and the implication is of course that in order to use a lightsaber, like a knight of old, a man (or woman) had to have certain skill and discipline. So the lightsaber became a symbol almost of class, the weapon of choice for those who were the more skilled fighters, the true galactic aristocracy, or as one of the games based on the series would have it, the Knights of the Old Republic.

I think it may be fair also to credit Lucas with the usage of hyperspace in movies. Yes, Star Trek had warp speed, but the actual mechanics of how the Enterprise got from one point to another were never explained. 2001 showed us a sort of hyperspace sequence in the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" section, but Star Wars was the first to actually take us into hyperspace and show us what it was like. It's possible too that the movie was the first to pioneer, or at least popularise, the phrase "light speed", though Lucas didn't always get it right, as we know from the extremely embarrassing speech by Han Solo, where he mixes up parsecs as a measure of time rather than distance. The attempts to "explain" this later on only made it worse, as the writer, producer and other commentators dug themselves in deeper; they should just have admitted, sorry we got it wrong, and left it at that.

But these elements aside, basically Star Wars was nothing really new. It was Errol Flynn, but in space rather than on the Spanish Main. It was Arthur and Lancelot, but on the Death Star instead of in Camelot. And it was, to some degree also, John Wayne fighting off the Indians and saving the girl. It was, to put it bluntly, every adventure movie you've ever seen, just transported to space. But it worked for one reason really, and that was that it was the first time this had been done. Science fiction movies up to then had concentrated on either dystopian futures or bleak alien planets, exploration and invasion. Nobody had ever thought you could have fun with the premise. But Lucas did.

Now, I'm not going to pretend I'm privy to the man's thoughts, and knew what he intended, how his movie came about, if it achieved all he set out to or changed radically, or if the success was too much for him. All that I could find by researching, but I won't, because I don't care, and I'm sure others have done it much better than I. The point is the impact Star Wars had on the movie-going public, on youth and on science fiction. Really, it's no exaggeration that none of the three would ever be the same again. Kids were now growing up wanting to be Jedi warriors, there was a reawakened interest in robots (which had been all but completely absent prior to this - can you think of one significant robot or android character in film before Star Wars? What? Robbie the Robot? Do me a favour!) and later adults would unashamedly attend conventions and collect figures, videos, posters and other memorabilia in a way nobody had other than Trekkies.

Hollywood noticed, sitting up and blinking in the darkness, and movies which had been unable to even get a second look were suddenly being screamed for and inspected with interest, probably. Without question, the idea of science fiction in film, as a major earner and a for a mainstream audience, was born in 1977 with the success of Star Wars. Witness the popularity of such "soft" science fiction blockbusters as the Back to the Future trilogy, Tron or Independence Day. Sure, these are different movies in tone and scope than Star Wars, but would any of them have been greenlit without its success? Given the, at the time, thinking prevalent about science fiction movies among producers, I venture to say they would not. Of course, some other science fiction blockbuster could have led the way, but was there ever anything quite like Star Wars in science fiction?

The Matrix, Terminator, Robocop, even the Star Trek movies all owe a debt of gratitude to Star Wars, a movie which took the conventions of what was accepted as a science fiction movie and went "Nah". A movie that dared to look beyond the dark, often sterile, doomy and quite frequently baffling nature of science fiction movies up to then, a movie which catered not only to kids or geeks, but to everyone - or perhaps it might be fairer and more accurate to say, to the kid or geek in all of us, however well  hidden or denied - and dared to show them that science fiction could be enjoyable, that you didn't need a degree in quantum physics to understand it - that in this case, you didn't even have to understand it! - and that you could have a really good time with the kids, or on your own, or with mates, watching a movie that took you out of yourself, said forget about the factory, the school or the union boss, and just let yourself go. Listen, let me tell you a story. No, not once upon a time: a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

[Trollheart]

II: Old Friends and Family Reunions

The second movie showed us Luke growing up. Yes, you can say that he had to grow up real fast once those Stormtroopers came calling, and reduced his aunt and uncle to a Kentucky Fried consistency, but really, throughout Star Wars he's a wide-eyed kid, taking his first steps in the great big galaxy, hero-worshipping Han Solo, falling in love with Leia (oh dear; we all know where that leads, don't we?) and taking on the bad guys. By the end of the movie he's the hero and all is well with the world. To some extent, Star Wars could be taken as a self-contained movie, and can be, if you wish, viewed as one. Local kid finds himself in space, takes on the empire, beats them and blows up their big bad space station, wins the girl. Although of course, not actually. But as a standalone movie, hell, it works.

But then of course, while Star Wars is not about reality, it's not total fantasy either, and while the Death Star may be destroyed, it can, somewhat like a popular space astronaut in the same decade, be rebuilt, though probably for a lot more than six million dollars. So the menace is back: somewhat like Jason or Michael Myers or Trump, or any bad guy you can think of who just won't stay dead, the Death Star (minus Governor Tarkin, last seen stroking his chin in classic evil genius pose before it all went spectacularly tits-up) is back, and so - sigh! - the rebels have to go through it all again. But that's for the third movie, which we'll come to. For now, it's more a case of hit-and-run, as the rebels leg it from their latest base, Yavin having proven too hot to go back to, and the Empire, poor sportsmen that they are, in full pursuit.

Look, I don't know about you, but the one glaring (pun very much intended) memory I have of The Empire Strikes Back is this: "Oh my fucking EYES! Why is everything so WHITE?" Well, of course it was all white because the rebels chose an ice world, for some reason, on which to set up shop, perhaps because someone said "Let's find a nice planet" and was misheard as "Let's find an ice planet"? Or possibly in the belief that Vader would never think of looking there. I mean, all that white would surely clash with his tasteful black armour, no? Well, no: fashion faux pas aside, the Dark Lord of the Sith certainly did go after them, and rather downbeat in a way, the rebels are defeated and must beat a hasty retreat from Hoth.

But the white!

For surely about twenty minutes of the movie (which to me seemed an hour) your eyes are assaulted by glaring, blinding white - snow is everywhere. Ice is everywhere. Fucking white stormtroopers are everywhere. It cuts the eyes out of you - or at least, it did me: like staring too long at the sun, my eyes were forced to squint. And then, when, mercifully for me, the rebels are routed, the sudden contrast of pure black in deep space is so jarring that I could still see the bright white surface of Hathor superimposed on space for a while. It did a lot to ruin the opening sections of the movie. For me, anyway.

But while a lot of people laud TESB, personally I have some issues with it, not least the annoying glare. It takes itself a little too seriously. We get mysticism, self-exploration, almost a vision quest for Luke, and the action divides between he and R2D2, as they head to Dagobah to find Yoda, and the rest of them, who end up with their heads (and bodies) in the clouds, in the lazily-named Cloud City. Look, there's no doubting the two sections of the movie dovetail quite beautifully at the end, and that next-to-last scene, after Luke falls into the chute and improbably ends up holding onto an upside-down flagpole (what's it there for? Who's going to bother risking their lives, or flying up there, to run up a flag that's the wrong way around?) and is saved just as he falls by the Millennium Falcon, is a thing of beauty.

And who can fault the confrontation between Luke and Vader, with the - at the time - galaxy-shaking revelation of their relationship? This was originally in an era when something like the internet wasn't even thought of, much less in use, and so there really was no way for the secret to leak, so I doubt anyone really knew what was going to be revealed, and I think we were all gobsmacked. The scene of course gave us a future pop culture reference: "[insert name here] I am your father!" Right. And the fight between the two of them? As the skinny jerk who always argues with the big tub of lard once said, mmm! Classic movie history.

But does the movie itself try to do too much? Star Wars had a lot of moving parts, but they were all moving in the one direction: a final (we thought) confrontation with the Death Star and Darth Vader, and the realisation of the destiny of a young boy who was to become a Jedi knight. This one? I don't know. There are subplots - there's Han being frozen, Lando betraying them for some reason (money I guess) and Luke, um, fighting himself in a cave. A bit existential for the kids, which is why I think Lucas had figured out by now that his movie was appealing more to adults than kids, so he could go a bit more cerebral with it.

Empire does make some telling observations: it ain't necessarily over when the fat lady sings (or in this case, the fat space station blows), enemies don't give up as long as they're live enemies, and sometimes, splitting up is not the best idea. I personally could live without all the bullshit Jedi training in the swamp - all it was missing was a montage and an eighties AOR affirmation tune such as Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" or Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" - and I may be in the minority here, but my Star Wars world could stand without Yoda in it. Don't like the little guy, and other than playing the role of sensei to Luke, what does the little fucker do? Yes, he has a lightsaber fight in I think Attack of the Clones, but (so far) that's been about it. Damn muppet. Literally.

But of course this was three years later, everyone was salivating for the follow-up movie, and the box office returns proved there was an appetite for more Star Wars, with Empire making back almost twenty times its already considerable budget, pushing the revenues to almost half a billion dollars. Not bad for 1980! It's a far cry, though, from the original, which made over seventy times its much smaller budget, but a lot better than its successor, which only managed a paltry tenfold return on a budget that was very similar to Empire. Hmm. Is it possible that by the time the original trilogy wrapped, people had had enough of Star Wars? Well, there was a gap of sixteen years between Return of the Jedi and the first of the "prequel" trilogy, The Phantom Menace, so you know, maybe. By now, perhaps other science fiction movies had picked up the baton and run with it, and left the original far behind.

This wouldn't of course stop it becoming one of the biggest and most profitable and well-known franchises in film history, and there can hardly be a kid or adult alive now who had not a figure, bedspread, poster, toy lightsaber, model Millennium Falcon or some merchandise from the movies. It's as ingrained in the human consciousness now, and as much a part of human culture and history as, well, as James Bond, or The Magnificent Seven, or any movies you care to name. It may have been, today, a long long time ago but it is never going to go far, far away again.

Another interesting thing about Empire is the reduced role in it for Leia. Well, I say reduced: she didn't exactly have a lot to do in Star Wars, beyond stand with a blaster in her hand and proclaim she was not just a damsel in distress, while unable to avoid the very clear fact that that is exactly what she was. After an initial snarl at her would-be rescuers, she pretty much fades into the background of Star Wars, until she's there smiling at her heroes as they're awarded their medals for being Really Great Heroes (sorry we never had any Really Great Heroine medals made; just didn't seem any point and it would have cost extra, besides, what did you do, Your Highness?). I mean, let's be fair here: Lucas does not exactly fly the flag for women in the, um, past (when is this set? Does anyone know? Does he?) - well, in space then. It's pretty much lipservice when we meet Leia, but she's more or less pushed into a corner and told to stand there and look pretty for the majority of the movie.

And in Empire. Well. Can anyone remember what she does? I mean, I know she goes with Han and Chewy to Cloud City, I know she sees Han encased in Carbonite (we always thought he was cool enough, to be honest) but, you know, what does she do? Not a lot. And the next movie is no kinder to her. So really, when it gets down to it, Star Wars - at least, the first and original trilogy - is really a boys' adventure tale, with some girl tagging along and getting in the way, having to be rescued - twice - and just, well, being a girl in the end. Damn women. Also, as was caustically pointed out in Family Guy, she is, if not the only woman in the galaxy, one of a very few. I can't remember any others, apart from the smoking skeleton of Aunt Baru, and let's face it, there's not much sex appeal or girl power in a charred pile of bones, is there? I can only assume later movies addressed this, but for a period from 1977 to 1983, women are pretty much conspicuous by their absence, other than Leia. And in the third movie she's in chains. I mean, how much more pointed could the irony be?

You definitely have to give Empire continuity points though. Whereas, as I said, Star Wars could be watched as a one-shot deal, you certainly could not do that with Empire. Possibly the first movie, certainly the first science fiction movie to end on a cliffhanger, or at the very least with loose ends trailing from the fleet like the tendrils of a jellyfish as the movie ends, you couldn't help but want to see what happens next. So the scene is set for the third and final movie in the trilogy, and the wrapping up of the story.

Like I said in the previous entry, Star Wars was the first science fiction movie to showcase robots as other than just machines that did work and nothing else, or as comic relief. Certainly, the relationship between R2D2 and C3PO, skillfully handled by both actors and the writer, in a way that should not have been possible (one of them only emits indecipherable beeps, for god's sake! How did we come to love him?) is something of an Odd Couple/Laurel and Hardy deal, mostly thanks to Anthony Daniels' fussy, English-butler-style manner (something Family Guy called, unkindly but hilariously accurately, the gay robots of Star Wars) that makes us laugh and grow to love them. But it's more than that.

They're agents of the plot. It's the message recorded on R2 that alerts Luke, a farmboy dreaming of adventure in space, to the presence both of the "beautiful" (I'll agree to disagree with you there, young Skywalker!) Princess Leia and the mysterious Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom he knows only as Ben. Without these droids (these are the droids you're looking for) the story would not exist. As it proceeds, through three movies, R2 and Threepio are an integral part of it, and it really would not be the same without them. When the stupid little metal barrel gets damaged in one of the fights while in Luke's X-Wing, we worry for him, and Luke himself shows his affection for the tub of circuits when, offered a replacement for the "beat-up R2 unit", he refuses, saying he and this one have been through a lot.

