How Star Wars Conquered the Universe is the book that conquered my attention span this past week (well really, the last three or four days), it's an insightful, illuminating, and just plain fun book about everyone's favorite space fantasy (well, those of us with good taste anyway), no matter how many times George Lucas has tried to screw it up. I kid, but really...the prequel trilogy is like a Litmus test for whether I really want to be friends with someone.
I think the sense of letdown that I and many of my ilk (i.e., long-term Star Wars fans) felt at the time of the first prequel (and which in no way was assuaged by the two follow-ups) is born in some ways of our own failure to see the original trilogy for what it was (a kid's movie). Anyone born between 1977 and 1983 who grew up with Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie, didn't know what to make of Anakin, Boring Obi-Wan, and Padme (really, "Padme?" What the hell, George...what the hell?), much less that freak Jar-Jar Binks. I remember when my friends and I left the theater way back in 1999, we tried to console ourselves that it was somehow better than we'd thought. It was cool, I guess, to see "that son of a bitch split in half" (as my cousin Brandon says some esteemed film critic behind him exclaiming when Darth Maul was sliced in two), but two and a half hours of Trade Federation and blockade talk does not a space epic make. I think it's why I responded far more favorably to the recent Star Trek reboot than I ever did to the original series of films: that one had action and whiz-bang special effects (and a pretty decent story, to boot).
And you know who directed that one? J.J. Abrams, who is behind the helm of the new planned Star Wars trilogy. In a time when Peter Jackson might as well call his Hobbit trilogy "The Quest for More Cash," Lucasfilm is now under the banner of the All-Mighty Mouse and being revisited in an attempt to...well, I don't know what (unless you count "nearly killing beloved American treasure Harrison Ford in a freak doorway accident" as motivation for revisiting the galaxy a long time ago and far, far away). I have the uneasy mixture of dread and "please god, don't let it suck" that a lot of my fellow fans surely must feel since 1999 (or 2002, or 2005). I'll probably go see the new Star Wars movies; I'd be a fool not to. But right now, I'm not sure how I'll feel about it.
The prequels have a reputation (justly in some cases, unjustly in others) of being awful. Just plain crap, really, and a lot about the prequel trilogy falls under that label. But for better or worse, Star Wars helped birth the recent trend of multi-movie epics with comic-book heroes or Hobbits from Middle Earth....and I don't mean the classic trilogy, either. As the book points out, the prequels made money; they were virtually critic-proof, and they proved that a story presented in multiple entries didn't need to worry about losing audiences (even if those audiences came to hate the very thing they were seeing). You wouldn't have Lord of the Rings without the prequels, nor would you have Twilight (if you know me, you know which of the two aforementioned properties I favor and which one makes my skin crawl). The prequel trilogy, shoddy and ineffectual as it was in furthering the story of Anakin Skywalker, did a lot for making studios aware of how profitable multi-part epics were.
I'm also less inclined, after reading the book, to think of George Lucas as the Evil Emperor. The book confirmed, for one thing, my theory that the Ewoks were the Viet-Cong (okay, maybe it wasn't my theory alone, but I'd like to think I was one of the first to see shades of Vietnam in the trilogy's depiction of a primitive rebellion standing up to a major technological enterprise). It also reminded me that, at heart, Lucas might never get around to making the small, independent films he set out to do, but he did start out wanting to make movies outside of the Hollywood system, and as much as Star Wars has helped to further that, it was never his intention. He was an artists first and foremost, looking to stay true to his vision. In the wake of Sony caving to North Korea, we need more artists like Lucas (even if they have the annoying habit of going back and adding digital effects that add nothing to the story).
I will always be a Star Wars nerd; it's just part of who I am, ladies. But I do think that some of the aspects of the "Expanded Universe" are just plain silly or not worth my time. I read the Timothy Zahn trilogy back in the day, but subsequent encounters with lesser Star Wars novels reminded me that the movies were great. The books, not so much. Star Wars fandom has certainly gained more cultural cache in recent years; it's okay to be a dork who wants to dress up as Boba Fett, I guess. And I celebrate that, I do. But I hope that J.J. Abrams doesn't screw it up. I really hope so. Because the last thing anyone wants is another Jar-Jar Binks roaming around doing stupid shit.
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