How critics saw ‘Star Wars’
“Star Wars” has been a presence in American life for more than 38 years, and as each chapter of the saga has emerged, The San Francisco Chronicle critics have weighed in with their reactions and opinions. Overall, the reviews have been mixed: Three positive reviews, four negative reviews, and one genuinely mixed review that possibly inclined toward positive.
If you’re counting at home, that’s eight reviews for six movies. The reason: The Chronicle found a way to review “The Phantom Menace” three times.
We begin a long time ago on May 25, 1977. We had a new president then named Jimmy Carter, and the No. 1 song on the radio was “When I Need You” by Leo Sayer. On that day, John L. Wasserman reviewed “Star Wars,” calling it “the most exciting picture to be released this year — exciting as theater and exciting as cinema.” He praised it for being as “visually
Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle critic, in a review of “Return of the Jedi”
awesome” as “2001: A Space Odyssey,” even as it remained “intriguingly human in its scope and boundaries.”
Wasserman went on to make a prediction: “If ‘Star Wars’ doesn’t garner at least half a dozen Academy Award nominations, I will eat my Wookie.” Fortunately, he had to do nothing so disgusting. “Star Wars” got 10 nominations and one special award for sound.
Flash forward three years, to May 21, 1980. There were 52 American hostages being held in Iran; inflation was at 14.4 percent, and if you turned on the radio, you were bound to hear the question “Won’t you take me to Funkytown?” On that day, Judy Stone reviewed “The Empire Strikes Back”: “Confusion sets in with the opening credits, which announce this is ‘Episode V,’ and here we were expecting Chapter 2.”
Stone went on to call the screenplay “a slender and mundane reed to carry the weight of all those miraculous special effects” and said that “the generally humorless dialogue defeats the best efforts of director Irvin Kershner.” However, she liked the look of the film and accurately predicted that “Yoda is guaranteed to win the hearts, if not the minds, of viewers.”
Now let’s get back in the time machine and set the GPS to May 25, 1983. Ronald Reagan was president; inflation was at 3.5 percent, and David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” was the big hit on the radio. Peter Stack reviewed “Return of the Jedi” that day, and by now Chronicle critics were attaching Little Man ratings to their reviews. Stack gave “Return” a clapping Little Man (the second-highest rating), but the whole tone of the review was one of good-natured (almost impish) disappointment.
Stack complained that “things Star Wars just don’t seem as fresh as they once did.” He noted “a dissipation of human spirit in the epic scheme.” He wondered why “Chewbacca has lost weight and Princess Leia has gained some.” However, he praised the “highly inventive, grotesque characters, led by a completely disgusting fat thing called Jabba the Hutt.”
“I guess you could say it’s entertaining.”
He concluded by calling the film “a large and spectacular event, a deluge of riches in sound and color, creatures and machines, and people in motion. I guess you could say it’s entertaining.”
Now let’s move ahead 16 long years to May 19, 1999. Bill Clinton was deep into his second term, the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a year in the past, and on the radio, Ricky Martin was “Livin’ la Vida Loca.” On that day two articles about “The Phantom Menace” appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle.
In the official review, Bob Graham, displaying his legendary geniality, began what almost amounted to a pan with this friendly, rhetorical question: “Does any adventure series have a greater — and more supremely deserved — reservoir of good will going for it than ‘Star Wars?’ ” He went on to say that the movie was worth seeing, for its “stunning spectacle,” before bringing down the hammer, with criticism of the film’s lack of character development and its emotional tepidness.
That same day, Peter Stack wrote an essay about the visual side of the film, which amounted to an alternate review. “Never mind the sour chorus of critics complaining that the story is flat. ... Sit back for one of the great visual rides in movie history.”
With disagreement in the
ranks, a third opinion was called for. But this would not arrive until the film’s DVD release on Oct. 21, 2001, just a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In reviewing the DVD, I saw my task as simple, to decide the question for all time: “Was George Lucas’ ‘The Phantom Menace’ a lousy movie or a really, really lousy movie?”
I thought the latter. “Every non-human creation looks as if it was made from washingmachine hoses or old California raisin costumes.” Bob Graham had generously praised Jar Jar Binks as “delightful.” I thought the character “took a wrecking ball” to the movie’s first hour and wondered why time and expense was lavished on the creation of a computer-generated bad actor, when there were so many real bad actors out there who could use a job.
Now let’s take a little hop to May 16, 2002. President George W. Bush’s approval rating was at 76 percent, Eminem’s “The Eminem Show” was just days away, and “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones” was being released. On that date my review — accompanied by an in-between Little Man “alert viewer” rating — appeared in the paper. Apparently, I liked Anakin, the one character neither all good nor all evil, and praised Hayden Christensen for giving him “more than a surface sullenness. There’s something spiritually warped about Anakin, something that goes all the way to his core.” However, I complained of the movie’s super seriousness and said that the series had started out “like junk food” and had ended up “tasting like medicine.”
Now let’s move ahead to May 18, 2005. The Iraq War was in its second year and Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” topped the charts. That day, I gave an in-between rating to “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith,” but I wasn’t sure about it, because I liked a lot of things in that movie. So when I wrote the review, I decided to lead with the positive: “Now that the third installment of the second trilogy is in, we can see why George Lucas wanted to revisit his “Star Wars” saga. He had a great idea about how Darth Vader became Darth Vader. It was a sophisticated idea, because it didn’t involve one reason for the character’s descent into evil, but a combination of factors: Innate talent. A hairline crack in the moral nature. Historical opportunity. A personal crisis. Seduction by a ruthless politician. And bad luck.”
Unfortunately, the movie dragged, or at least I thought so at the time, so I didn’t think I could give it a better rating. Maybe I should have. Ten years later, I just remember the good parts and have no recollection of the bad parts. But then, I haven’t seen it since.