Even the word we now use often for robots, "droids", comes from Star Wars, where Lucas clearly wanted them to be thought of as more than just machines or automatons, and robots would not cut it. But to be fair, and annoyingly so, they're not. At least, R2 is not. Droid being short for android of course, this refers to a robot with a humanoid appearance, such as Data in Star Trek, or Kryten in Red Dwarf. Nobody could say R2D2 looks human. But that's beside the point: for Lucas, droids referred to any robot, and so it was written into science fiction lore.

One character I have never had time for - with respect to the late Peter Mayhew, and no slight meant on his acting - is Chewbacca. Other than roar and look threatening, what is his role in the movies? Is there a single scene, other than maybe the one where he's playing chess with R2D2, from which he could be removed and that scene suffer, or not work? I find him totally superfluous, and I get that Lucas wanted an alien co-pilot and friend for Han Solo, but I never thought they explored the relationship between the two in enough, or even any, detail for me to warm to the Wookie. We never even found out how the two got together (though maybe the later film, Solo, covers that?) and to me, he was, to quote an annoyed Leia in the first movie, a big walking carpet, who did nothing and contributed nothing to the movies. Any of them. And yet the fucker got a medal! Well, I guess he did fight alongside them. And who's going to tell a seven-foot Wookie he can't have a medal? But as a character, for me, just did not work. Definitely my least favourite. Until the horrific advent of Jar-Jar Binks, of course.

In fact, when you think about it, over three movies (which should be enough time for anyone to write a decent backstory) we get hardly any character development. Yes, Luke learns what it is to be a Jedi - sort of - and Han realises there's more to life than money - maybe - but if you look at the characters in Star Wars and compare them to those in Return of the Jedi there's not a lot of difference. You can recognise them as the same people, and even though they've been through adventures together, suffered and triumphed together, and blown up the Death Star together (twice!) there's really no massive change that I can see. So you kind of have to ask yourself, what did they learn?

But more to the point, what did we learn? Taking, of course, only the first three movies as our base, what are we told about Han Solo? Leia? The droids even? Vader? Kenobi? Surely somewhere along the way there would have been time for someone to at least hint at their life story? Why did Solo become a space pirate? What planet does he, or did he, call home? What about Leia's family? Does she even mourn them, other than one short scene after Alderaan does a very good impersonation of a bunch of floating cinders? And how does the daughter of the emperor's chief enforcer end up living the high life with a royal family that hates his guts on another planet?

So many questions, and maybe some are answered in the later movies, but that's beside the point. If the first trilogy had been all we ever heard of the franchise, if the prequel movies had not been made, we would be in the dark about these characters we have come to love, seeing them only as the barest sketches of the people they are. Even so, it appears that's where they're left, for at least thirty years, as the next movies go back even a longer, longer time ago, to tell us the prehistory of some of the other characters, and Luke, Leia and Han appear to have been forgotten about, done with.

[Trollheart]

Okay then: we've talked about it enough, so let's quickly hop through the second movie and revisit it. Oh, got your sunglasses? Well, don't say I didn't warn you - we're going in!

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Although there's not a space battle going on, this is still the second of the movies to open with a shot of space, downward camera to show an imperial star destroyer, albeit coming towards the camera instead of going away from it, but really: couldn't Lucas come up with a different opening? And is there some irony in a world that is covered in ice being called Hoth? Well we're into action straight away as Luke is the main course for some version of the abominable snowman and Han decides to make that exit he had delayed to help wipe out the Death Star, but as usual there's something stopping him. I mean, it's one thing or another isn't it? Either a megalomaniac is threatening to destroy the Alliance, someone has encased him in carbonite or Luke has gone missing. How's a guy expected to go pay his debts and get that price off his head?

Good to see there's realism in the fact that Leia and Han have not just settled down to raise little space pirates; she's pissed at him for leaving and he's pissed at her for refusing to acknowledge her feelings for him. Hey, what is it with Lucas and severed arms? Vader loses one, Luke loses one, the guy in the cantina, now the abominable snowman. Even C3PO lost one of his. Is it some sort of fetish of his? Does nobody cut off legs or heads anymore? And now it's time for Alec to earn his wages by putting in another ghostly appearance. I swear, agents: once they have you on contract... I find this one a little more visceral than the previous, perhaps proof that Lucas believed his movies were appealing more to adults than kids. The cutting open of the belly of the beast Luke was riding and his being put inside it is, well, yuck. Interesting how Han has been demoted from general back to captain. Maybe that's because he's now about to leave, and his Alliance rank only applies while he's under their command?

Well it's time to evacuate once more. Must suck to be a kid of one of these rebels, always moving, always on the run, never a chance to settle down. Ah, the life of a rebel scum huh? Those new uniforms the stormtroopers have for snow work are damned scary: make them look just like members of the KKK! Well I see one woman operating a communications console in the rebel base - typical! Only work available for the girls is to answer the phone! - but so far I don't believe I've seen one single female in the entire imperial army! Not one! What is this? A boys only club? Suppose it saves on those specially-made breastplates...

This is the first time we see the ground assault troops, with walkers and AT-ATs, which kind of helps to underline how damned powerful the empire is. It also makes a clear distinction between the men (and occasional woman) of the Alliance and the machines of the empire. A trip through an asteroid field provides more scope for the many video and computer games that were to follow, but there's time for a little humour when they accidentally land on a living organism, taking it for an asteroid. Meanwhile it's time to slow everything down and bore everyone with the unwanted introduction of a muppet. Damn Yoda. This is a little like the later scene with the Architect in one of the Matrix movies - was it the third one? Interestingly though, there are parallels between the two scenes, the big monster in the swamp with Luke and R2D2 and the strange monster in the asteroid with Han, Leia, C3PO and Chewie.

Looks like this is the first time we see the emperor, the guy who runs things, and the only person who has any sort of command or control over Vader. A third mention of "I have a bad feeling about this", coming from Leia this time, so now all we need is Luke to say it and we have every character - who can speak or at least whose speech can be understood - having voiced that opinion. Meanwhile, back at the swamp it's gone all existential, as Luke seems to battle Vader but finds it's himself he's fighting, a foreshadowing, did we but know it at the time, of the relationship between the two.

Time to bring on the one black man in the Star Wars universe. Of course, being a black man he's immediately "where the white women at?" And not to be trusted. That's established pretty quickly, when he hands the heroes over to Vader. No choice, my ass. Time for Han to experience the big freeze. Quite surprising how Lando expected Vader to keep his word, after all, what leverage has the guy got? Now that the Dark Lord has what he wants, what's to stop him destroying Cloud City if he wants to? Idiot. And now, the classic, iconic confrontation between Vader and Luke, and the revelation to shake all revelations since, well, maybe the end of Planet of the Apes. Ah, the world before the internet, huh?

So then we have the classic split as the heroes undertake two missions, and the first time, as I say, at least in my experience, when a movie ends, not only on an almost literal cliffhanger, but continues into the next one. This would of course become standard for this genre, and others, as time went on, but TESB set the precedent, and after this all the other movie writers could do was follow the trail Lucas blazed across the galaxy and through motion picture and science fiction history.

[Trollheart]

III: If at First You, um, Succeed, Try, Try Again

Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi

As I noted or at least alluded to earlier, there's one serious problem I have with what was, at the time, the final movie, and which, even now, with six others in the can, still stands as the end point and conclusion of the entire, now fifty-year story. The problem is that it's almost unnecessary. Return of the Jedi is indeed a return, in so many ways. It's the return of the bloody Death Star (didn't we blow that thing up already?), the return of Darth Vader, last seen watching Luke fall to apparently his death, minus one hand, and no doubt thinking "Fucking ungrateful kid! I offer him the galaxy and what do I get?" and even the return of the bloody victory parade and awards ceremony! It's really hard not to see it as being a copied, slightly tweaked (and I mean slightly) version of the first movie, and to be fair, after waiting six years for the "final part", I think we had a right to expect something better than a rehash of the first one. But that's what we got.

This would, of course, be the final movie to feature the full original cast. To my knowledge, the only one to go on and have a part in the later movies would be Han Solo (I think played by Harrison Ford, but we'll see; I haven't even seen the "third" prequel movies once) with our hero Luke Skywalker, his sister, the two droids and indeed Darth Vader (as we knew him) all written out. This is of course due to the fact that Lucas goes back in time, so if the first trilogy was set "a long time ago" then the other six take place in a time even further back, all of which we'll come to. But the point I'm making here is that the characters we had grown up on and come to love and even identify with (yes, even you, Vader, one of the truly great evil characters of science fiction, or indeed of any drama) bow out in The Return of the Jedi, and for me, they kind of make a bit of a balls of it.

Not that that's their fault, neither actors nor characters. That's all down to George, and why he couldn't have made the effort to end the series better is a question I guess we'll never have the answer to. My own belief is that, having scored big with the first two movies, he sort of took his foot off the pedal and cruised through to the end with a final movie that, in my opinion anyway, far from deserves its reputation and disappointed me as a conclusion to the story.

But before I get too down on this movie (really, Trollheart?) let's be fair here: there is a lot to love about it. The daring rescue of Han from Jabba the Hut - the appearance of, and rather quick disappearance from existence of said Hut, who up to now has just been mentioned as a kind of shadowy underworld crime boss figure (given his size it's quite a considerable shadow he casts, too!), Luke's final face-off with his father and the surprising turnaround which almost saves the soul of Anakin Skywalker (oh come on now! You already know: how is that a spoiler?) and does for the Emperor, the death of Yoda (with much cheering, at least from me) and the reappearance, if only as a ghost, of Obi-Wan, to say nothing of confirmation of the relationship not only between Luke and Darth Vader but between him and Leia, and of course the return of everyone's cocky hero, Han Solo. Oh, and Chewbacca is in there too somewhere, but who cares?

It would be grossly unfair to say the movie is a copy of the first one (hey wait a minute, TH! That's literally what you said a moment ago! - don't you have somewhere else to be, pal?) though it does reuse and recycle a lot of plot elements; after all, it would not get away with just being a clone (sorry) now would it? But I just wish there had been, for instance, a new threat rather than the tired old Death Star being hauled out of retirement and, rather like the bowl of petunias in Douglas Adams' The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy groaning, "Not again!" or even, hell, a different end scene! And don't even get me started on fucking Ewoks, the chilling first tendrils of merchandising directed at the really young market touching the franchise, fingers which would soon be all over the next movies, with characters that could only be explained by saying they had been created in order to sell toys, and not the other way around.

Let's also nod to the brothers of the galaxy while we're at it. Two of them. Two. Or, if you only count the first three movies, one. One. A single black man. Talk about your Token Black, huh? One thing Lucas certainly did not have a handle on, at least in the 1980s, was the idea of inclusion, affirmative action, or just the simple premise that the galaxy would not be run, exclusively populated and staffed by white people! We've already noted his male-dominated universe, but it seems white male privilege is at a premium, or was, a long time ago and far, far away. I don't know if this led to any sort of boycott of, or disinterest in the movies by an African-American audience. I guess probably not. Our soul brothers and sisters were already used to being overlooked at this point, unless for comedy effect or in the case of giants such as Poitier, Pryor or James Earl Jones, chosen simply due to the weight of their fame, and luckily later in the 1980s and further on we would get bigger stars such as Washington, Smith and Elba coming up, as well as - finally - some female ones, but in the bleak early eighties there wasn't much room for - some would say call for - black actors, and whether this figured into Lucas's idea when casting the first trilogy or whether it simply didn't cross his mind that there would be "black people in space", all three - indeed, all six that I've seen - movies suffer very heavily from a white imbalance.

I suppose you can give this film some small credit for having a few more women in it, though in fairness we're talking about exotic dances and slaves/hookers here, so not exactly breaking the glass ceiling and not quite the strong intelligent type of woman. In fact really, featuring the kind of women we get to see fawning over, performing and dancing for a big fat sweating mound of blubbery flesh is pretty much only reinforcing the stereotype of female character that even by the late 1970s was beginning to be cliched and phased out in favour of stronger, more serious ones.

More, I guess, on that later, but for now let's also look at the somewhat unsung heroes of the first three movies, the droids. Of course, you can't have an ancestor if you're a walking hunk of metal, but it's kind of sad to see there was no room for C3Po and his beeping friend in the prequel movies. After all, they could have been built decades, even centuries ago (is there such a thing as planned obsolescence in Lucas's world? How long is the warranty on a translator droid anyway?) so it might have been a nice link had they been in the other movies. Hey, maybe they are: as I say, I've seen - suffered through, let's be honest here - the first, or rather, second three (parts I - III) only the once (and never had the desire to repeat the experience) and the final three I have not seen at all, so perhaps, as usual, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Might be as well to hold onto that thought till I at least re-watch the second three and get my first taste of the third.

