Word: starring
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Star Wars universe is not so far away anymore, and certainly not long ago. The new Star Wars movie takes place a few years ago, in the un-mysterious period that came before childhood. Many of us were not born when the first Star Wars movie came out and don't remember seeing any of them for the first time. Instead of behaving like a normal media product, the original movies function as a story from prehistoric childhood, like Sunday School or the songs that mother sang...
...many times that they have come to be treated as projections of a generation's still-fragile heritage, not as a trilogy of George Lucas movies. Since those movies came out, a generation of Americans have made them an almost-religious touchstone, and in the last decade the Star Wars franchise has generated a canon of Star Wars trivia, coming in the form of trashy novels and pretentious "technical manuals." This new movie, then, comes as a banal realization of rumors that have been circulating for 20 years...
...grow up to imbue it with as much meaning as our generation has found in the original movies. Some scenes have the potential to become psycho-emotional monuments in our cultural memory: just as Han Solo rocketed out of nowhere to send Darth Vader hurtling through empty space in Star Wars, so does Anakin Skywalker throw his racing pod into a breathless ascent and flame-out half-way through Episode...
...underwater metropolis at the start of the movie, one feels a tinge of wonder, but it is immediately muddled by over-done special effects. Often, the music is off (John Williams' score seems affixed, chopped up by Lucas' manic pace). And of course, one expects a lot from a Star Wars...
...Lucas obviously did not set out to make a smarter Star Wars. His characters troop along to a Jedi-like tripartite climax, one battle in space, another on the ground and a third between lightsabers. This is not a movie that shows 20 years of maturation; it is not innovative, it is not artistically brave; there are no rowdy droids rambling on to a techno beat, no wary characterization that plays to the audience that has grown up since Return of the Jedi...