Star Wars, -30-

[calimac]

So some time thirty years ago this month, sturgeonslawyer and I and our friend Jo piled into her car, because she had one, and drove from our college down to the biig theatre (the one that features in Michaela Roessner's Vanishing Point, then unwritten) to see the new skiffy film.

And we watched it, and we came back out, and someone asked me, "So what did you think?" and I replied, "Not bad." That has remained my settled opinion. That it changed the cultural environment of SF film is beyond question. But the film itself? Not bad. A rousing cliched adventure story which at least was not boring, which is more than I can say for some of its successors, both in the series (Phantom Menace) and out (Raiders of the Lost Ark).

The series jumped the shark for me at the end of the second film, when Vader tells Luke "I am your father." I didn't believe it then, and I believe it even less now. It's a fudged-in retcon, I'm sure of it. Ghosti-Wan's abashed explanation in the third film, as to why he "lied" in the first one about Vader having killed Luke's father, is strained beyond credibility.

Also beyond credibility in the third film is the equally obviously retconned scene where Luke and Leia turn out to be siblings. We were watching that on first run - none of us knew what was going to happen - when Luke made the announcement to Leia. At that moment, liveavatar, sitting next to me, turned to me and said, "Somehow, I always knew." Followed immediately by Leia saying to Luke, "Somehow, I always knew."

Incidentally, that turns one scene in the second film, where Leia kisses Luke on the mouth to spite Han, into inc-st. LJ in its quest for purity should delete all Star Wars fans.

About the prequels, the less said the better. I once read a story in which the Beatles got back together for a reunion tour, and they were awful. Who'd have imagined, if something equivalent to that actually happened, how awful it really would be?

So if Star Wars isn't the greatest SF film of all time - and it has aged rather badly - what is? grrm says Forbidden Planet. I wouldn't. It's got a solid plot - not surprising since it's by William Shakespeare - but the actual writing is poor. And the acting! Except for Walter Pidgeon, who's fairly good as always, everybody in it is lifeless at best.

My list of the three greatest SF films has:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey - a perfectly paced, awesome epic, beautiful to watch, and the special effects still hold up. Deep and complex enough to set the viewer thinking, but not too much so to understand.
2. The Man in the White Suit - a 1950 Ealing comedy about a meek scientist, played by Alec Guinness, who invents an indestructible fabric. The story is mostly about the social effects of the invention, which makes this one of the few SF films that could have been a leading story in the top-ranked SF magazines of its own day, instead of reflecting the SF of 30 or 40 years earlier.
3. Dark Star - one of the Gemini astronauts described the spacecraft as "an orbiting men's room." This is perhaps the only SF film to honestly depict that side of space travel. And funny, funny, and rather wistful too.

I made this list some years ago, and there have been good SF films since then, notably A Scanner Darkly last year, but I'll stand by this.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, you mistake me. It is easy enough to write SF about technological creations that already exist. But what makes The Man in the White Suit SF is not the fact that it's about the social effects of an invention. What makes The Man in the White Suit SF is that the invention is science-fictional. What makes the film good SF is that it's about the social effects of the (science-fictional) invention. A film about the current social effects of an existing invention is not SF. A film which extrapolates new effects of existing inventions is SF again, because it extrapolates. Which is why the film about imaginary inventions is SF - because it extrapolates.

That's also why the movies about asteroids are SF. They employ existing technology against something they've never been used on. They're about something newly imagined. They extrapolate.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

They employ existing technology against something they've never been used on. They're about something newly imagined.

Old technology can be newly imagined. This is why Jason and the Argonauts is sf (well, fantasy), because it takes the legends and goes off in new directions. I disagree with much of your premise: I often consider the best sf novel ever is Delany's Tales of Neveryon. On the surface, it's fantasy. But he's exploring the impact of two new technologies on the culture: Money and writing. He told a story that highlighted how technology changed their life.

Jules Verne didn't write science fiction -- the term hadn't been invented -- but he took recent technology (submarines, the "discovery" of oxygen) and took them on flights of fancy.

Singin' In The Rain takes a new technology and explores several completely new (at the time) professions: Vocal coaches, substitute singers, sound recordists. The impact that sound made on the actors (and Hoilywood in general) is much better done than the impact of new clothing materials is in The Man in the White Suit. Old timers still had to "Make 'Em Laugh" but if your voice wasn't up to it, then actors would be out of a job. In Real Life (tm), this was a Big Deal, with many stars fading. Needing someone to sing your songs was a mark of shame, and stars often fought a "songs by" credit in the movie.

A non-sf plot would have the star break a leg right before Opening Day, and the understudy leaps in so A Star Is Born. SitR extrapolates a star who hasn't changed but time has moved on. How to make the singer the star in this new environment? They open the curtain during a live performance. To my knowledge, this was never actually done and is an extrapolation of the technologies involved.

It's also, to my knowledge, the first song about vocal coaches. "Moses Supposes His Toeses To Be Roses".

While the events in the movie are circa 1927, even in 1952 there were people who could remember a time when sound recording didn't exist at all, and certainly not in theaters. The telephone was invented in 1876, the phonograph arrived in the late 1800's, the first commercial radio stations were broadcasting in 1921 but not many of them. Sound recording, far more than photography, wasn't merely an advance, it was something completely different and unexpected. The melding of sound and motion pictures was a major synergistic change to the world.

Singin' In The Rain is deliberately musical comedy and accidentally science fiction, but is sf nonetheless.

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Old technology can be newly imagined.

Right. That's exactly what I was just saying.

Of course Jules Verne wrote science fiction. That a thing didn't yet have the name doesn't mean it's not that thing. Dionaurs lived in North America before it was called North America. People had cancer and diabetes long before anyone even knew what they were, let alone named them.

But it has to be newly imagined. Singing in the Rain is, as you point out, historical. It's about the things that did happen. That the specific events are fictional doesn't make it SF. In the film Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis drives a car. A car is a technological invention. In real life, C.S. Lewis didn't know how to drive. That doesn't make Shadowlands science fiction.