I hope they are in at least some of them though, because since droids don't really age (remember Marvin the Paranoid Android? "The first ten thousand years was the worst. And the second. The third ten thousand years I didn't enjoy at all. After that, I went into something of a decline." ) there's scope for them to have been in the service of, oh, maybe Obi-Wan Kenobi or even a young Anakin Skywalker at some point. Would they, then, remember their old master when they were sold to his son, I wonder? Might be awkward. Oh yes, sir! You're the one whose father became the Dark Lord Vader, and is a Master of the Sith. Sorry, sir: have I said something wrong?

Okay but seriously, is this not taking it a little far? The opening scene is almost identical to that of (sigh, all right then if you insist) A New Hope. We see the by-now-familiar words scroll up in yellow letters, then the camera angles downward, this time to the still-under-construction Death Star II: The Next Generation, and then that star destroyer does its pass over the screen. Admittedly, this time it's not chasing a rebel ship but dropping off Lord Vader for some much needed r&R (no, not rock and roll - rest and recuperation) or at best a surprise inspection of the new deadly battle station. Anyway, as I may have mentioned, ROTJ becomes the first science fiction movie, possibly even the first movie of any kind to follow directly on from its previous incarnation, becoming in effect part two of a two-part movie. In many ways similar to the original four-movie arc that wound through the second, third and fourth Star Trek movies, ROTJ and TESB can almost be viewed as one long film, as to some extent can ANH, but as I already noted, that can be viewed as a standalone movie, whereas these two very much depend on each other.

The rescue of Han Solo is handled well, and it's good to see Luke has really been practicing those Jedi moves, though again Chewbacca is there pretty much as bait, while Leia forms a sort of bait herself, enabling her brother to come in and rescue them all. I have to wonder (and I cant' remember; I'm watching it as I write) if the "rescue" was all planned to fall apart so that Luke could get into Jabba's palace? I mean, if not, it was a pretty poor one, wasn't it? How did they think they would get away with it? Yeah, has to have been a kind of false flag operation to open the door to the Skywalker kid, no other explanation. Man, I hated that little alien dog thing Jabba had, the one that kept laughing like a hyena. Hey! The big monster in the pit is called a rancor! No, I'm going to do it, just watch me - so if he's out one day, is the cave without rancor? Sorry, sorry. I do think the idea of one of Jabba's henchmen crying over the death of his pet is a bit silly. I mean, humanise monsters all you want, but what's wrong with a dog, cat or a budgie?

There is a touching scene when Solo and Chewbacca are reunited, though I'd have to say the way the Wookie paws him it looks more like he considers Han to be his pet than his friend. Here's a point though: if Luke is such a powerful Jedi Knight, why did he have to hurl a rock at the control to close down the big portcullis on the rancor? Why couldn't he just have used - oh, what is it again? That energy thing that binds all living - oh yeah: the Force. Why couldn't he just have willed it closed? Some Jedi master. I will say, it's good to see Tatooine again, and those Banthas. Haven't seen any Sandpeople yet. Hey at least Leia gets to act out the fantasy of every poor girl enslaved and/or abused by a scumbag. Choke on that, pal!

Kind of hard to imagine though that Luke had, as he says "taken care of everything". How could he know exactly how things would turn out? Does the Force allow you to see the future? And what's with the Sallac? Luke lived on this planet and never mentioned a huge alien venus flytrap thing that lives in the desert! Look, I'm sorry: I know it's meant to be moving, but the death of Yoda does nothing for me. Never liked him, never will. Hey, is this the first appearance of the emperor? I think it is. So now I guess that thing in the cave, where Luke was fighting himself, makes some sense: he has to face his father, as well as the dark side of him, in a battle that will decide once and for all yadda yadda yadda right I get it now. And they even recreate the swinging-across-on-a-rope scene from the first movie. Sigh.

Oh look! Another woman! And this time she's not dancing around in a skimpy costume. Well, I guess they might frown on that sort of thing over at Rebel HQ. Yeah, for once - and perhaps the only time so far, with the exception of one princess who's lost her planet - it's a woman in charge. She's telling the boys what to do. Ah but she doesn't last long. I think this may in fact be her only scene. Oh, and if you're going up against the might of the Imperial fleet, it's always been my strategy to follow a fish. Step forward, Admiral "It's a trap!" Ackbar. Can I get an Allah stuck onto the front of that? No? All right then: just an idea.

Here's a question though: last time we saw them, Lando Calrissian had sold out Han Solo in Cloud City to Jabba. Now, without, so far as I can see, much of an explanation, they're the best of pals again. As they used to say in the seventies probably, what gives, daddy-o? Speaking of that, what's with Vader suddenly going all medieval? "What is thy bidding O Master?" Huh? Surprised Palpatine doesn't turn around and say "what the fuck you talking like an extra out of Game of Thrones for? Not that I would know what that is, as it hasn't yet been televised, but seriously dude, what the fuck?" Think Lucas got a little carried away there!

The landspeeder/hover bike thingy chase through the forest is pretty cool (though you'd seriously have to ask yourself where Leia learned to ride like that; surely her daddy the king of Alderaan wouldn't have allowed his precious little girl to have one of those dangerous things?) but you can again see the idea of marketing this to the video game market. This, again, something new: Star Wars was probably the first movie, never mind science fiction one, to spawn a whole slew of merchandise beyond the standard lunch boxes, posters, figurines and comics. I'd be willing to bet my completely inconsiderable salary that this was the first time a computer or video game was derived from a movie. Now, it's common practice, but back in the seventies and eighties, not so much. Mind you, that might have been because there were still hardly any personal computers, but even in video arcades you had the standard Space Invaders, Frogger and Pac-Man, but I doubt there was one game based on any movie before this franchise came along.

Of course, after all that fast-paced excitement there had to be a comedown, and it arrives in the form of the thrice-damned Ewoks, which for me means that halfway through the movie it's time to go to the lobby unless you fancy watching fucking teddy bears down in the woods today (and are you gonna get a big surprise!). Clearly put in not only for the kids but to test the characters out for their own (sigh) short-lived (hooray) series of mini-movies, you'd also have to say that they're a pretty racist creation. I mean, does nobody draw a parallel between those Ewoks (all dark-skinned, you'll notice) carrying their captives on poles to their native village? Really? Nobody? Clear as day to me. Oh, and they just happen to elect the big golden robot (a figure of white authoritarianism if there ever was one) as their, um, god. Right.

I see Chewie proves his worth again by getting them all trapped in a net because he's, as Han says, thinking with his stomach. I like it when Luke says "Han, can you reach my lightsaber?" I keep hearing "Uh, Han? That's not my lightsaber!" Time for Luke and Leia to share an awkward moment when he tells her who she is, and more to the point, what her relationship to him is. Come to think of it, how did she become a princess of Alderaan? Was she fostered out? Who ever heard of a foster princess? Aren't they usually all anal about bloodlines and lines of succession? And is Leia really going to be the first female Jedi? Did that storyline ever go anywhere?

Well, to be fair, Leia does have a lot more to do in this last movie than she did almost in the other two combined. Once she gets out of those chains of course. Bit more of an action heroine this time around. It's interesting how Luke approaches the emperor in black, just like his father. And indeed Palpatine himself. It might have been too much of a cliche for him to have been in white, but is it a case of his being susceptible to the Dark Side if he doesn't watch it, that he's not such a goody two-shoes? Okay, so Chewie is some help after all, commandeering the walker, give him that. Nice to see a reversal too of the last words Han and Leia originally spoke, with him saying "I love you" and she replying "I know." A reversal too for Luke and Vader, as the son pays the father back for taking his hand. You know, an eye for an eye, a hand for a hand?

The climactic fight between Luke and Vader lives up to its promise, and to give him credit, Lucas does a very good job turning what has become one of the all-time movie bad guys into a sympathetic figure at the end, no easy task. I do wonder though how Vader managed to carry the emperor and throw him down into the shaft when he was missing a hand? Hah: bet Palpatine hadn't foreseen that! The usage of the same theme for Luke's solo (sorry) vigil at Vader's Viking-style funeral as when he first watched the twin suns of Tatooine set and dreamed of glory and adventure is a really nice bookend, though if I can sound a note of cynicism here, the funeral pyre could also symbolise the death of the franchise. With the passing of Vader, even though they'll go back into his history, I think the series lost its main anchor, and remembering that the next six films would be Luke-less, I think in many ways you could say this was the end of an era.

And maybe they should have left it at that. What am I saying? If there's money to be made, there'll be sequels. Just look at Speed 2. Or rather, don't. This idea would then lead to another six movies which, let's be honest, I really doubt anyone needed. I did enjoy Revenge of the Sith but the other two I distinctly remember as blowing big time, and as I say the final three I did not bother with. For me, and I think for a lot of people, this trilogy was almost perfect: a beginning, middle and end. But we all know how Hollywood works, and in fairness to Lucas it would be another twenty years almost before he would unleash the first of the six prequels upon us. Personally though I've always regarded these as the "core" movies, and had little time for the ones that followed.

Nevertheless, they did follow, and so must we. Therefore, in the next instalment, we take you even further back in time, an even longer time ago, but still the same distance away, to a time before empire, and back to the Old Republic.

[Trollheart]

Interregnum I: Star Bears?

Rather unfortunately for me, who has made no secret of his disdain for the goddamn Ewoks, it seems someone had the bright idea to make not only one movie about them, but two. How I wish I didn't have to suffer through this, but sadly it's as much a part of the Star Wars story as is a TV series about our two favourite droids, so I can't avoid it. I wonder how they managed dialougue, given that the damn furry bastards don't talk in English? Perhaps that will turn out to be a blessing. All right then, may need a few stiff drinks for this one. And I don't even drink! But maybe after this, I will.


Title: Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure
Year: 1984
Format: TV Movie
Broadcast Chronology: After Return of the Jedi
Universe Chronology: Dunno, or care
Basic premise: Ewoks help some kids find their lost parents, or something
Starring: Warwick Davis as Wicket W. Warrick (seriously?), Aubree Miller as Cindel Towani, Eric Walker as Mace Towani, Fionnuala Flanagan as Caterine Towani, Guy Boyd as Jeremitt Towani
Directed by: John Korty
General reaction: Negative
Personal reaction: Negative
Rating: 4/10

Right well clearly there's only one way I'm getting through this, and that's by unmercifully ripping the piss out of it. Which is what I will do, and I anticipate there being many opportunities for such derision and scorn. Look, I had to BUY this damn thing! Yes, it was only a buck fifty, what's your point? I still had to purchase a movie I have no real interest in seeing. I couldn't download it, the Y had only trailers, what's a guy supposed to do? The suffering I go through in the name of my art, honestly. So the least I can do is have some fun with it, which I hope I will. So on the forest moon of Endor (duh) two concerned parents look for their kids, who have vanished after I guess they crashed here. As they search they're attacked by some sort of big monster with an axe, who probably wants to know where Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are, and what this pile of crap is supposed to be?

I mean, it's more like a Disney live-action adventure from the 1960s than anything to do with Star Wars, and it's of course not long before the annoying Ewoks show up, one of them doing a Laura Ingalls across the field, another getting ready to fly off in his machine (how have such primitive creatures managed to master flight, when it took us nearly two thousand years?) in search of his missing kids, whom he finds, and then finds - anyone? Yeah, the missing human kids. At least one of them has balls. And a gun. Looks a little like a very young Luke Skywalker really. He's quickly overpowered and taken to the camp, where no doubt the stupid Ewoks will regale him with tales of when they took on the mighty empire and helped the Alliance. Puke.

The kind, grandfatherly voice of Burl Ives doesn't help to make this any more bearable, as if anything could, and the youngest kid is like a poster child for Cherubs R Us. Double puke. There's a tiny little part of the Star Wars fanfare there, as if it's embarrassed to be caught where it is, but otherwise there's little to indicate this has anything to do with the greatest saga ever to sweep the galaxy. There's a certain sense of racism - well, speciesism I guess - when Mace, the older kid, describes the Ewoks as animals, while the younger one, Cindel, sees them more as friends.

Not very clever to head off into the forest of an unknown moon at night, and in pretty short order they're being hunted, on the menu for some hungry beast. They take shelter in the trunk of a tree and have to be rescued by the Ewoks the next morning. Tell me this: why is it, when people realise the person they're talking to can't understand them, that they talk verrrrryyyy slowlyyyy as if somehow that is going to make them be more intelligible? Looks like the local witch doctor has located their parents in his crystal ball or whatever, and now they're captives of some giant. Well of course they are. So now they're off to see, and slay, the giant, which I suppose is a kind of a metaphor for Luke and his friends taking on the gigantic power of the empire. Or something. God, even Burl Ives sounds bored. I know I am.

So now the Caravan of Cunts, sorry Courage is on the way. Maybe they'll all get eaten by wild beasts.  No? Guess not. Kids' film, so not exactly expecting much in the way of violence, death or gore. In fact, it's very Disney, with even its own little version of Tinkerbell. Jesus! Come on! Bring on the giant! Time to grind some bones to make his bread. Preferably Ewok bones. Hey, has anyone noticed that Ewok is just an anagram of Wookie, minus two letters? How lazy. Hah! Good to see that no matter what far-flung future (or, you know, past) you're in, or how far into space, the answer to all of life's problems can be found in the hands of a kid with a gun. Makes you feel all sort of warm and Republican, doesn't it?

