Star Wars review 1977

This review of the first Star Wars movie ran in The Weekend Australian on Saturday October 29, 1977.

The Star Wars Trilogy. Special Edition. 1997 Lucasfilm/Ltd. Credit/Industrial Light/and/Magic. /filmstills film scene movies actor mark hamill (Luke Skywalker) actress Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) Harrison Ford as (Han Solo)

This review of the first Star Wars movie ran in The Weekend Australian on Saturday October 29, 1977.

The Saturday matinee dream

By Geraldine Pascall

Well, it’s here.

After the biggest movie hype of all time and a box office record in the United States that almost makes Jaws look like a dud, Star Wars opened in Sydney and Melbourne on Thursday.

In a few weeks we’ll know whether the movie will continue its amazing US success here; whether we’re ready to climb on to the big space trip, whether we’re also into fantasy, as they’re saying.

For its director, George Lucas, Star Wars was almost seven years in the making - from the time he wrote the first draft of the script. After a lot of trouble getting backing for it (Alan Ladd jnr st 20th Century Fox was the man who finally gave it the go-ahead) Lucas brought it in under $9 million.

Given its phenomenal box-office record - over $120 million gross in five months in the US - that was very cheap.

Yet there wasn’t a big opening promotion for it. Star Wars virtually came in cold: no one knew what to expect and the response astounded everyone. Within a few days there was astonished stories about record weekend grosses, people queuing for blocks and audiences stamping, cheering and standing up and applauding.

Some of the US critics raved about it. Time called it grand and glorious … a subliminal history of the movies, wrapped in a rivetting tale of suspense and adventure, ornamented with some of the most ingenious special effects ever contrived for film. Variety, the showbiz paper, gave it their finest accolade: supersocko and boffo.

Honest

Many of the big name critics were somewhat cooler: they admired its technical achievements and polish but regretted its two-dimensional characters and simplistic story - so much skill expended for so little point.

Lucas didn’t seem to mind the criticism. He had wanted to make an honest, wholesome fantasy movie, like the ones he used to see at Saturday matinees when he was a kid - a movie we would have loved when we were 10 years old.

That, basically, is what he did, using the most sophisticated and advanced computer technology that had ever gone into a movie. His surprise was that it appealed to a bigger audience well over the age of 10.

Star Wars’s progress in the past five months is almost legend now - Fox’s shares shooting up on the New York Stock Exchange, Star Wars saving Fox from financial disaster and takeover, the sale of the Star Wars book, the fortune being made out of Star Wars toys and merchandise (that arrives here too this week), beating Jaws at the box-office altogether by Christmas, on the way to being the most successful movie ever made, the British technical know-how that produced it, the robots implanting their various extremities in the cement outside Grauman’s Hollywood.

Shrewd

So, too, is the money that will be made from the movie - for Fox who has 60 per cent, for Lucas who has about 30 per cent, for Alec Guinness who shrewdly asked for a percentage, and is probably now making more than he’s ever made in his long career, and for the other actors like Mark Hamill, to whom Lucas generously gave percentage points to (.25 for Hamill) after the movie was made.

Fortunes have been made just in the US in those five months. Now Fox and Lucas are watching just what’s going to happen elsewhere - there’s a lot more money to be made.

In Manila, they put Star Wars in quietly, thinking that the best method would be to follow the low-key US release. It bombed, to put it politely.

The release here has also been fairly quiet. The big media stories after the US opening weren’t followed up and until the TV ads and ordinary press ads this week there were only two previews, quite unusual for such a big movie.

Fox are obviously relying on a similar grass-roots response here as happened in the US.

It’s hard to predict how the movie will go and impossible to extrapolate from one’s own response to it. When I saw it in August I was impressed with its production values and careful technical skill, delighted with its visual originality and marvellous sense of parody.

But I couldn’t help feeling that it was just a comic strip superbly brought to life - with all the undemanding, unsubtle and unconvincing banality of a comic strip.

Even the charms of the robots See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo and the incredible Wookie, Chewbacca, palled after a while when the movie kept to the one predictable, minimally developed line.

People who’ve seen Star Wars say it’s one movie that’s definitely better the second time around. If I can get a couple of tickets in the next week, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

With all that behind it, with all the people who have found such wonder and magic in it, this is one time a critic wouldn’t mind finding out of he or she is wrong.