Star Wars on Trial (58 page)

Note that I am not talking about the obvious problems with the films-the seagoing physics in an interstellar environment; the acting generally so wooden that IMAX viewers can see the termites running out the actors' ears; an economy that contains faster-than-light travel, strong Al and chattel slaves but, apparently, no news mediaor even how the lightsaber amputations pile up so awkwardly that they go from high drama to creepy fetish to the implied goal of the saber martial art and then back into creepy fetish again. I don't even mean dialogue like "I've been waiting for this moment a loooong tiiiiime, my leeeeetle greeeeeen frrriiiiiend." I'm just talking plot.

Standing alone, Episode IV is a fairly mediocre movie. Young guy makes friends, makes good and doesn't quite get the girl, but that's okay, because there's a sequel in the offing. In Episode V, things get wonky. Why didn't Obi-Wan Kenobi tell Luke that Darth Vader was Luke's father? Clearly, Vader could have told Luke at any time-the guy's pretty much the Vice President of the Empire, isn't he?-so Obi-Wan has no reason to believe that Luke could be kept from the truth. If Vader wanted to blow Luke's mind, he could have had the words "Luke, I am your father, xoxo, DV" burnt into the side of some nearby mountains with the laser cannons of his Star Destroyer at any time. Or how about when Vader confronts Leia? No mention of paternity, or the Force, which is supposed to be strong in her as well. Finally, why couldn't Obi-Wan tell Luke that Leia is his sister for that matter-again, there's no reason to hide any of this.

Of course, in Episode V, Vader declares that he wants to use Luke as a weapon against the Emperor. Given that, it almost makes sense that Vader would wait for some dramatic moment to tell Luke the truth-he had to keep his secret son/secret weapon quiet so that the Emperor would not find out. Except of course that Emperor Palpatine knows that Anakin impregnated Amidala, as we see in Episode III. Thus, a potentially intriguing plot point, one that would also explain why Kenobi never even bothered to alter Luke's surname or place him somewhere other than Anakin's home planet (and the same damn neighborhood!), can be flushed down the toilet.

But wait! we hear millions of fanboys cry, Anakin thought he killed Amidala, so how would they know about Luke and Leia? That's almost a good point, except that, between their having Sith powers and political pull on the one hand, and the fact that Luke Skywalker is staying with mutual relatives in the old 'hood and living under his true surname on the other, it should be trivially easy for Vader, or the Emperor for that matter, to find out about young Luke and kill him in his cradle. Or whenever they felt like it. Didn't Luke sense Vader's power and Han Solo's plight from across interstellar space after a few days of hanging out with Yoda and getting Force training in Episode V? How hard could it be?

The problem, simply, is that George Lucas and crew can't handle prequels. For example: In Episode IV, Luke destroys the Death Star by piloting a fighter into the heart of the giant construct. But back in Episode I, young Anakin Skywalker disables the Trade Federation Droid Control Ship in virtually the same way. Why then, wouldn't Vader or, you know, somebody fix the rather obvious design flaw in the Death Star? No reason at all; it's simply that Episode IV came first and the scene in Episode I serves no purpose but to evoke the climax of Episode IV

Anakin, as a child, builds C-3PO and meets R2-D2. Obi-Wan meets both droids. At the end of Episode III, the droids have their memories wiped. But Obi-Wan doesn't (nor, presumably, could he). In Episode IV, he still fails to recognize the droids, and has no reason to simply be pretending not to recognize them. Again, all that happened is that IV came out first, then Episodes I through III premiered decades later.

For that matter, how come Owen doesn't remember C-3PO and R2-D2 after meeting the droids in Episode II? If he did remember and didn't want to blow any cover he might have, why purchase C3PO?

Leia, through Episodes IV-VI, is ignorant of her heritage. This, despite the fact that she is a public figure. Did nobody in the Empire ask the Organas from where they adopted this girl? Biochemical technology is such that in Episode I Qui-Gon can analyze a blood sample and send it over Magic Radio Waves to Obi-Wan on the Queen's ship, where Obi-Wan can check the blood for midichlorians. Leia is certainly awash in those sparkly little Force germs, germs that apparently can be e-mailed to people. That she's down with the Force should be the third or fourth most obvious thing in the universe. R2D2's butt-rocket came in handy in Episodes II and III and could have also come in handy any number of times in Episodes IV through VI. If only someone had thought of the butt-rocket twenty years ago! Uh, I mean twenty years from now! No, wait....