Seeing a lot of elements of Lord of the Rings here - long journey, quest, fellowship, magical items, underground chamber, dwarves, giant spider, evil giant... Well I guess it's a good turnaround. The parents are now helpless and the kid has to save them. Also the idea of small creatures being able to outwit and outfight a much larger but slower opponent. Tell you what though, that giant bears more than a passing resemblance to a Klingon warrior! More of the triumph of little things over big when Tinkerbell distracts the giant and he ends up going on a really bad trip, man.

And of course we end on a fucking Ewok dance and party. Basically Jack and the Beanstalk, without the beanstalk. Or the magic harp. Very definitely for kids and not likely to appeal to anyone over the age of maybe six or seven. Still, you know, to be fair, this movie has really given me a new insight into these little guys and made me think about them in a completely different way. Oh no wait, it hasn't. I still hate the little bastards, maybe more than I did before. Oh well, at least it's over.

Title: Ewoks; Battle for Endor
Year: 1985
Format: TV movie
Broadcast Chronology: After Caravan of Courage
Universe Chronology: Dunno
Basic premise: No idea. I'll assume they battle for Endor. Okay I checked and apparently most of the cast, all of the family from the previous movie, bar the girl, die, and then there's some sort of inter-tribe war over the engines of a starcruiser or something, and some human whose presence there doesn't seem to be explained in the synopsis, and I don't care. Thankfully, despite diligent efforts (no really!) I can't get my hands on it. What a disappointment.
Starring: Warwick Davis as Wicket W. Warrick, Aubree Miller as Cindel Towani, Eric Walker as Mace Towani, Paul Gleason as Jeremitt Towani, Wilfred Brimley as Noa Briqualon, Carel Struycken as Terak, Sian Philips as Charal, Niki Botelho as Teek
Directed by: Ken and Jim Wheat
General reaction: More or less negative
Personal reaction: n/a
Rating: n/a

Now be fair! I looked online, I tried YT, I was even willing to bite the bullet and purchase the cursed thing (as long as it wasn't more than a buck fifty) but taste prevailed apparently, and it's available nowhere. So it with a heavy heart I can't review this, but I doubt it's any loss. I do note that though the father is in it (and dies) he's played by another actor - assume the original one said no fucking way am I doing that shit again - while Fionnuala Flanagan, who had little to do in the first movie other than wander around the forest and then spend time sitting in a cage, although at least she did get to shoot the giant, correctly believed her talents would be better utilised elsewhere, and her character isn't even in it. I didn't like either of the kids, but if I was forced to watch one I think it would be my choice to have the watch Mace, the boy, however here the movie concentrates apparently on little cherub Cindel, so thank the great maker I don't have to suffer through it. We move on.

Interregnum II: Cartoon Wars: Star Wars Comes to the Telly

While we waited - most of us with extreme skeptism - for the continuation of the story in the much-mooted prequel movies, and paid exorbitant sums to therapists to help us forget the damned Ewoks, the next natural progression for Star Wars was for it to make its transition to the small screen. After all, TV shows are a lot cheaper to make than movies, and you have a ready-made captive audience, not to mention that if the series is any good, chances are you'll have them watching every week. Naturally, animated was the way to go, though in recent years the first live-action series have begun to appear, but the restrictions of the latter versus the former, both in terms of securing actors, sets and stage time and also in the area of special effects and budget, makes animation always the more attractive prospect. Also, as originally Star Wars was produced, or seen as being produced for kids, it made more sense to appeal to that market. Adults might go to see a movie they'd been told was great, but the chances of them sitting through a whole television series were, at the time, remote. This being the 1980s, people wanted shows about cops, lawyers, soaps and the like; there were science fiction and fantasy shows on the telly - most notably Star Wars' biggest rival franchise - but apart from the dedicated fans of those shows, they were not considered huge draws for adults.

But hey, kids always love cartoons right? And even if it had been somewhat commandeered by adults, kids pretty much unilaterally loved Star Wars, and kids loved TV, so it should really have been a match made in Heaven. Two characters surely ready-made for their own adventures were of course the first two we see in the very first movie, and so the scene was set for the first spin-off of the franchise.


Title: Droids
Year: 1985 - 1986
Format: TV Series
Broadcast Chronology: After Return of the Jedi
Universe Chronology: 4 years after Revenge of the Sith, 15 years before A New Hope
Basic premise: The adventures of R2D2 and C3PO before they meet Luke Skywalker
Number of episodes: 13 (plus one special)
Status: Finished
Starring: (The voices of) Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Ben Burtt as R2D2 (wait, what?)
Directed by: Ken Stephenson, Raymond Jafelice
General reaction: Meh
Personal reaction: Meh
Rating: 4/10

Let's be honest: we're not expecting very much here, are we? This is essentially for kids, so I don't imagine we'll have any great galactic concepts or sweeping sagas, but hopefully it will be more than R2 learning that it's nice to be nice or some shite like that. Let's hope the show has at least something about it, and can hold its head up rather than cringe in the corner and wonder why it was born. I'm not looking for miracles, and my expectations are very low, but if I can come away from this not feeling embarrassed for the show, then that will be something.

Yeah, well two episodes in and I'm ready to haul ass out of here. The music is annoyingly limp-wristed and insipid, there is at least a basic plot arc revolving around the theft of a super weapon from galactic gangsters, and it's not entirely cartoony, but there is an element of something like Scooby-Doo about it. It's hard to care, and I don't. Probably, to be fair, a little better than I had expected, and even though I would prefer to avoid the (groan) Ewoks, who are up next, I'm not prepared to watch any more of this. So while it's not a pile of Sarlacc crap, it's not something I want to get into in any sort of serious way.

And speaking of things I do not want to get into...

Title: Ewoks
Year: 1985 - 1986
Format: TV animated series
Universe Chronology: Prior to A New Hope and also prior to Caravan of Courage
Basic premise: Adventures of Ewoks
Number of episodes: 26 (2 seasons)
Status: Finished
Starring: (Voices of) Jim Henshaw, Denny Delk, Cree Summer, Jeanne Reynolds, Erik Peterson
Directed by: Raymond Jafelice, Ken Stephenson, Dale Schott
General reaction: Meh
Personal reaction: Puke
Rating: 1/10 - no, fuck it: 0.5/10. Doesn't deserve the 1.

Given that I've already suffered through the bloody Caravan of Courage, and further, given my already noted dislike of these pointless characters, you'll understand I hope that I'm not about to sit through two fucking seasons of this rubbish. I read, anyway, that it was more seen as a marketing ploy to sell toys to kids (never! You do surprise me!) than a serious attempt at a series, so I doubt there's going to be much there. I'll check out one episode, see what it's like, and we'll move on to more serious, important stuff. Okay, well first they look more like chipmunks or something than Ewoks, and second, they're speaking bloody English! Sigh. And they have their own song. Of course they do. Did kids fall for this?

Well, according to the comments on YouTube, yes, they did. Lot of fond memories, apparently. Not for me though. Music sounds a little like the Mister Men to my ears. Well I guess give them credit for having the big spiders and the sparkly Tinkerbells from the movies.  Yeah I lasted about ten minutes then lost interest. It was as poor and bland as I expected. How in hell did this ever get two seasons? Oh yeah: the Star Wars brand and the merchandising. Right. Well, we will be returning to the TV later, when Star Wars got taken a bit more seriously, but for now, speaking of serious, it's time to return to the main franchise, the movies, as Lucas finally got up off his arse and wrote, and had released, the second trilogy.

[Trollheart]

Part II: What Rough Beast - The Second Coming of Star Wars

As I said, we had waited a long long time for the "new" movies, almost as long as the third Boston album or the rebirth of Doctor Who, and most of us probably thought they would never happen. Afterwards, we probably wished they hadn't. Well, in fairness I've seen each of these movies only once, but I remember being singularly unimpressed with all of them, bare the last. I think the whole point about the "prequels" was that they were totally new, with new characters (well, some of the same but younger) and none of the ones we had by now become familiar with. No Luke Skywalker, no Han Solo, no Princess Leia, not even Darth Vader, though we would see how Anakin Skywalker became the galaxy's most feared and well-dressed villain, and of course a young Obi-Wan Kenobi was there too, but it was a real cosmic shift for most of us.

Prequels in every sense of the word, the new movies took place during the time of the Old Republic, and before the rise to power of the empire. Hell, we even got to see a young emperor, though he wasn't exactly pushing kids around the playground with the Force or anything. In fact, he was only a senator, but then, every megalomaniac has to start somewhere, right? In my opinion, if you look at the three movies as a sort of lead-up to one of the most interesting backstories in the Star Wars universe, the origin of Darth Vader, they're just about necessary, but you have to wade through some crap to get to the good stuff, and a lot of it, if I remember, especially in the second movie, is damned boring.

Be that as it may, I suppose we were all stoked to see a new chapter of the Star Wars story, though I seem to remember I wasn't that bothered. Hey, it was nearly a quarter of a century ago, you know! My memory is not what it was. But I don't remember the kind of excitement going through me that I felt when the second and third of the original movies were released. As well as that, the novelty value of having - at the time - unknown actors play the main parts was gone. Now that Star Wars was big business it needed big stars, and so we had the likes of Ewan MacGregor and Liam Neeson taking the roles of the Jedi Knights, with Samuel L.  Jackson eventually becoming the one and only black Jedi in the second movie. Time, and the franchise, had certainly moved on.

Speaking of having moved on, seems Lucas was finally dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century (almost) as he was forced to admit that there were in fact more than a handful of women in the galaxy, and so we get, finally, some proper female characters with heavyweights like Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley able at last to show that even a long time agao in a galaxy far, far away, sister were in fact doing it for themselves. There were also, despite my comment above, a few old favourites. Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker reprised their roles as the two lovable droids, Frank Oz stuck his hand up Yoda's arse again and we even had the orignal actor who played the emperor, Ian McDiarmid, come back to play his younger self.

I: Birth of a Jedi, Birth of a Sith Lord: The Path to the Dark Side Begins

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace


Title: The Phantom Menace
Year: 1999
Format: Movie
Broadcast Chronology: After Return of the Jedi (if two decades after...)
Universe Chronology: Set 32 years prior to A New Hope and 13 years before the rise of the empire
Basic premise: The planet of Naboo is being blockaded and Jedi Knights come to negotiate, stumbling onto a full-scale invasion. They end up on Tatooine and hell you know the rest.
Starring: Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn, Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Natalie Portman as Queen Padme Amidala, Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker, Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Kenny Baker as R2D2, Ian McDiarmid as Senator Palpatine, Ahmed Best as (sigh) Jar  Jar Binks
Directed by: George Lucas
General reaction: Lukewarm (sorry)
Personal reaction: Meh
Rating: 4/10

Okay, let's be honest here (yes I do that a lot, what of it?) - when the familiar "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" comes up, the logo and the fanfare, you kind of think YES! But compare the scroll to any of the first three movies. Then, it was a time of galactic civil war, with the brave rebels taking on the evil empire. Now, it's, well, it's a trade war. Taxes. Embargos. Battleships are mentioned, sure, but only in a blockade kind of way. Negotiations? Tariffs? Agreements? Congress? Endless debates? These are hardly the elements that comprise an exciting science fiction/space opera movie, now are they? Hell, the words even look guilty and embarrassed as they slink up the screen, their older brothers in the original trilogy scoffing "My, how times have changed! Is that the best you can do?"

Not a good start, but it should get better. Shouldn't it? Well there's a half-hearted attempt to link back to the original movies when one of the first sentences, which comes out of Obi-Wan Kenobi's mouth, is "I have a bad feeling about this." You and me both, pal. Okay, well give it its due, like the previous movies it's fairly quickly right into the action, and it is good to see two Jedi Knights at the peak of their powers take on a bunch of robots. Also good to see Obi-Wan as other than a doddering old fool. Guess Han Solo wouldn't be so smart now huh? Well, he'd be making ga-ga noises, wouldn't he? Might not even be born yet.

Let's also take time to sneer at the title. I mean, what? The Phantom Menace? Doesn't that sound like every horror or science fiction B-movie you've ever watched? "You'll scream! Your heart will freeze!  You'll run away in terror from... THE PHANTOM MENACE!" Christ. Not that the second movie's title was any better. But come on: Lucas says it refers to the machinations of Senator Palpatine (soon to be seen falling down a power shaft near you, trailing ectoplasmic electrical tendrils of Force power) as he moves the pieces behind the scenes, setting things up for his rise to emperor and the destruction of the Republic. Well all I can say about that is bollocks. Makes no sense. This title is rubbish, and frankly, not worthy of a Star Wars movie.

Battle droids, eh? That's cool. So is the invasion fleet. What's not cool is that Qui-Gon Jinn (I'm just gonna call him Jinn, Neeson's character, Obi-Wan's Jedi Master) saves what will turn out to be the most hated Star Wars character ever, as we are forced to meet, and unfortunately not bear witness to the - preferably gruesome - death of Jar Jar Binks. What were you thinking, George? How to possibly manage offending a whole culture with one character? How to bring proper racism into your universe? How to ensure you got banned from the Caribbean forever? Well at least the underwater city is good.

