Star Wars: The Force Awakens

#197 at the time of writing.

I've warmed to the original Star Wars since I blogged about it - ok, I admit, it is a brilliant film. (Though I've cooled to the sequel.) But I've never been excited about Star Wars.

Until this film came along.

J. J. Abrams did it with Star Trek, and I believed he could do it again. Perhaps I got caught up in the hype, but I was really looking forward to watching this, and it exceeded my expectations. It successfully walked the tightrope between modern and nostalgic, while keeping up a great pace and sharp wit throughout. Yes, it's basically a remake, but it's fresh, and it effectively reboots the franchise in a direction that has captivated new generations - and me. Without a Jedi in sight.

In particular, Rey kicks ass in a way that I - and my daughter - would love to see more of on the big screen.

I love that relatively untested actors were used. It's a testament to the legend that Star Wars has built up for itself that John Boyega was so nervous and frightened at the prospect of not getting the role that he didn't tell his parents he'd been cast until after a cast photo was posted online by the official Star Wars Twitter page, and Daisy Ridley nearly had a panic attack during her first day on set when she feared her performance wasn't up to scratch.

George Lucas, thank you for letting go. Bring on the sequels.

Neat trivia: John Williams received his 50th Oscar nomination for scoring this film. Oh, and this is the third movie in history to reach the $2 billion mark after Avatar (2009) and Titanic (1997).

Alien

#42 at time of writing.

I watched Prometheus a couple of days ago, billed as a prequel to Ridley Scott's Alien, so I had to re-watch the film that started it all.

In Alien, the crew of a mining vessel are woken from stasis to find that rather than having returned home to Earth, they've been roused to investigate a mysterious distress signal emanating from a dead planet. They land and discover an alien spaceship with a long-dead captain, and a roomful of hibernating eggs. Unwittingly, they bring one of the eggs back with them. Bad move.

Much has been said about how nail-bitingly tense and sinister this film is. The twists are shocking, and H. R. Giger's notorious alien delivers the ultimate horror kick.

Prometheus was entertaining, but one wonders why (beyond cynical profiteering) filmmakers feel the need to detract from the artful implication of backstory by actually showing the backstory as a separate movie (I'm looking at you and your crummy prequels, George Lucas). Alien was breathtakingly original - 33 years later, Prometheus delivers nothing new.

Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi

#10 and #112 at time of writing.

I watched these two in quick succession today. The Empire Strikes Back is too... unfinished to watch on its own. It starts off slowly - the whole ice planet sequence is disappointingly reminiscent of the interminable desert planet scenes from the original Star Wars. But it picks up. A few buckles are swashed, sure enough.

It received mixed reviews upon release. Inevitable, I suppose, after the impact of the first in the trilogy - expectations were impossibly high. But since then it has come to be considered as the best Star Wars film.

Certainly, the emotional resonance of these two films is much more effective than the first film. They're packed with action, Henson muppets and glorious, glorious incest.

Return of the Jedi is the best of the three, in my opinion.

The epic backstory is implied with such pizazz that there would be no need to actually make the prequels...

I wonder if episodes VII-IX will ever get made? Actually, I'm sure they will, even if it's over George Lucas's dead body.

During the 2001 Census there was a viral email campaign encouraging people to record their religion as Jedi. You can't be prosecuted for lying about your religion on the Census, so I thought I'd register as a Jedi myself. I wasn't alone. In England and Wales 390,127 people (almost 0.8 percent) stated their religion as Jedi on their Census forms, surpassing Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

#19 at time of writing.



This is a near-perfect film, from back when George Lucas still had new ideas. Actually, it is perfect. A script full of wit, cracking characters, wonderfully tongue-in-cheek hokum, truly creepy bad guys...

It's the king of B movies, with a depth of attention to detail that surpasses even the best high-budget flicks. This movie has it all: action, romance, comedy, and suspense. From beginning to end you are hooked. Critic Bernard Weinraub said it best: "Deliriously funny, ingenious, and stylish." Harrison Ford is at his best as Dr. Jones. Can you imagine Tom Selleck as Indy, as was originally intended? Hm...

It starts with one of the most memorable opening sequences of all time, lifted from old Scrooge McDuck comics. Then it sprints from set-piece to brilliant set-piece, packed with iconic moments from the red line travelling across the map to the warehouse full of boxes.

Matt Groening has said that the secret of designing characters is to make them immediately recognizable in silhouette. Indy's fedora and whip ensures that he fulfills that criteria. The original kangaroo-hide bullwhip was sold in December, 1999 at Christie's auction house in London for $43,000, and again in 2008 for $57,500.



The infamous scene in which Indy shoots a flamboyant swordsman was not in the original script. Harrison Ford was supposed to use his whip to get the swords out of his attacker's hands, but the food poisoning he and the rest of the crew were suffering from made him too sick to perform the stunt. After several unsuccessful tries, someone made the off-handed remark, "Why doesn't he just shoot him?" Steven Spielberg immediately took up the idea. (But, someone tell me please, hadn't this already been done in a Bond film? You Only Live Twice or something?) Another great ad-lib was Indy's line to Marion when they are on the ship - "It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage."

The music is fantastic - as good as Star Wars. But, unlike Star Wars, there are some scenes that dispense with music altogether (like the brawl in Marion's bar) and the tension is compelling on its own merit. The editing is ten times pacier than Star Wars. The cheesiness is a few Hobo Power units more tolerable.

Forget Star Wars. This is it.

Star Wars

#12 at time of writing.

Star Wars. You had to be there.

I don't doubt that for teenagers in 1977, it was an absolutely mind-blowing experience. It's ambitious, and peppered with iconic (and very parody-able) moments. The universe is thoroughly imagined. But, well, it's not actually very good is it?

I avoided seeing Star Wars until I was at University in 2000, and predictably it didn't live up to the hype. It starts off promisingly enough, but then there's an interminable series of arid scenes on the desert planet and it doesn't get much better from there.

The acting is horrible, the story is unoriginal, it has plot holes big enough to drive the Millennium Falcon through, and the dialogue is beyond silly. That's not to say it wasn't an important film. Most know that Industrial Light and Magic was formed to do the special effects for Star Wars, thereby ushering in the age of the special effect driven movie.

The special effects were mind-blowing at the time, and so was the marketing. George Lucas may be a hack director, but he is a master of marketing. Star Wars was the first film to successfully create a line of merchandise and toys. And they sold like gangbusters, even though the first action figures were an empty box with an IOU inside!

I'm sure I'm being unfair. But there are certainly more than 11 better films. For one, Raiders of the Lost Ark was twice as good. Mind you, Empire Strikes Back was a vast improvement, and Temple of Doom was rubbish.

Having said all that, I remember enjoying Flash Gordon on Betamax when I was a kid, and that's a fucking awful film.



Believe it or not, several Star Wars characters are derived from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. George Lucas acknowledges this in the first conference room scene on the Death Star. Just as an Imperial Officer is saying the line "...the Rebel's hidden fort..." he is telekinetically strangled by Darth Vader, shutting him up before he can say the full title.

Shame that Carrie Fisher did a Judy Garland and ended up addicted to drugs and wishing that she had turned down the film that made her famous.

For interest, here's a review from 1977. And for fun, here's the Star Wars Kid. This trailer made me laugh as well - why wasn't Fanboys released in the UK?