Star Wars isn’t as great as everyone makes it out to be, and the original trilogy has aged like three 45 year old gallons of blue milk.
All three films were directed by George Lucas. The first of the movies, “A New Hope”, came out in 1977. The second movie, “The Empire Strikes Back”, came out in 1980. The last of the original trilogy, “Return of the Jedi”, was released in 1983.
The movies really make it clear that they’re from “a long time ago.”
The acting is stale, and everyone is constantly speaking in the same low energy tone. There is no sense of urgency coming from the actors. The most energetic characters on screen weren’t even real people. The droids, R2-D2 (voiced by Ben Burtt) and C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) stole the show. They should have been the main characters, especially with how often R2 saves the day.
The film makers somehow managed to make the non-humans more emotive than any of the actors that show their face, and one doesn’t even speak in a way the audience can understand.
Mark Hamil does a decent job with his character Luke Skywalker, but Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher both fail to deliver. Han Solo (Harrison Ford) feels like a mess of a character, and Leia (Carrie Fisher) can’t even decide if she has a British accent in the first movie or not.
And then there’s Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones), who’s only redeeming features were that he had a cool outfit and cool music play everytime he was on screen. Take the music away, and most of the time he’s just awkwardly walking around. James Earl Jones’ delivery often felt confused, as if he wasn’t sure of the context of the lines.
Visually, the movies have aged decently thanks to the use of practical effects. All of the freaky little alien people feel alive. They look like they belong, but most don’t add anything to the story.
Any time they use other special effects like for the lasers or the holograms, the movies start to show their age.
The scenes that take place in space also look rough. The spaceships look fine in the first movie, but the star covered background is really outdated. The ships in the second and third movies are very jarring, and all of the scenes in the cockpits during the dogfights look out of place. It’s very clear that they’re just in a room pretending to pilot a ship, there is no illusion.
The action scenes are always lackluster. A lightsaber is, conceptually, cool as heck, and yet every time they pull one out in the movie I end up feeling disappointed. The only time I really enjoyed the choreography was during a scene in the third movie, where the team goes to Tatooine to save Han Solo from Jabaa the Hutt.
The relationships between all of the characters are confusing, none of them really seem to like each other, and the romance between Han and Leia is creepy and gross. Luke gets way too attached to Ben, mourning him more than his own family. The only ones with a fun dynamic were C-3PO and R2-D2.
The biggest problem I have with the original trilogy, however, is the plot. It’s just a glorified war movie, filled with propaganda and facism. They had some space wizards, but they weren’t prominent enough. They focused more on the war aspects, and not enough on all the cool space wizard stuff. The star to war ratio was off.
The most interesting concept in the movies was the Death Star, a space station capable of destroying whole planets that was introduced in the first movie, but then unnecessarily reused in the third movie because it was one of the only good ideas that the filmmakers had.
The second movie had too much down time. There was a swamp with a silly little crackhead, he was a lot of fun. But replace Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) with a regular person, and you get the same result. He does teach Luke some cool magic, but he barely ever uses it.
The scene where they had to travel through an asteroid field was pretty solid, that’s something that was unique to the space setting, and it was done well. Also, the twist where it is revealed that Darth Vader was Luke’s father was pretty cool, it didn’t feel like it came out of nowhere and definitely had an emotional impact.
But the rest of the second movie feels like a regular war movie, with not enough going on. Every time the movie cut to Han and Leia, they were doing something uninteresting. Granted it was all setup for Darth Vader to kidnap them, but even that was lackluster.
The third movie was the worst of the bunch, even though It has a strong start. Luke shows off his new skills when he saves Han Solo in the deserts of Tatooine, but then things go downhill.
The movie spends a lot of time in the woods, where Han and Leia are having a very boring adventure. The parts with Luke and Vader were interesting, but they left me wanting more and not in a good way. I was underwhelmed.
Most of the scenes in the movies can be contextually placed in a modern setting, and it would play out the same. You could replace most of the alien characters with a regular human, and the result would be the same. They needed more aliens that were actually different, like Chewbaca, or the Wompa Luke fights in the snow. These aliens had impact, it mattered that they were different because they could do things that humans couldn’t.
Most of the aliens added nothing to the story. You could replace the Ewoks with people, and that would be the same. The Tusken Raiders could just be regular humans and it would play out the same. The Jawaas could be replaced with regular people, and it might even be more interesting. These races did have their own cultures, but none of the cultures were particularly alien.
The asteroid scene I mentioned earlier was pretty cool, as that wouldn’t really work in another setting. The Death Star as well, it’s big and other worldly, posing a very serious threat.
The movies look cool most of the time, but don’t offer much in terms of substance, and the characters aren’t particularly likable.
The movies may have been revolutionary at the time, and the sci-fi genre as a whole certainly owes a lot to them, but the original Star Wars trilogy should stay in the past, where future projects can learn from their mistakes.