It's quite a clever move really. WIth droids the only things being destroyed you can't really class it as violence or carnage or even murder; you can enjoy the lightsaber attacks (can't call them fights; the droids just get knocked apart) without agonising over any deaths or feel you're revelling in mindless violence. It is in fact almost funny, given the metallic voices of the droids.This is I think the first we ever hear of the Sith, the, for want of a better phrase, dark Jedis. In the original trilogy all we were told was that Vader had turned to the dark side. Now it seems the dark side has its own Jedi knights, and they're called the Sith. We have Darth Sidious and Darth Maul, which also shows us that Vader's first name is a title rather than any sort of, um, first name. I guess it's analogous to lord or master, so every big cheese in the Sith is Darth this or that. Interesting.

Strange to see R2D2 on his own, separate from C3PO, but I guess they haven't met yet. More racism in the character of the trader Watto, who has an unmistakably prominent nose and speaks, and acts, pretty like a caricature of a "greedy Jew". Here we meet Anakin Skywalker for the first time, just a kid, having been lost in a bet to the Hutts, the gang who control Tatooine, a planet we have not seen since the last movie. Whether Jabba the Hut is here or not I don't know; no idea how long these people live. Oh right, he is: there he is, opening the race. I have no idea why Binks had to accompany Jinn into Mos Eisley (is it Mos Eisley? Not sure) - he was no help, got in the way, nearly got himself killed, and the only slight advantage of his being there was to get Jinn introduced to Anakin, leading to our meeting C3PO for the first time. Seems Anakin built him, to help his mother. And so the two droids are introduced to one another.

Now we get this pod race, another godsend to the computer video game industry, and the only part of the movie I actually remember. It is good to see that Anakin is being brought up by his mother on her own, whereas Luke had both uncle and aunt looking after him. A real modern interpretation. Okay so wait just a damned minute here. C3PO was created on Tatooine, yet he didn't realise, when he was brought back and bought by the descendants of the boy who built him that he was home? He must have known what planet they were on, and even if he didn't, how many families named Skywalker are there that live on desert planets in the arsehole of nowhere?

I have to say, whether it's the role she's been given, or her acting ability, Kiera Knightley as the Queen's decoy comes across as about as emotional as a service droid. Flat, toneless, expressionless - I mean, this is a woman, a ruler who is supposedly watching her people die under an enemy occupation, and she seems as upset about it as a hangnail. Not, to be fair, a lot for Obi-Wan to do either; Neeson steals all the best scenes and the film revolves pretty much around him. I suppose it's easy to say it when we know what's going to happen, but you can see how Amidala is being manipulated by Palpatine into elevating him to power, and we know where that leads. Yoda's right too: Anakin is all ready made for a trip to the dark side - I wonder how Samuel L. Jackson feels about that phrase?

It's ironic, and hubris of the greatest kind that Jinn goes against the advice of the Jedi Council, who see all too clearly what Skywalker is destined to become. Well, not clearly but they have an idea. Even Obi-Wan thinks it's a bad idea. Everyone will have cause to regret the Jedi's decision in the years to come. Can't say I agree with the idea of making the Force dependent on these midi-chlorians or whatever. It was supposed to be all mystic, godlike, divine; now it's a scientific process? Meh. Teaming up with the Gungans smacks to me of Ewoks from the second movie, and is I guess a lame attempt to show people that the "whites" have to rely on or team up with the "blacks" in order to defeat the bad guys. Again I say, meh. The revelation about the queen not being the queen is a good one, though. But the Gungans' relationship to some wild African tribe is further reinforced when the Jedis and the queen and the rest of the party come to their "sacred place", which looks like nothing so much as a native settlement in the jungle, complete with wooden huts. And not Jabba ones either.

I must say, the Gungans' force field isn't much use is it? The droid army just walk through it. Now we get the classic battle between Darth Maul and Jinn and Kenobi. I do like his lightsaber staff, very cool. Again though, the idea of almost exclusively droids being shot and killed is I think a step backwards, perhaps a concession to those who believe movies of this type are too violent, but in ways I think it is a self-defeating move, desensitising kids to violence and making all the battle scenes more like a video game. At least in the original it was real men, stormtroopers and rebels, who got killed. Here it's like, so what? They're droids. Who cares? Also, their less than human aspect does raise a troubling issue here: if something looks that mechanical is it a life or is it just a piece of machinery to be destroyed? What, I wonder, would Data say?

Another question: how are the two Jedi jumping as if it's zero-gravity almost? They're not superhuman, no matter how well trained they may be, but Obi-Wan Kenobi just made a jump UPWARDS of at least fifty feet! How did he do that? Jinn's death at the hands of Darth Maul was a little telegraphed, especially when he got cut off from Kenobi, but it's basically a retread of the fight years later between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader isn't it? Not quite sure why Jinn knelt down when the force field went up; maybe he was gathering his strength? Praying to the Force? Needed a breather? Looked weird anyway. A good foreshadowing when Palpatine looks at Anakin and says he will watch his career closely. Another viking funeral I see, and an ending that very closely mirrors the end of the first movie. Think they might have done something different.

Overall, what do I think now, after having watched this for only the second time? Admittedly, it's not quite as bad or forgettable as I remember (so to speak), but is it a worthy successor to the original trilogy? Was it worth waiting for? Did it whet my appetite for more? In my case, the answer to all three questions is no. I think the main issue I have - and perhaps that many people had - is not just that these were mostly new characters and not the ones we'd known for, at this point, twenty-two years, but that even the one we did know, albeit a younger version, had really very little to do in the movie, the whole thing being concentrated mostly around a new guy we had no  history with. Not taking anything from Lliam Neeson's performance, which was great, but you know, who was this guy? Sure, we're told he was Obi-Wan Kenobi's master, but we haven't heard of him before, and so when he dies (and as I say above, it's no great surprise after the death of Kenobi) it's not the same emotional shock as it was in the first movie, not to me.

The attempt to inject too much humour into the movie annoyed me too, mostly because it's orchestrated through the figure of Jar Jar Binks, and for me it never ever works. His patois is annoying, his clumsiness even more so, and the idea of his being elevated to a general in the Gungan army is, frankly, about as easy to swallow as a beachball. The young Anakin works well, though for a child I think it's also a little hard to believe he can not only fly a spacecraft but also destroy the home base of the Federation, but the fact that we know what's coming tended to have me waving at the screen and saying "No! No! Don't train him! Listen to Yoda and Mace Wotsit!"

I did think we might find out something about who Anakin's father was. His mother says "there was no father", but this is just her speaking metaphorically, I have to assume: she didn't get herself pregnant, so who did? I feel if we knew that, then surely that might be a major piece of the puzzle and the solution to the mystery as to why he's so loaded up with, well, Force fuel, as it were. Maybe it goes into that more in the next two movies. As I say, I remember little if anything of either. I also have to wonder why, like C3PO and R2D2, if he grew up on Tatooine, Anakin in the guise of Darth Vader doesn't recognise the planet when he returns there in the first movie, and why he doesn't have any connection to his brother and sister. Sure, he's evil now, but still. A lot of plot holes there, methinks.

It's building a backstory, of course I understand that, and the introduction of the Sith is at least something interesting, as is the rise of Senator Palpatine to the eventual role of emperor, and it will be good to see how the Republic collapses and the empire comes into being, but though it has its good points, I just felt mostly the film felt, well, flat for me. It wasn't the return I'd hoped to see: in fact, I was one of those - and pretty much remain so - who believed the original trilogy should be left as it was. If Lucas wanted to have other adventures for other, unconnected characters in the Star Wars universe, fine, but he should have left our heroes alone.

I think the second movie only reinforced that belief in me.

[Trollheart]

II: Into the Arena: The Tears of a Clone
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Title: Attack of the Clones
Year: 2002
Format: Movie
Universe Chronology: Set 10 years after the first prequel movie, so therefore 22 years before A New Hope and barely 3 before the birth of the empire.
Basic premise: The Republic is being shaken by upheaval, in the middle of which a discovery is made that an army of clones stands ready to attack, and that they are controlled by a dark faction within the Jedi.
Starring: Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Natalie Portman as Queen Padme Amidala, Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Kenny Baker as R2D2, Ian McDiarmid as Senator Palpatine, Ahmed Best as (sigh) Jar  Jar Binks, Christopher Lee as Count Dooku, Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu, Frank Oz as Yoda

Directed by: George Lucas
General reaction: Meh
Personal reaction: Not bad
Rating: 5/10

Well, Liam Neeson is brown bread, so at least that leaves us to concentrate on Obi-Wan as the head Jedi, and Anakin has by now shot up, no longer able to fit into one of those pod racers back on Tatooine. Queen Amidala has, for reasons which may or may not become clear, become Senator Amidala now, and there should be a touch of class and gravitas thanks to Christopher Lee. Will more droids get shot to pieces? I'd be willing to bet yes, they will, and possibly - though this is just a guess, you understand - a whole bunch of clones too. So once again, for the now fifth time, we open on space with a camera move - up this time, rather than down, just to give a little variety, if not much - and a ship - or in this case ships approaching a planet.

I mean, surely anyone who says "I guess there was no danger" should expect something nasty to happen? Guess that's the end of the senator then. Oh no: yet another decoy. Kind of clever how now Anakin looks like Kenobi did in the last movie and Kenobi kind of looks like Jinn. Also good how McGregor looks sort of like Alec Guinness might look at this age. Nice link. Not so sure about the idea of a romance between Anakin and Padme though. Pretty much action all the way again, and we even get a car chase, if a hover car chase. Reminds me of The Fifth Element. Very well done though. I like the in-joke when Kenobi asks Anakin "Why do I get the feeling you're going to be the death of me?"

I do like the way they show how hot-headed and impatient Anakin is, how quickly he angers, and Yoda has him sussed. It's easy to see how he turns to the dark side. Of course, the problem here is that we know how this ends, so it's kind of hard to be surprised. His political ideas are decently developed; he's a fascist in the making. And he's blue-eyed and blonde. Hmm. So Boba Fett is a clone of his father, eh? Hey: that ship there looks like Deep Space 9! More fodder for the game market as Obi-Wan and the Fetts fight it out in an asteroid field.  And now Anakin is back on Tatooine looking for his mother. Reunited with C3PO too. There's that theme again as Luke, sorry Anakin sets out to rescue his mother from the Sandpeople.

Enter Christopher Lee as the villainous Count Dooku, who's all ready to take on those pesky Jedi and kick the Republic up its arse. Poor old Mrs. Skywalker doesn't look too well: think the Tuskens have been doing more than just having her wash the dishes and mend their clothes. And now she's dead. What was that Jinn said to Anakin: a Jedi uses the Force for defence, never for attack? And never for revenge. Hmm. Guess the future Dark Lord skipped over that part of the Jedi manual, and those Tusken Raiders are going to be sorry they messed with his mom. There's of course something tragic about Anakin carrying the corpse of his mother back to her home, but there's something terrifying too. The look in his eyes: it's like the thought of his mother was the only thing holding him  back, and now, like a certain dictator popular in the 1940s, with the death of his mother all traces and vestiges of humanity - mercy, love, kindness, pity - are gone, and the man is a walking machine, bent on revenge and death. Anakin Skywalker is, to all intents and purposes, gone now, and Darth Vader waits to fill the void. Usage of the Vader theme really underlines this.

Okay, is Count Dooku a bad guy or not? Seems he's a Jedi, and not just any Jedi, but the one who trained Jinn. He appears to be ready to take on the Dark Lord of the SIth, Darth Sidious, whom he says is controlling half the senate.Is there some smart subtext to the fact that Anakin and Padme fall onto a conveyor belt, as the franchise gets ready to become an unstoppable behemoth which will churn out movies, TV series and spinoffs, cartoons,games, comics and merchandise, to rise to be perhaps the largest and most profitable ever? Hey! I didn't know R2D2 could fly!

To answer my question in the last paragraph, yeah, it would seem he is, as our friend Dooku is presiding over the arena-style thing in which he hopes to see the Jedis and Padme die. And he's pally with the viceroy and Jango Fett too. Oh look! A full-on multiple Jedi fight. Now this will be cool. Ah, looks like poor old Jango quite lost his head. Sorry. I like the misplacing of C3PO's head on a battle droid body: now that's how to inject comic relief into the movie, not via a stupid annoying klutz like Jar jar Binks, who thank my various gods is hardly in this much at all. Hmm. Don't those soldiers Yoda brings to the rescue of the Jedi have a distinctly stormtrooper look? Yeah and those ground assault vehicles look like precursors to the empire's AT-ATs.

