Overall Rating
  Awesome: 66.78%
Worth A Look: 14.84%
Average: 5.3%
Pretty Bad: 4.59%
Total Crap: 8.48%
5 reviews, 253 user ratings
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| Star Wars |
by MP Bartley
"That's right - Only 4 Stars."
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If people ever ask me what I believe to be the most over-rated film of all time, I reply instantly "Star Wars". Then after ascertaining that I do indeed mean 'A New Hope' and not 'The Phantom Menace', they usually say, "but...how can you hate Star Wars?!", to which I reply "I don't hate it. It's just massively over-rated". And it is, admit it. It's superbly entertaining and funny for the most part, but drags and has more than a few flaws.It's better than good, it's great in fact, but worthy of universal admiration? I don't think so.My first criticism is usually "take away the character of Han Solo and the attack on the Death Star and what have you got?" Granted you could take any great, universally lauded film, and take away one of its major set-pieces and most memorable characters and it'd be very flawed. But it wouldn't look as half as ordinary as 'Star Wars' would.
For a hero, Mark Hamill is criminally bland and dull, with Carrie Fisher not far behind him in the cardboard stakes (and to the fanboys who lust after her in the gold bikini -- am I the only one who thinks she looks like a man?). The God-like Alec Guinness meanwhile, looks faintly embarassed by the whole thing. Remember him for 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' or 'Bridge on the River Kwai' -- not this. And should we all own up to the fact that C-3PO and R2-D2 were always annoying?
But one person stands head and shoulders over the rest -- and that's the Ford himself. He gives a hugely entertaining, cynical performance that sparkles amongst the rest of the dullards here. His joshing of the 'force' is a welcome antidote to the po-faced seriousness everyone else gives it (and who really wanted to be a Jedi anyway? A boring, sexless lot). The scene where he's desperately trying to fob a stormtrooper over the intercom before blasting it with the legendary kiss-off "Nah, boring conversation anyway", is the stuff of legend. Every minute he's on screen is magic, every minute he's not...less than magic.
And the second reason 'Star Wars' gets a fat four stars despite all the criticism I give it -- the final attack on the Death Star. Hands down, one of the greatest action scenes committed to film. The little lurch the camera gives when it dips into the trench is genius and it's a five-star piece of adrenaline all the way. Despite the fact you barely know any of the pilots, you chew away at your fingernails willing them to make it out only to be gutted when most don't (although I couldn't have given a stuff if Luke bought it. He's really that dull), and who doesn't get a lump in their throat at Han's last-minute rescue. Brilliant stuff, edited superbly.
It's a shame that the other action sequences lack the same invention. The lightsabre duels are really lame, looking back, and the rescue of Leia on the Death Star just resorts to running around really similiar looking corridors. Vader's a great villain, but too many patches stretch past without him.
And boy, does 'Star Wars' take an age to get going. After an initially jaw-dropping opening in space, it resorts to a really dull, dusty planet full of really dull, dusty people. For ages. And unlike 'Lord of the Rings', say, it doesn't even have any decent backdrops or scenery to entertain the eye.
And doesn't the whole icky Luke/Leia incest thing disprove the thought that Lucas had all the sequels and prequels always in mind? Or was it a case of "It made shit-loads of cash! Brilliant, I'll run some sequels off!"
"But you had to be there for it to be awesome" is another argument I have thrown at me when I deride it. Not at all, any film that would even considered to be one of the greatest ever made stands alone regardless of how new it was at the time. Great films don't date and 'Star Wars' sadly has. If you have to watch a film at a particular time for it to be great, then deep down you know it's not all that great, is it?After all the criticism I've dished out, it may be surprising to see a four-star rating beside it. But as I said, Han Solo is fantastic, Vader is a great villain and the final attack is a thing of greatness indeed. But take them out and you would have a very ordinary thing. It's deeply flawed and for something so blindly and uncritically loved, I feel it as almost a responsibility to point them out.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=207&reviewer=293
originally posted: 05/13/04 02:38:39
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Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
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USA
25-May-1977 (PG)
DVD: 12-Sep-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
08-Dec-1977 (PG)
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