Even acknowledging that a shift from Republic to Empire could have retarded technological progress, or even caused a reversion, why no mention of midichlorians, no glimpses of all the goofy robots and vehicles exclusive to Episodes I-III, no discussion of how the Empire came to be? They also went from tri-wings in Episode III to X-wings in Episode IV That's the rough equivalent of waking up tomorrow and discovering that every four-tined fork in the United States has been replaced with a three-tined fork.

This was discussed above, but needs to be brought up again to examine from another angle. Why did Obi-Wan take Luke to Tatooine and send him to live with the Skywalkers? It makes no sense at all. As explained above, it couldn't have been part of a masterstroke to give Vader a weapon against the Emperor, which would have had the useful side effect of rehabilitating Vader and righting the error ObiWan made years ago. At the same time, Luke on Tatooine and the "Ben" Kenobi "disguise" makes no sense as a trap for Vader. Tatooine is too obvious a duck blind for Obi-Wan to snipe at Vader with Luke as a lure. Unfortunately for viewers interested in stories that make sense, there is no third alternative.

Admiral Motti, the scrub Force-choked to death in Episode IV just to show the audience what a baddy Vader is, taunts Vader with the lines "Don't try and frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebel's hidden fort-guk blab duuuh." Too bad Motti looks a bit older than an adolescent in that scene. Clearly, the fellow had to be alive during the time of Episodes I-III, when the galaxy was lousy with Jedi (and their childlings!) doing magic tricks at every Senate session. It's hard to be an atheist when the Force was a near-ubiquitous part of life in the Republic.

A Short Sampling of Additional Plot Holes in the Star Wars Universe, Provided by Fans during Online Discussions, Since 1997...

Submitted to the Court by David Brin

From Episode l: The Phantom Menace

• Palpatine is concerned about being hunted down by the Jedi, right? Yet he has the Trade Federation persecute Naboo, drawing attention to his home planet! Anyway, why does he send Darth Maul to kill Amidala, when Qui-Gon's bringing her to the Senate to do exactly what he wants her to do? (Wouldn't he send a yacht to fetch her, keeping Maul secret a while longer?)

• If the Queen is so influential that she can give one speech and topple the Chancellor of the galaxy, why was she unable to get help from these political allies earlier? Not even a news crew, to broadcast atrocities on Naboo? No big planets who are sick of the Trade Federation, hankering to pounce on its mistake? Everybody's a wimp except for two Jedi and some funky amphibian rastafarians? Boy, that sure was a peaceful Republic!

• What's to keep the shamed, defeated Trade Federation guys from later screaming "It was Palpatine! He made us doo eet!" The fact that the Sith Lord's eyes were in shadow? They really know nothing about a guy they've sworn fealty to and staked everything on? Some savvy traders!

From Episode II: Attack of the Clones

• Is there anyone in this universe who could explain the politics of the Republic, what the Separatists are about, or why everybody acts like they have an IQ of maybe four?

• Is anyone else amazed that the Jedi are sent into a death trap at the very moment that Yoda happens to collect a new clone army?

From Episode Ill: Revenge of the Sith

• How did Obi-Wan get Anakin's lightsaber to give to Luke in A New Hope? You can plainly see, when they were fighting on the volcano, both lightsabers were blue. But when Obi-Wan gives Luke "your father's old light saber"- it's green! (This may seem a nitpick, but it's one that shows how little they care about "Campbellian" myth-telling. Dig it. Like in The Lord of the Rings, the ancestral sword is an important "talisman" carrying anointed power between hero generations!) In Revenge of the Sith, I expected a tear-jerking scene when the dying Anakin tells his former master, "Please... give this...to my son...." But instead? The green sword turns out to be just another of Obi-Wan's many lies.