Another fight to the death between a Jedi with a blue lightsaber and one with a red. Is Lucas trying to make a political point here? Oh, and another arm sliced off. Jedis are nothing if not predictable. Ah,  good to see Yoda actually fight like a Jedi instead of just being an annoying teacher. I like the way they bring the Death Star into it, too. Hold on a mo though: is Darth Sidious the emperor or is it Palpatine? The Sith Lord sounds, and looks, much more like the ruler of the empire we hate, but I'm pretty sure it's Palpatine who rises to that station. Oh right, I see: they're one and the same. How did I miss that?

Overall then, I'd agree there's a marginal - though only marginal - improvement on the previous movie, with better and more appropriate comic relief provided by the droids, especially C3PO, and more action. It's hard to argue with a fight scene that contains multiple Jedi fighting, after all. I was a litlte confused, and still am, at the plot though. The clones were being developed by or on behalf of Dooku, but then the Jedi took them and used them against him? So where does the Clone War come from? Are we to assume the clones - which I always took as being the enemy when they were mentioned - are on the side of the Republic? And who is the Republic? Again, I always took it the Republic was the enemy of the Empire. Did Dooku also get his clones, and are both now to fight against each other? What's with the droid army? Where does that fit in?

I imagine it's pretty obvious that when Anakin and Padme do the horizontal bop, she gives birth to Luke. Maybe that will be shown in the third movie, can't remember. I do find it telling that, other than the opening credits, each of these three movies (well, two so far) have ended with very un-Star Wars-like themes, almost as if Lucas is trying to distance himself from the original trilogy. But then there are so many callbacks to that, so it's hard to know if it's just coincidence. Or maybe he's just tired hearing the damn thing. I do think Anakin's character is handled very well; once you know what happens in the future, it's easy to see how it happens. Anakin Skywalker is a Jedi time bomb just waiting to go off and take half the galaxy with him, and Palpatine knows, and intends to profit by the young Jedi's insecurities and grievances against his master and the Jedi Council.

Again though, the death of Jango Fett aside, we're still talking about droids being killed here, and it does tend, for me anyway, to lessen the impact of so much violence. I suppose with the clones now operational the next movie will have more human deaths, but Lucas has used more droids here in these two movies than in any of the other three. I'd say this one is truer to the spirit of the original trilogy, with three heroes - one of which is a woman - fighting together against a dark force. Nevertheless, I don't think I'll ever change my stance that none of these are a patch on the originals, and I'm still not sure if it was a good idea to make them.

Well, apart from the final one. Maybe.

[Trollheart]

Interregnum III: Cartoon Wars II - Star Wars Comes to the Telly, but Properly This Time

In some ways, you could say that Star Wars had never really made its debut on the TV. The weak and frankly peurile Droids and the bile-inducing and far worse Ewoks could, maybe, be seen as hallucinogenic nightmares, brought on by eating too much cheese before bedtime. They weren't, but they might as well have been. They were poor, badly-written and ineptly executed attempts to cash in on the massive popularity of the franchise, and while they may have kept the kiddies (and I mean the real young ones) entertained, no adult worth their salt would consider watching them. Yes I know I did but a) I'm not worth my salt and b) I did it in the name of my art and even then c) I only managed to watch as much as I could force myself to, in order to formulate an informed opinion. That opinion you have read, and I stand by it.

But now, with the release of the first two prequel movies, the subject on everyone's lips was 9/11 and Al Quadea and George Bush, but the subject on every Star Wars fan's lips (what do they call Star Wars fans? Warsies? Lucasalites?) was the war that had been mentioned in Princess Leia's important message that more or less kicked off the whole thing, and whose advent and origin had been explored in at least the second movie, as we've already seen. Yes, the theme of choice for a new Star Wars assault on TV was the Clone Wars. And of course it would be animated, because why not? Who was going to try to do a live-action series one year after Attack of the Clones hit?

It appears, too, that there are, or would be at this point, two more iterations of The Clone Wars, one a movie and one another series, and both released five years after this. It also seems that despite getting three seasons this was not exactly what you would call epic, with the first two seasons giving us episodes of up to two minutes, while season three branched out and stretched that to a staggering twelve. Minutes, that is. So how much can you cram into less than a quarter of an hour, I wonder? Let's find out.

Title: Star Wars: Clone Wars
Year: 2003 - 2005
Format: Animated TV series
Broadcast Chronology: After Attack of the Clones
Universe Chronology: Set between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones
Basic premise: The Clone Wars, duh
Number of episodes: 25 (3 seasons)
Status: Finished
Starring: (Voices of) Mat Lucas as Anakin Skywalker, James Arnold Taylor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Tom Kane as Yoda, Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Terrence "T.C."Carson as Mace Windu, Corey Burton as Count Dooku, Grey DeLisle as Padme Amidala, Nick Jameson as Palpatine/Darth Sidious, Fred Tataicore as Qui-Gon Jinn
Directed by: Genndy Tartakovsky
General reaction: Positive
Personal reaction: Bored mostly
Rating: B

Well, it's twenty years later and don't it show? The animation is far superior, smoother and more, well, mature, sort of reminds me of what 2000 AD looks like today compared to how it was in the 1970s. A bit hard to follow when the episodes are so short, but it does seem to do a decent  job of following the basic idea of the second movie, but five chapters in and so far it's just a bunch of battles. Well made and all that, but nothing much else happening. Of course, five chapters equates to about ten minutes, so maybe I'm being a little hasty. No I'm not. Basically it's like one endless video game fight. It's all action and little to no exposition, which makes it hard to know what exactly is going on. Exciting, yes, easy to follow, no.

Actually it's getting a bit stupid now. Mace Windu is like some sort of superman, actually punching through robots, flying, Jedis are not that powerful! It's like nothing can touch him. Onto season three then, with the "longer" episodes - a whole twelve minutes - and it seems some humour has been injected into the series, perhaps not taking themselves as seriously this time around. Better or worse? Let's see. Nice link back when Obi-Wan says "What an incredible smell you've discovered!" Well for some reason two episodes are not available to me, so it gets a bit confusing but there's some sort of quest to release some primitive people - ah I can't really follow it.

I'm actually going to go against public opinion here (oh what a surprise, Trollheart! You know better than the world, right? Shut up: everyone's entitled to an opinion. It just so happens that they're all wrong and I'm right!) and say that, while the general consensus is that this is a masterpiece of animation (it is) that works without real narrative (it doesn't) I would have preferred perhaps less video-game action and more plot. It's without doubt the best TV adaptation so far, but then, what have we had up to now? R2D2 and C3PO chasing gangsters with a Scooby gang? Ewoks learning life lessons? It's hardly a high bar now is it? Still, I will give it ten out of ten for continuity, as the final episode, seeming to end on a cliffhanger, does, but dovetails perfectly with the opening of the third and final movie of the second trilogy, which really makes Star Wars: Clone Wars one long prologue into Revenge of the Sith, and that's damned impressive.

But other than the animation, which can't be faulted, nothing else is.

[Trollheart]

III: Darkness Descending, Terror Rising: Death to the Republic

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Title: Revenge of the Sith
Year: 2005
Format: Movie
Broadcast Chronology After Attack of the Clones
Universe Chronology: Following directly on from Star Wars: Clone Wars and coming three years after Attack of the Clones
Basic premise: The fall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader
Starring: Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Natalie Portman as Queen Padme Amidala, Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Kenny Baker as R2D2, Ian McDiarmid as Senator Palpatine, Ahmed Best as (sigh) Jar  Jar Binks, Christopher Lee as Count Dooku, Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu, Frank Oz as Yoda, JImmy Smits as Bail Organa
Directed by: George Lucas
General reaction: Positive
Personal reaction: Positive
Rating: 8/10

I'll say it one more time and then shut up: I remember virtually nothing about these movies, but the end scene (or close to it) with Anakin on some sort of hill of lava or something sticks with me about this one. I do have a vague memory that even then I considered this one far superior to the other two, and that it came across to me as the one where finally they got it right. All though the second movie we've been seeing Mrs. Skywalker's only son moving closer towards the dark side, exhibiting impatience, anger, a lust for revenge and power and a need to shape the world into what he wants it to be that speaks very clearly of his transition to the figure who will become Darth Vader, and here is where that finally happens. I don't remember being disappointed with it, which is always a good sign. But like the other two, I have only the very sketchiest memory of this movie, so it will, hopefully, be good to watch it again and review it properly.

Well after two scrolls wittering on about trade negotiations, it's good to see that word we all love to see, and whose plural forms the other half of this franchise's name. War! Surely there'll be no fucking around here! Again we open on space, downward angle and two ships fly past a larger one. Getting to be a habit now, George. Maybe it's meant to be some sort of motif? Anyway we are again right into the action from the beginning, and I must say, having watched Clone Wars has made me more receptive to what's going on here. Otherwise I'd be saying - as I probably was the first time - who the fuck is General Grevious? Where did he come from? I would wonder though about the phrase "there are heroes on both sides". Sounds like something Trump would say ten years later. How can there be heroes on the side of the enemy?

So Anakin's path to the dark side continues and gets closer as he executes the armless (sorry; well, handless anyway) Count Dooku, but he doesn't seem to think it odd that Palpatine tells him to leave Obi-Wan behind, even though his master is not dead? That doesn't trigger something in his brain? Of course, as I said in the review of the previous movies, once you know what's going to happen it's easy to make these observations, but still, you'd think he'd wonder. Good to see R2 can protect himself and cause havoc when he needs to. It's funny when he starts sliding down the hull of the general's ship with everything else as they dive, but I wonder why he doesn't activate his rockets and just fly back up?

Lots of things blowing up as usual. Hey, let's be honest: it's a better landing than Deanna managed with the Enterprise saucer section in Star Trek: Generations! Ah, now Padme breaks the news about the Skywalker twins. The relationship between Palpatine and Anakin continues to grow stronger as he is seduced away from the Jedi. Interesting to see the Wookies in combat, not that I care. I love the way, as Palpatine outlaws the Jedi, dissolves the Republic and declares himself emperor of the new First Galactic Empire, Padme sighs "so this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause", obviously looking back to how Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, and I'm relatively sure someone said the same thing, either at the time or afterwards.

And now the betrayals begin. First Anakin defies Mace and saves Palpatine, who kills the Jedi, and pledges himself to the new emperor Lord of the Sith and the dark side, then at a signal from the emperor all loyal forces turn against their Jedi commanders, killing them. I don't quite get it: is this like a sort of sleeper cell thing, where all the soldiers were implanted with an activation code? Or have they just been playing along, waiting for the signal? Kind of odd how they all just obey and switch sides without question or even surprise, as if they've been anticipating such an order.

It's quite a clever piece of writing to have Anakin shift his loyalties not out of greed or lust for power or even impatience or anger, but to save the life of his wife. He's had dreams where she dies in childbirth, and the emperor tells him that he can save her, so in effect it's the love of a woman that drives Skywalker to the dark side, though in truth he was more than halfway there anyway. There's a point there near the end, when he's talking to - well, ranting at - Padme, and he smiles, and just for  a second you can see Luke Skywalker, or I should say Mark Hammill. It's quite eerie. A good callback to when he tells Padme he and she can rule the galaxy together, the same offer he will later make to his son (and again talk about overthrowing the emperor, which literally happens right at the end).

The setting is very well chosen of course. It's like battling in Hell, and Anakin/Vader stands on a metaphorical and indeed real and actual precipice, as he contemplates where his life is going, what path he intends to take, and where it will lead him. His own private Gethsemane, and he's prepared to remain there, to burn there, to rule there, and to lose everything he has ever held dear. I like that when he fights Obi-Wan he has a blue lightsaber instead of a red, as if even here, at the last, with his mind made up and the dark side stretching before him, he has a chance to turn aside, to change his mind, to return to the fold.

But the die is cast, and now we have two major battles going on at once: Anakin/Darth Vader versus Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda versus the emperor. Whatever else you can say about this movie, you can't deny that of all three, it is the one which most satisfactorily delivers on its promise, and it' s a fitting ending to the saga. I see of course parallels with the end scene of Terminator 2 as Obi-Wan and Vader fight above a river of molten metal, literally fighting on a bridge in Hell. I like the way after the battle you have two medical scenes, one of Padme bringing forth not only new life, but the chosen champion who will save the galaxy and defeat his father, her husband. And Leia of course. The other scene, then, concerns the attempts by the emperor to save what is left of their father, the now Sith Lord Darth Vader. One scene, while it will contain death, celebrates life, whereas the other glories in death, the saving of a man who will bring untold misery to trillions and write his name in fire and blood across the history of the galaxy. Vader takes his first artificial breath while Padme breathes her last human one.

The last vestiges of Anakin when in the guise of Vader his first words are an enquiry after the safety of his wife, while the emperor uses lies and trickery to fool him into believing he is responsible for the death, not only of the woman he loves (or loved) but of her unborn children, his son and daughter. One final, agonised roar as his humanity rushes from him and he is the emperor's creature, no longer a man but a machine, motivated by hate, revenge and bitterness. The end scene, where baby Luke is handed to Owen and Beru as they watch the twin suns setting, is a fantastic little callback too. Bravo.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do it. The only reason this movie doesn't get a higher score is because none of these, not even this one, can live up to the originals, but damn it gets close here. Very little bad I can say about it, and without question the climax of the whole saga, wrapping everything up so that if you watch them in order now, it makes a complete story that makes total sense. So why a third trilogy? Guess we'll find out, but I really think it should have been left here. However the almighty dollar calls, and Disney aren't ones to resist its siren song, so we get three more movies which, from what I've heard, turn out to be something of a travesty. We'll get to them, as we have to, but there's a lot more in between.

