Word: obie
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Star Wars became an almost "academic" exercise in refashioning ancient myths for modern audiences (at the time--no surprise--he was reading a lot of Joseph Campbell). In this vein, Lucas' most memorable invention was his notion of the Force--"an energy field created by all living things," as Obi-Wan Kenobi puts it. "It's a distillation of a lot of mythological religious teachings," Lucas says. "Not that I'm promoting a particular idea or anything. I believe in God, and I guess that's reflected in the movie, but that's about as far as it goes...
...sleek retro-kitsch; even the opening logo has acquired the classic blockiness of a '56 DeSoto. One can find endearment in the lame badinage of C-3PO, in Carrie Fisher's bagel-like hairdo, in the whining and bickering of the lead characters, in the varying pronunciations of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the planet Alderaan. The invocation to "trust your feelings" seems a woozy echo of the '67 Summer of Love, not the '77 summer of Wars, but Alec Guinness carries himself with the majesty of a Jedi knight and an acting peer. The climactic dogfight, copied in a quillion...
...where I am so used to seeing "Star Wars." In a movie theater, some glaring errors do stand out. Bad dialogue abounds, particularly from the whiny mouth of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). Also, the film grows sluggish at times; I didn't remember it taking this long for Luke, Obi-Wan, and the droids to leave Tatooine. The special effects (those from the original version) range from the sublime to the ridiculous. The final scene in which the X-wing fighters speed through the trenches of the Death Star is so real it looks like it was filmed on location...
...convinced me that you don't have to make a choice between corporate work and work in the public interest, an issue I had been worrying about," said Obi Okwumabua, a first-year student at the law school...
...extra banter tends to drag things down. The parts of the script based in Tatooine and Alderaan are nifty because we have little or nothing to compare them to. The lengthening of the ride on the Milennium Falcon is gratuitous because we know exactly how it should sound. Obi Wan wouldn't have expounded at such length on the nature of Han's character, and the new condition of the ship. Ben Kenobi's charm was that he always said enough, but never too much. Writer Brian Daley has given him too much baggage dialogue...