May the Force be with you and be perfect
Star Wars: The Force Awakens made movie history this week by beating Avatar’s record as the most-successful film ever in North America.
On Wednesday, it flew past Avatar’s $750.5 million (U.S.) lifetime gross, doing so in a record 20 days. The Force Awakens now seems likely to reach $1 billion domestically before it slumbers. With its lucrative unveiling in China set for Saturday, it could ultimately also beat Avatar’s $2.8 billion worldwide record, making it the most successful movie of all time.
Hollywood website Deadline.com lists more than 20 industry records, The Force Awakens has notched since its Dec. 18 official release, one per day, with many more likely to follow.
One thing missing from the list is another superlative it could eventually lay claim to, if not already: Most Argued-Over Film in History.
While most fans seem delighted with The Force Awakens, some were less than thrilled with its many shout-outs to the original Star Wars trilogy.
There’s also been considerable fussing over perceived plot lapses, “mistakes,” unexplained character traits — why is Rey such a fast learner? Why is Han Solo better than ever? — and so on. There’s even been serious debate over the lack of commas in one line of the opening scroll, which some fans think is a hint (or spoiler) about future episodes.
The Force Awakens has turned fans into grammarians. A Star Wars uberfan named Nicholas Spargo put his grievances into a video titled Why Star Wars: The Force Awakens is Worse Than the Prequels.
It’s gone viral faster than Han Solo did the Kessel Run, as have similar rants and counter-rants, the latter including filmmaker Matty Granger’s spirited defence of the film.
For fans like Spargo, the phrase, “Dude, it’s only a movie!” is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. But the obsession over such details is actually a backhanded compliment to what director J.J. Abrams and his team have wrought.
People care about this movie and this franchise so much, they want everything to be perfect. Which is impossible, in movies as in life; a film doesn’t have to be flawless to be great.
This assertion can be easily proven if you look at the myriad “mistakes” in, and quibbles about, some of the classic movies The Force Awakens has roared past: Gone With the Wind, Titanic, Avatar, Jurassic World and even Star Wars: A New Hope.
Here are just a few examples, which I’ve gleaned from the “Trivia” section of the Internet Movie Database and from MovieMistakes.com:
Gone With the Wind (1939) Producer David O. Selznick promised the very persnickety author Margaret Mitchell she could weigh in on any aspect of the movie version of her Civil War tome. But when she complained about the size and style of the Tara and Twelve Oaks sets (“I did not know whether to laugh or to throw up at the TWO staircases,” she wrote a friend), Selznick disregarded her.
He also ignored the book’s lauding of the racist Ku Klux Klan. He wisely excised all reference to the Klan from his picture.
The momentous “Burning of Atlanta” scene in the film is actually the opposite of what people assume. It’s not the November 1864 torching of the city by General Sherman’s Union Army. It’s from two months earlier when the retreating Confederate Army torched its own ammunition dumps.
Titanic (1997) Director James Cameron was a fiend for detail when making his tragic ship romance, even hiring the original Titanic carpet manufacturer to spin a duplicate rug.
But he had to wait until the film’s 3D release in 2012 to digitally fix one major error from the original release: the configuration of stars in the night sky as the ship is sinking wasn’t at all like how the heavens looked over the North Atlantic on that fateful evening in April 1912.
Avatar (2009) Cameron also made this fantasy blockbuster, which features blueskinned alien humanoids known as the Na’vi. They aren’t supposed to be placental mammals like humans, meaning females like Zoe Saldana’s character Neytiri shouldn’t have breasts.
But Cameron said he wanted Neytiri to look like a cross between Raquel Welch’s character in Fantastic Voyage and the comic book character Vampirella.
Jurassic World (2015) Bryce Dallas Howard’s park operations manager Claire Dearing should by rights know how many different species of carnivorous dinosaurs she has in her tourist attraction, in this Jurassic Park sequel phenomenon. But she says in the film the park has six carnivores, when in fact there are seven.
Dearing also seems confused about the basic science regarding DNA, showing a model that is scientifically inaccurate.
Jeeps from the original Jurassic Park are found by resourceful boys and they still run after more than 20 years of abandonment. In reality, the gasoline in the tanks would have become unstable and the tires and electric wires would have rotted away.
Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) Jedi mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi never actually says, “May the Force be with you,” the film’s most-quoted line. Other characters say it, but Obi-Wan utters only variations of the exhortation.
The scene where Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter spins out of control was a late add to the film by George Lucas, the director and series creator.
Some crew members objected to it, saying it was a blatant setup for a sequel — and sequels were considered cheap and inferior cash-ins at the time. Fancy that! Peter Howell’s book Movies I Can’t Live Without is now available in premium paperback through StarStore.ca/movies.