It would be another decade though before we'd have to deal with the next and (so far) final trilogy, but with such a head of steam built up and technology now capable of the franchise being properly done on the telly, it's no surprise that this is where it went next, and where, despite the addition of three more movies, it seems to have found a proper and responsive home. Before that, perhaps oddly, there would be one more movie which, in a reverse of the previous series, would lead back to the last two movies and into a full-blown, seven-season animated series.

[Trollheart]

Interregnum IV: Cartoon Wars III: A Clone Again (Naturally)

Title: The Clone Wars
Year: 2008
Broadcast Chronology: After Revenge of the Sith
Format: Animated movie/pilot episode to TV series
Universe Chronology: Set just after Attack of the Clones, during the Clone Wars duh
Basic premise: Jabba the Hutt's son is kidnapped and the Jedi must retrieve him alive
Starring: (The voices of) Matt Lanter, Ashley Eckstein, James Arnold Taylor, Catherine Taber, Tom Lane, Dee Bradley Baker, Ian Abercrombie, Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Daniels, Christopher Lee
Directed by: Dave Filoni
General reaction: Very negative
Personal reaction: Very Positive
Rating: 7/10

Holy good Christ on a stick doing cartwheels across the Crab Nebula! Talk about advances in animation! If I thought the 2003 Clone Wars series was better animated than the likes of Droids, only five years later and this is in a different class! It's like the kind of animation you have in computer games today. 3D, full motion, almost likelike figures which for a moment had me wondering if this actually was an animated film. Amazing. Oddly enough, they're using a plot device which involves the kidnapping of Jabba the Hutt's son.

It is a little disorienting, going back to the Clone Wars after having watched ROTS and seen the end of it all,but I guess the clue is in the name. Have to admit, I'm really getting to like those battle droids, especially here, where they're given more personality and are used almost as comic relief. Cute, in a way. Yes, much better. A cohesive story line, good tie-in with both the previous series and the movies, and some truly awesome animation. This has whetted my appetite for the series, though I doubt I'll sit through seven seasons.

Well, maybe just one or two...

I must say I don't get where everyone else is coming from. Once again it's a case of Trollheart vs the World, and I disagree with them all. Comments such as calling the animation "wooden", characters "stiff" and a lot of other nonsense I simply don't agree with. I was very impressed personally. I don't of course have that much experience with animation of the 21st century, but calling it a "Saturday morning cartoon" is not, I think, fair at all.

I find their lack of faith in Lucas disturbing.


Title:  The Clone Wars
Year: 2008 - 2014 (revived in 2020)
Format: Animated TV series
Broadcast Chronology: After Revenge of the Sith
Universe Chronology: Set just after Attack of the Clones, during the Clone Wars
Basic premise: Various stories; linked I think
Number of episodes: 133 (7 seasons)
Status: Finished
Starring: (The voices of) Matt Lanter, Ashley Eckstein, James Arnold Taylor, Catherine Taber, Tom Lane, Dee Bradley Baker, Ian Abercrombie, Anthony Daniels, Steven Stanton, Matthew Wood, Terrence C. Carson, Katie Sackhoff, Sam Witwer, Corey Burton, Nika Futterman, Phil LaMarr

Directed by: Not sure but I think Dave Filoni?
General reaction: Negative
Personal reaction: Very positive
Rating: 8/10

Basically this is the continuation of the movie, and again I can't understand when people diss the animation. I find it first class. Not only that, I like the characterisation and the story lines are cool. With over 100 episodes it should be possible to build a pretty detailed depiction of the Clone Wars, and if this was so bad as people say, how did it get seven seasons I wonder? Each episode seems to be a little  vignette; this first one stars Yoda as he tries to establish a base for the Republic in a star system and recruit new allies, while Count Dooku attempts to stop him. I don't know if it will always focus on one character but I can see how that could work. An impressive start. Or, I guess, continuation.


Title: Star Wars: Rebels
Year: 2014 - 2018
Format: Animated TV series
Broadcast Chronology: After Revenge of the Sith
Universe Chronology: Set ten years after Revenge of the Sith
Basic premise: Various
Number of episodes: 75 (4 seasons)
Status: Finished
Starring: (Voices of) Taylor Gray, Vanessa Marshall, Freddie Prinze Jr., Tiya Sircar, Steve Blum, Dave Filoni
Directed by: Dave Filoni
General reaction: Positive
Personal reaction: Positive
Rating: 8/10

Again, very good animation - kind of on a par with Clone Wars (the second one, 2008) and pretty engaging. It's drawn me in already. I liked the two-part opening episode, and Obi-Wan Kenobi's use of the words "in time, a new hope will emerge". Nice. The main character, the kid, has a vaguely Indian look, which is heartening too. Something I would - and might - watch more of.

[Trollheart]

Part III: When You Wish Upon a Death Star -
The Empire Strikes a Deal

In the first movie, the initially titled Star Wars, later appended to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Ben Kenobi, on feeling in the Force the destruction of Alderaan, mentioned that it sounded like millions of souls crying out at once. In my own modest attempt at a parody, Star Bores: A New Dope Old Bald One Kenyabe remarked that it sounded like a million people crying out "FUCK!" at once, and  I think you could probably hear the chorus of groans and curses in a similar way when the announcement was made that what could be regarded as one of the most evil empires on Earth had managed to score the rights to Lucas's film characters. Oh George! You fell to the dark side! How could you?

Breathlessly, fingers crossed, but not expecting much (no new hope here) we waited to see what a mess Disney would make of our beloved franchise. Like the First Galactic Empire or indeed the Doomsday Machine in the original Star Trek, or just a black hole, the Happiest Place on Earth (™) had already swallowed up one of its main rivals, and Pixar had just become another arm of the Disney animation corporation. Next up was Marvel Studios, and we've all seen how that went. Now they were reaching with hungry hands (yes I know I'm mixing metaphors; shut up or that won't be the only thing I'll be mixing) for one of the most successful and - say it - profitable franchises in human history, and eager to make big money out of it.

A movie every two to five years, they promised, which would be either great or terrible, depending on how they handled the first one, and plenty of live-action TV shows as well. Could be a new lease of life for the franchise, could be a brightly-coloured stake through its heart. Most worrying of all was that George, having sold his soul, not like Black Sabbath for rock and roll, but for a rather more useful four billion of his namesake and first Founding Father, would not really be involved in the future projects. He was going to retire to an island somewhere, maybe buy himself a planet or a moon, and retire. Possibly. Certainly from his baby anyway, which was now put in the supposedly safe hands of the man who had transformed and reinvigorated - or perverted and destroyed, depending on your point of view - the other behemoth, Star Trek.

So how would J.J. Abrams handle this most precious legacy that had been passed to him by the cold dead hands of Uncle Walt? Well, the deal was done in 2012 and we had to wait a pretty short three years before the first movie in the third trilogy, and the first not to involve its creator as other than a "creative consultant" (which probably means they occasionally asked his opinion on something, ignored it and did what they liked) hit the theatres. Ridley Scott knowledgeably assured us in 1978 that in space, nobody can hear you scream, which is true, it being a vacuum and all. However I think, one week before Christmas 2015, even space would not have been as silent as Earth, as we waited to see what would now be the seventh Star Wars movie and prayed it would not be a travesty.

I don't know if it was or not, as I have, as I have mentioned several times already, never seen any of these three movies, so this will be new to me.

And can someone please get that damned cricket out of my way? What's with the top hat, dude? Don't you know they went out of style two centuries ago?

I: Rey of Light: To Find a Jedi - the Search for Skywalker

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

Title: The Force Awakens
Year: 2015
Format: Movie
Broadcast Chronology: After Revenge of the Sith
Universe Chronology: Set 30 years after Return of the Jedi
Basic premise: Han Solo goes looking for Luke Skywalker
Starring: Mark Hammill as Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Kenny Baker as R2D2, Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca, Adam Driver as Kylo Ren, Daisy Ridley as Rey, John Boyega as Finn, Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, Lupita Nyong'o as Maz Kanata, Andy Serkis as Supreme Leader Snoke, Domhnall Gleason as General Hux, Max von Sydow as Lor San Tekka
Directed by: J.J. Abrams
General reaction: Positive
Personal reaction: Positive
Rating: 7/10

I have no intention of reading much about this before I watch it, and I'm certainly not checking the critical responses, so as not to colour my own opinion of it beforehand. I am heartened a little to see they decided to go back to the original characters. I mean, the ride to see how Anakin became Vader was great, but I missed there being nobody else I knew, other than Kenobi (and he was much  younger of course) and the droids. It seems like it will be nice to get to know old friends again. Possibly. It is sobering, and saddening, to note that three members of the original cast - Alec Guinness, Kenny Baker and Peter Mayhew - have all now passed on, to say nothing of the feared Lord of the Sith, David Prowse as Darth Vader.

Thirty years on, then, and Vader is dead, the emperor is dead (unless he was somehow able to survive being thrown down a reactor shaft), the empire is gone and the Republic is back. Luke Skywalker, it seems, has vanished and showing that this is the twenty-first and not the twentieth century, and without a planet to be princess of, Leia has been made a general. It seems the empire is not quite down and out yet, and rather like (and possibly paralleling) the rise of the far right now, a cabal called the First Order has grown out of, it says, the ashes of the empire, and is dedicated to hunting down the last of the Jedi. That would be Luke. Perhaps he was wise to go into hiding.

Once more we have the classic start, and you'd have to think Abrams is paying homage to the original movies, as we get the scroll, then space, then a downward camera angle to a planet and a huge, huge ship moving like a shadow across it, blocking it out entirely. A star destroyer? Possibly, because here come stormtroopers, and no matter how much I've grown to like and even love the battle droids while watching Clone Wars, I have to say it's good to see the guys in white back again. And off they go, acting like King John's knights in medieval England, attacking people indiscriminately and burning villages. Well, maybe there are elements of Vietnam and the Nazis too. First time I've ever seen a stormtrooper stop to check on his dead comrade. Nice touch. Sort of humanises them. Sort of.

The new droid looks like some sort of beach ball or roly-poly toy. I preferred R2D2. There's a new Darth Vader in town, too, and that stormtrooper piques my interest; when they're all told to execute the villagers, he does not take part, looks to be disgusted even though  you of course can't see past his helmet. Look, I find it a little hard to believe that a mere three decades after they wrested power back from the empire the fucking Republic has gone and lost it again, and now they're once more on the run, the resistance? Can these guys not hold onto power once they have it? Are we talking a bunch of Democrats here?

Well this is interesting. So our reluctant stormtrooper has had a crisis of conscience and is now helping the hero to escape from the star destroyer - he's called Poe Dameron, apparently, and is NOT a Jedi. And they're escaping in a TIE fighter! Never saw the interior of one of those; well, sort of but only when an imperial pilot was flying one. The stormtrooper is called Finn - or has been given that name by Dameron, as he's just a clone with an assignation - and they're breaking out. Okay looks like Poe didn't make it when they crashed. But here's something interesting: the Millennium Falcon junked on the planet, and now being flown by Finn and this girl on the planet he picked up called, um, Rey, along with that beach ball robot, BB8? BB8. Right. And it has the map showing where Luke has gone to hide, so everyone is after it. A little cliched but all right.

Great to see Han Solo back. Yeah, and I suppose him too. Solo back with the Falcon: what more could you ask for? And of course, straight away he's in trouble with people he owes money to. Oh now that's another cliche though isn't it? Han Solo is the new Darth Vader's father? What's the guy's name - Kylo Ren? Right. Perhaps stretching the copying a little too much. I can't call that so much a homage as lazy writing really. The new top bad guy is good: Supreme Leader Smoke sorry Snoke. Oh and now one of Luke's apprentices turned against him and that's why he fucked off? Really now JJ come on: can you not think of something more original? You're just recycling old ideas here.

Okay well the idea of Ren fighting against goodness and trying to remain on the dark path is a good twist, and I like that's he's, um, praying to the head of Darth Vader. Creepy. Good work on the watering hole thing; recalls the Cantina on Mos Eisley but with advances in computer graphics now and prosthetics and just about everything, they can do a lot more with it. Now Finn is being a sort of latter-day Han Solo, or rather, the way Han used to be. He's no hero (he says), he just wants to get away from the First Order. I imagine the older Solo sees a lot of his young cocky self in him, a man who is more interested in saving his own skin than fighting for a cause, as he was. A man driven by needs and wants rather than principles, and a man who is looking for somewhere to belong, even if he doesn't realise it, or won't admit it even to himself.

