Today marks the launch of yet another George Lucas Star Wars film, this time an animated feature called Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and I’m disappointed to say that most of the reviews I’ve seen, from both professional film critics and average Joes, report that the Star Wars dynasty has sunk yet another step. One such negative review comes from TJ who recounts the decline of the Star Wars brand over time. (Warning: Strong language and a minor spoiler. And I don’t buy into everything he writes, but then I haven’t see the latest movie yet.)
TJ points out what was so good about Star Wars: A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, compared to the other four (and now, five) movies in the saga. What was wrong with the Prequels, he posits, is that they were written for six-year-olds, as witnessed by the silly droid army which was given lines like “Roger, roger,” not to mention, Jar-Jar Binks, the most hated sci-fi character since Wesley Crusher strode the bridge of the Enterprise.
And what did Lucas did well in his movies? Battle scenes.
The good parts of the second-trilogy is quite simply the battle scenes. Lucas does them well. It’s why the Death Star invasion at the end of the 1977 movie was so good, why the Hoth battle and Luke-vs-Vader in Empire was so good, and why the best parts of ROTJ were the battle scenes.
In the second-trilogy, we get a multitude of light-saber battles, including Darth Maul, whose lightsaber battle with Qui Gon and Obi-Wan is by far the best part of The Phantom Menace, and why the Jedi battles are the best parts of the next two.
And yet, I think there’s something more that made Star Wars so good. Something that made that aforementioned lightsaber duel in The Phantom Menace so thrilling: John Williams’ score. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Star Wars without the rising crescendo. Go to the StarWars.com site and listen to it and tell me it doesn’t bring it all back. When I first saw Star Wars in 1977 as a 9-year-old boy, all I could articulate as we drove away from theater and I tried to process what I’d just experienced was the (inaccurate) statement: “I love classical music,” (by which I meant, orchestral music, of course. Cut me some slack; I was nine.)
It was the music that defined the sensory experience more than anything. What was the defining emotional moment in The Phantom Menace? That battle between Darth Maul and the Jedi, but it was Williams’ “Duel of the Fates” that got your heart pumping and brought all your senses to bear.
And if you think about it, John Williams’ music has probably done more to define the great cinematic experiences of the past forty years than any one individual. When you look at the the most popular and the highest-grossing movies in that time period, you consistently see one name attached to all of them: Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter.
When he wasn’t composing the scores, Williams was there as the unseen influence on the composers’ shoulder. You can hear echoes of Williams’ work in movies like The Lord of the Rings (James Horner Howard Shore), Titanic (James Horner), the Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on.
I wonder if, hundreds of years from now as historians look back, they will see this as the John Williams era as far as the performing arts go: movies and TV. Perhaps he and Steven Spielberg will be held up as the exemplars of the coming of age of the motion picture arts. I hope so.
But I also wish there was more appreciation of the man and his influence on the cinema today. I’m surprised I don’t see this discussed more often in fact.
Photo of John Williams used under Creative Commons license via Wikimedia. Poster art from StarWars.com.
