“I don’t normally explain a rating. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine. “This is really a 3.5”. Great. In this case, an explanation is needed.
THE Star Wars is an adaptation of George Lucas’ original rough draft for Star Wars. When rating, it’s hard to say what’s horrible because of the source material and what’s horrible because it’s horrible. Benefit of the doubt, it’s a competent comic, but good god is the story all sorts of fucked up.
I don’t know what happened to the Star Wars screenplay between George Lucas writing it and the thing hitting the screen, but thank christ it happened. Because this thing was all sorts of flavors from Episodes 1-3, the episodes we don’t speak of.
Is it really that bad?
Yeah. The characters are confusing, there’s too goddamn many of them, and for some reason we have some real trade law nonsense and chrome is really important.
Some of my favorite bits:
+A male character punches a female character in the face because he needs to rescue her but she refuses to leave space college. Yep. That happens. That’s a hilarious old thing that I haven’t seen in some time. In what scenario is it preferable to knock a person unconscious and then just slump them in a car? That’s some crazy shit.
+A character is mistakenly worshiped as a god. Oh, wait. That happens in the third movie too. Okay, how about this-
+A guy dramatically rips open his clothes to reveal his robotic body. Twice.
Star Wars was the perfect movie to grow up with. The original trilogy, okay I know people have their problems with Return of the Jedi, but the original trilogy is so full of imagination and excitement, and you have to remember, before computer shit came along, it was impossible to make anything look even a little real. Except Star Wars. That shit looked real. And it’s easy to undervalue 6 hours of entertainment in the era before the internet, before Netflix. During the time when a video game lasted 6 hours because you played it 10 times in a row.
Fuck me, I don’t know who it was out there that saved my childhood from George Lucas, but I owe you hundreds of beers.”