Let's just take a moment to consider the Skywalker family, shall we? Father unknown, mother sold into slavery on a desert planet, ends up losing her son and getting raped and beaten to death by Sandpeople. Son goes on to become Jedi but rebels, turns to the dark side and helps bring about the rise of the empire. Son ends up losing wife and children, is almost killed by his mentor and best friend, living for the rest of his life as some horrible half-man half machine, takes his revenge killing said mentor and best friend, nearly kills his own son, gets eventually killed by said son. Said son goes on to become Jedi master, has one of his apprentices turn against him and has to hide out from the newly risen empire/First Order. Meanwhile, his sister (Vader's daughter) marries a war hero and ex-smuggler, whose son then turns out to be another one who turns to the dark side and so hates his father! Hell, you wouldn't want to be part of that family, would you? The power and the fame and the chicks - it just ain't worth it.

Cliches do however abound in this movie. Now the Tarkin-style underboss goes through an almost apoplectic fit as spittle flies from his mouth, declaiming the end of the Republic and the rise of the Reich sorry First Order, while behind him are - oh look! - banners of red and black. And did those stormtroopers just give a Nazi salute? I mean, come on! Originality is not Mr. Abrams' strong suit, is it? Surely this is not a fucking third Death Star? Oh it couldn't be, could it? It is: bigger, badder and with a new name, but the Death Star Mark III basically. What is it with the empire and weapons of planetary destruction? Didn't they learn their lesson the first two times? So now the Rebel Alliance has become the Resistance. Again with the Nazi links, but I guess rebellion doesn't make a lot of sense when basically it's the First Order/Empire who are now essentially the rebels. How the hell did all this happen in thirty short years, again I have to ask, sounding like Yoda I am?

And another question: what would induce Luke Skywalker to go off without his lightsaber? And as a follow-up question to that, how is it possible for someone with no Jedi training at all to use one? Yet Finn is wielding Luke's favourite weapon, well, not quite as if he was born to it, in fact he's quite clumsy with it, but should he be able to use it at all? It's good to see X-Wings again though, will admit that. And while we're on the subject of nostalgia - this movie being built on it - Solo looks well for his age and they don't have him jumping around as if he were twenty or thirty years old.

Speaking of not cavorting around like a kid, Leia has changed, and not for the better. Mind you, she's older now - we all are - and now she's a general. Good to see C3PO as well and R2, even if he is in a sort of robotic depression, missing Luke, and oh look! Edgar Allan Poe sorry Poe Dameron isn't dead after all. Nice. And Rey though not a Jedi has the Force in her. Hmm. Here comes Han to the rescue again, though to be fair the main heroes here are a black guy and a woman, so yay twenty-first century equality! Even if the de facto leader is still an old white guy. Hey, it's progress, right?

Oh well fuck me! Han Solo is dead! Didn't expect that, not so soon. Never trust a scion of the Vader family. Okay Rey has to be Luke Skywalker's daughter. It just doesn't make sense otherwise. Why would the Force be strong with her? Why would she have got those visions of Luke when she touched the lightsaber? And why would she be able, now, to will the weapon into her hand, and be able to use it to defeat Vader II? So now Rey is the new Han Solo, and R2 comes out of his sulk so they can find Luke, which is the final scene as we finally meet our favourite galactic hero right at the end, and he's in Ireland!

That was so much better than I had expected, and to be completely fair, Abrams/Disney did not do the hatchet job I had feared they would. I could have done with a bit more originality, as I noted at length above, but even so, some major milestones, and given that this is essentially Disney, it was a lot more mature than I expected. I mean, Han Solo dying? I guess Disney must have grown up too. A pity Abrams had to rely on yet another attack on the Death Star as the centrepiece for the climax - would have been nice to have had, I don't know, an underwater or underground weapon, or something using dimensional travel. Something, other than a bigger battlestation. But there it is. Overall, a massive surprise and not at all the disappointment I had been dreading. Looking forward to the second one now.

But before that...

[Trollheart]

Interregnum V: An Even Longer Time Ago,
But Just As Far Away: How it All Began


Title: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Year: 2016
Format: Movie
Broadcast Chronology: After The Force Awakens
Universe Chronology: Set one week (!) before A New Hope
Basic premise: A prequel to the first movie, showing how the plans for the Death Star were obtained, and at what cost
Starring: Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso, Diego Luna as Cassian Andor, Ben Mendelsohn as Orson Krennic, Donnie Yen as Chirrut Inwe, Mads Mikkelson as Galen Erso, Alan Tudyk as K2SO, Riz Ahmen as Bohdi Rook, Jiang Wen as Baze Malbus, Forest Whittaker as Saw Gerrera, Jimmy Smits as Bail Organa, Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Jimmy Vee as R2D2, James Earl Jones as Darth Vader (voice)
Directed by: Gareth Edwards
General reaction: Positive
Personal reaction: Positive
Rating: 10/10

This then would be the first of the Star Wars movies outside of any trilogy, which is to say, it's not episode this or that, it's not written nor directed by Lucas, and it doesn't, so far as I can see, feature any of the main characters. Oh wait: the droids. And Vader. But it mostly focuses on a shall we say peripheral character, and seems to be a story set in the universe of Star Wars rather than part of the actual saga. It doesn't have the scrolling intro, it doesn't even have the logo or the fanfare. So how official, if at all, is it? Okay it seems quite official, as it literally leads up to the first movie and is produced by Disney and Lucasfilm, just made to look different to the official trilogy movies on purpose, not because it's like a pirate or unauthorised movie or anything.

That's odd: those stormtroopers are in black. Never saw them wear anything but white before, even in the snow of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. Oh right ! I get it now. This is the story of how the plans for the Death Star were stolen and passed to the rebels in the first movie. Hey this is going to be good. Probably. It's said to have been one of the most expensive movies of all time, made for over 200 million and grossing a billion. That's impressive. Not quite sure where all that money went, at the moment, but I guess we'll see. Good to see old Yavin 4 again, where the rebels are stationed, waiting their chance to strike a blow at the heart of the empire. I see yer man is doing his thing with that meter gun thing again. What is he doing? Checking the speed of the ships?

Good also to see Threepio again. See what I did there? No? Sod ya then. I also like the idea of having Tarkin back, though it's the first time I've seen what is basically a hologram of a dead guy playing a part. Particularly creepy, both given that Tarkin was the bad guy and that the late Peter Cushing so often played Dracula. Undead or what? Using the two aliens who accosted Luke in the cantina in A New Hope, and having the one who can talk use the same line is totally inspired. Interesting to see the power of the Death Star up close, at its target, and also interesting that it isn't just one blinding flash of light and all is gone; it's a gradual, torturous tearing apart of the moon as it comes apart, like an earthquake in slow motion.

I love the idea of the weakness in the Death Star being a deliberate one; it always seemed odd to me that such a failure was not picked up when there must have been countless separate checks as the station was built, and very unlikely it would be missed by all the inspectors. The sense of divided loyalty here is good: Galen being forced to work on a project he hates, for the people who killed his wife and separated him from his daughter, taking his revenge by building a back door trap into the station. So cool to see Darth Vader back again, back and bad as ever. I love that they even got the phrase "I've got  a bad feeling about this" in.

And then everything links up perfectly to segue into the opening of A New Hope, with the plans being passed to a young Leia as the shuttle makes its escape and just before she entrusts the plans to R2D2. It's fitting that Jyn and Cassian die; it would have been unbelievable for them to have been rescued or found some way out at the last moment, and their deaths for the cause works perfectly, underlining how important it is the plans not fall back into the hands of the empire. Superb, I have to say. Not a single complaint. Almost flawless and one of the top three Star Wars movies for me, including the original trilogy even. A masterpiece.

[Trollheart]

II: You and Whose Army:
That's Not the Force! This is the Force!

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi


Title: The Last Jedi
Year: 2017
Format: Movie
Broadcast Chronology: After Rogue One
Universe Chronology: Set directly after The Force Awakens
Basic premise: Rey tries to convince Luke to help while the rebels leg it again
Starring:  Mark Hammill as Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, Anthony Daniels as C3PO, Kenny Baker as R2D2, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, Adam Driver as Kylo Ren, Daisy Ridley as Rey, John Boyega as Finn, Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, Lupita Nyong'o as Maz Kanata, Andy Serkis as Supreme Leader Snoke, Domhnall Gleason as General Hux, Gwendoline Christie as Captain Phasma, Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico, Laura Dern as Vice-Admiral Amilyn Holdo, Benicio del Toro as DJ
Directed by:  Rian Johnson
General reaction: Positive
Personal reaction: Somewhat positive but somewhat negative
Rating: 7/10

First off, I would say deja vu again. It seems to me totally unbelievable that the empire (by any other name) is in power again after being roundly defeated only thirty years ago. Kind of makes you wonder why they bothered blowing up the Death Star. Three times. Now, as per usual, the Rebellion/Alliance/Resistance/Insert opposing forces of good here is on the run again, and this time the empire sorry First Order have a ship that makes star destroyers look like little toys. They call it the dreadnought. It's big. I mean, you may think it's a long way to the shops but that's just peanuts etc. Even so, it goes down pretty quickly and perhaps disappointingly, something like the Death Star blowing up in the first few minutes of the film. I get the idea, but in some ways it was a little too easy. Though in fairness they lost a lot of ships. Still.

It's good to see Luke didn't just rush off with Rey; he's the classic "I'm retired and I'm not going back" figure, but of course we know he will be enticed back. Some of this no doubt has to do with learning of the death of his friend Han Solo (though you would wonder why he didn't perceive that through the Force?) and the rather insistent persuasion of Chewbacca. Skellig Michael looks great. How cool that it's the original Jedi temple, and it's in Ireland? So to speak. Poor old Kylo Ren is in the doghouse with the emperor sorry Lord Smoke I mean Snake no sorry I mean Snoke. Well, he was beaten by a girl! And not even a Jedi girl at that. He must feel so humiliated.

Hold on one parsec sorry second: did they just kill Leia off? This is getting intense. Okay not dead but how did she survive in space? You only have seconds before you die and that was, well, more than seconds. I love how Luke is convinced by of all things R2D2, who shows him the original recording that brought him into the fight in the first place, and set him on a collision course with both his father and his, at the time unknown to him, sister. Is there anything that little barrel on wheels can't do? The stampede by the big animal things through the casino and the richo town is pretty cool, but now it's gone all cerebral and existential, and I'm getting both bored and confused by the Luke/Rey part. I hope this gets explained: multiple images reflecting forever to a cave of ice which reflects her parents who are... herself? Then communing with Kylo Ren and, um, not sure what's going on here.

Hmm. I did not expect the Falcon to depart without Luke. Oh look! Yoda still can't keep his muppet face out of a movie, even if he's dead. Yer wan the Vice Admiral took her time deciding to be a hero/martyr to save her rebels didn't she? Should I go now? Nah, let's see if they shoot another of my comrades out of the stars. Oh there he goes. Now? Well, maybe but I'm not sure... I mean, it was a grand gesture but did she have to wait till half of them were gone before she made up her fucking mind? And what is with this red smoke coming out of, well, just about everything on this new temporary base the rebels - or what's left of them - have again taken refuge on?

Is it just me, or is this BB8 robot able to do far too much? R2 and Threepio helped, sure, but they never piloted a walker or shot at anyone. And now that Snoke is dead, who's going to be the big bad for the third movie? Oh right: Ben Solo aka Kylo Ren aka Little Darth Vader. Right. Is Luke out of it then? Is he not coming to the rescue at the last - oh no. It's the Falcon, but he's not on board. You know, just there when Ren shouted I heard the voice of Harrison Ford. I wonder if that was deliberate, to show he's his father's son but it only comes out when he's angry? Good touch if so. Maybe it's just me.

Oh well I thought Finn was going to sacrifice himself there and blow up the big cannon. Well, he was intending to but then Rose stopped him, dying herself in the attempt. Look, it's all very well to say they'll win by saving the things they love but meanwhile she's dead and the big cannon is battering down the cave door. Perhaps not so well thought through after all? And where are all the rebel allies? Ungrateful bastards and pussies. Where's Luke? Surely Luke will save the day? Can it be that dark? Disney? Surely not.

No. Here he comes. No army with him though, but it's nice to see him and Leia back together after all this time, as he says, at the end. Now that was cool. Every gun they had blasted him and yet there he stands, and I love the contemptuous flick off the shoulder as if to say "that all ya got?" A final face-off then with the grandson of Darth Vader. Hey, I just realised Ren's lightsaber, unlike others, especially Luke's, has a hilt like a real sword. Oh now that is good! It's a Force projection. Luke's not really there. I think it's taken all his strength though and he's dying now. Time to pass the torch to the next generation.

Overall, not as good as the first movie. Ending was good and a fitting passing for Luke Skywalker, but I'm not quite sure why they have to be so dark all the time. I mean, most of the rebel alliance wiped out, nobody comes to their rescue, people dying left right and occasionally centre too? Not much of the spirit of the originals here. Can't honestly say I enjoyed that. It wasn't terrible but I would place it low enough on the scale. Not Phantom Menace low, but close. Hopefully the third, and final (so far) one will be better.

Ah, but first, a small detour to the, um, past. Like, before everything kicked off.