From Episode IV A New Hope-a biggie

• Okay, Vader questions Leia by hand, with truth drugs, yet never detects her Force and that she's his daughter. Or maybe he pretends not to? Nor to recognize his droids? It all seems so suspicious... almost as if something's going on that we're never told. Like his role in letting the droids with the plans escape the Senate ship, then helping the kids escape the Death Star, then the contrived theater of his "fight" with Obi-Wan, then doing everything possible to help Luke get his shot at the Death Star's reactor.... All of these could have been foreshadowers to something clever. But instead, they were left as simply glaring holes.

These examples are just the tip of the veritable iceberg. I'm sure there are a zillion fan sites out there with many more examples of failures of continuity, storytelling logic and narrative drive. Despite the endless novels and action figures and cartoons and comic books and role-playing games and kiddie books and all the other ancillary stuff, the Star Wars movies are ultimately fairly easy to avoid if you put your mind to it. However, while the movies themselves can be avoided, they cannot be ignored, because Star Wars ruined American cinema.

The first real modern blockbuster was jaws, but jaws was a selflimiting blockbuster. There was a limited amount of ancillary licensing that could be done with a great white shark, as sharks are natural creatures and in the public domain. Spielberg doesn't make any money from the Discovery Channel's endless Shark Weeks, and no eightyear-old wants a Roy Scheider action figure. Star Wars, on the other hand, created endless intellectual properties, all ripe for the licensing, and it made its billions without a lick of narrative sense.

Prior to Star Wars, the 1970s were shaping up to be a golden age for American cinematic storytelling. Think of The Godfather, Five Easy Pieces, Taxi Driver, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Don't Look Now ... the list goes on. Even post-Episode IV, the 1970s squeezed out Midnight Express, Tess and Kramer vs. Kramer, but the good, character-and-narrative-driven movie was fading fast. By the time Episode V was rolled out, Hollywood had forgotten about storytelling. The age of the blockbuster was here, and more than twenty years later, discerning viewers are still suffering for it. The serious flicks are all but gone; they're indie movies destined for the art house circuit, or foreign fare. And sci-fi? Ugh, sci-fi....

There have been sci-fi movies since the Edison version of Frankenstein, of course, and most of them contained B-level actors, Blevel story lines and B-level effects. George Lucas, who is little more than Roger Corman with a billion-dollar bank account and no passion for the cinema form, turned the B-movie into every studio's Alist. Since the new prized demographic was the teenager, there was hardly any need to spend any effort on scripts. Money? Sure. Effort? Forget about it.

So today, virtually any science fiction or fantasy film you see will make no sense. Occasionally they'll be funny, like Ghostbusters, and sometimes just so gonzo that they have to be appreciated on their own terms, like Big Trouble in Little China, but for the most part, the genre movie is nothing more than special effects pornography, with dialogue and characters there only to give the (formerly) optical effects and (currently) CGI a workout. Thus, nonsense like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a movie that couldn't be more insulting to the viewer's intelligence if "Insult the viewer's intelligence at every turn" had been some kind of corporate mission statement.

How about the Batman films, the Matrix movies, or Spider-Man? All of those films are essentially empty experiences, the rough equivalent of watching someone else play a video game. And even the energy and ideas that fuel video games can't be generated for long. Batman Returns was essentially plotless-quick, tell me what the point of any of the actions of Christopher Walken's character wasand Batman Forever and Batman and Robin were utterly unwatchable. Batman Begins was slightly more intelligent than the kiddie flicks of the 1990s, but made up for it by being simply boring.

The Matrix, like Star Wars before it, attempted to go middlebrow via an appeal to fortune-cookie mysticism, but Reloaded and Revolutions boiled all that gunk away to make room for more cliched kungfu fights, war-movie blocking and CGI explosions. The Spider-Man films, buoyed by Tobey Maguire's charm, are bearable, but already cookie-cutter. Nerd doubts himself, fights man in green, collects a smooch, goes home.

And these are the truly blockbuster sci-fi flicks. What about the second tier? The Blade franchise, Van Helsing, The Brothers Grimm, Daredevil, Minority Report-if any of these films were written up as a short story and submitted to your five-cent-a-word "professional" science fiction magazine, they'd get a form rejection letter, guaranteed, and regardless of their provenances as well-regarded Marvel Comics, Philip K. Dick stories or whatever. Good sci-fi films, like Dark City and Donnie Darko (or maybe I just have a "dark" fetish?) are essentially accidental creations. Mistakes.