Word: odyssey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Half the fun of Star Wars comes from taking in all those special effects. Although the technology never approaches the rarefied levels of visual fireworks achieved in 2001: A Space Odyssey, special photographic effects supervisor John Dykstra has pieced together an impressive collection of robots, futuristic weaponry and space age interior sets that will keep the eye titillated while the intellectual faculties take five. The spellbinding dogfight and final assault on the Empire's central nervous system that wind up Star Wars are particularly noteworthy for the way that Lucas so easily integrates the gimmickry into the climax...
...jumps a small, ectoplasmic BEM (as sci-fi fans call bug-eyed monsters) and proceeds to devour him. (Losing makes wookies so dyspeptic that Artoo is sagely counseled to let Chewjbacca win.) All science fiction movies these days are measured against Stanley Kubrick's monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But even by that standard, Star Wars is tops. To work out the photographic special effects, Lucas hired John Dykstra, an expert in the field. For his space scenes, Kubrick had used what is called composite opticals: he would put one -part of a scene-a spaceship...
...that Charles Lindbergh said he communed with ghosts and guardian spirits, is dense now with 747s, the flying auditoriums that are just beginning their summer trade. Passengers doze over their drinks, eat flash-frozen steaks, watch movies through a passage as passive as Muzak. The New York-to-Paris odyssey that took Lindbergh 33½ hours would be a 3½-hour streak for the Concorde...
Myth is not dead. It has just taken a job in the movies. Hitchcock is our Homer, Gone With the Wind is our Iliad, and, taken together, a hundred cowboy movies make up the Odyssey of the Late Show. Hollywood's images have become the myths of the 20th century, and somewhere in the depths of our unconscious are mingled words and pictures from the real and the reel: Abraham Lincoln and Raymond Massey, George Patton and George C. Scott, Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand...
...wife, dying of cancer, lifting up her bony hand to him in pain and entreaty, of Jed himself holding a gun to the head of a German officer sneering "Heil Hitler!" The lingering force of these images is linked to the mode of narration; Jed tells his story--an odyssey which takes him from Dugton, Alabamaa to academic renown and personal tragedy back to Dugton again--by summoning up a series of scenes from his past. The novel, like his entire life, represents an attempt to come to terms with his roots, to discover in the sturdy consistency...