The truth is that I’m not a big Star Wars fan. Not at all. Of the three originals, most would pick The Empire Strikes Back as the best, perhaps even worthy of all the hype, and I sort of get that, but the first was really rather cheesy, and the third, with its furry teddy bear insurgents taking down mechanized armour using sticks and stones, was pretty awful, and felt even dumber when director George Lucas revealed that the on-screen triumph of the cutesy-pie plush bear army was his sci-fi take on the Vietnam War. Yeah, right, George. That’s how it all went down. U.S forces, who actually never lost a battle in the entire war (highlighting the difference between tactical victory and strategic success), were vanquished in ‘Nam by hopelessly overmatched but plucky little human equivalents of the Care Bears, who made up for what they lacked in firepower with sheer courage and Stone Age ingenuity. It wasn’t like the Americans were tangling with heavily armed, highly disciplined regular army units of the NVA, infiltrating the South at division strength.
Fucking Ewoks. You gotta be fucking kidding me, George.
Besides which, all of the films were blighted by ludicrously clumsy dialog and preposterous physics, and as far as I was concerned Mark Hamill wasn’t much of an actor. The muppet Jedi Master with the tangled, backwards-assed syntax and Fozzie Bear’s voice was downright silly too, though a useful source of hilarious spoofs (one of my favourites was a poster that was famously hung on a wall at some branch of the DMV, right where all the poor slobs in the typically unmoving line could see it, which featured Yoda saying Impatient you are. A fuck I do not give).
Not that I didn’t watch them all, first on the big screen, then at home, having bought each of them, serially, in multiple formats as the mode of viewing evolved over time, VHS, Laser, DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital file. Yes, I was every bit as much of a sucker as any Wookie-worshipping fan boy, OK? These pulpy space operas might not have been great cinema, in fact a few of them roundly sucked, but they were still somehow addictive, and listen, buddy, the originals had Carrie Fisher, and if you aren’t in love with Carrie Fisher you’re obviously half a bubble off plumb, with a couple of vital screws gone dangerously loose.
Still. Star Wars. Meh.
Given my lukewarm appreciation of the original purported masterworks, it came as no surprise that the first instalment of Lucas’s “prequel trilogy”, depicting the rise of the evil Empire before the events of the earlier movies took place, would, in defiance of all the known laws of physics, simultaneously suck and blow (he quips with an appreciative nod to Bart Simpson). Dubbed The Phantom Menace, the newly designated Episode 1 of the Star Wars saga was a convoluted mess of boring political machinations and plodding Machiavellian skullduggery, featuring CGI aliens that embodied profoundly racist stereotypes, among them a sort of Jewish merchant/shopkeeper/Shylock, a bunch of obviously Japanese critters running some kind interstellar trading cartel, and, worst of all, the shucking, jiving, apparently Rastafarian amphibian known as Jar Jar Binks, an odious character who shall forever live in infamy. It was, generally, godawful.
But then there were the Jedi Knights portrayed by Liam Neeson and Ewen McGregor. The film comes alive whenever they’re the focus. For the first time since the series was launched, these two demonstrated in a hundred ways how it was that a small cadre of indomitable, implacable warrior monks, half Samurai, half Jesuit, once maintained order and justice across an entire galaxy. These guys are absolutely badass, armed with that most elegant of lethal weapons, the light sabre, which is demonstrated repeatedly to be far and away the most potent close quarter killing device ever devised, far superior at short range to any sort of firearm, if, and only if, it’s wielded by a master who’s spent his entire life learning how best to use it. It’s futile to shoot at a Jedi; in a flourish his light sabre invariably deflects the shot away. It’s futile to hide from a Jedi behind any sort of door, even if it’s a NORAD-style metal barrier several feet thick and fit to survive a nuclear blast; the Knight can simply plunge his light sabre straight into its centre and melt a man-sized hole right through it. Attack a Jedi with fifty mechanical droids, and they all end up in pieces on the floor, cut to ribbons by those slashing, glowing, frighteningly humming blades. Nobody can touch them. Nobody can resist them.
Nobody, that is, except an equally badass, essentially Satanic agent of the Dark Side, a so-called Sith Lord named Darth Maul, who confronts our beloved Jedi at the climax of the movie, and engages them in a brutal, unbelievably kinetic sword fight to the death. Up to this point we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that nothing, nobody, no living being or robot, can stand against a Jedi Knight. Yet here is this arrogant, cold-blooded, utterly evil bastard with mottled red and black skin and goddam horns on his head, obviously eager to take on both of our heroes at once, and it soon becomes clear that he’s more than equal to the task. This – this mutant demonic thing – is absolutely terrifying. What follows is one of the greatest, most viscerally compelling action sequences ever filmed, shot and edited so well that it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Lucas delegated the direction to Spielberg. It’s scary, and from the get-go we’re not at all sure how this is going to turn out, which, given our expectations coming in, doesn’t feel proper. We’re here for the happy ending, and after all, this is a Star Wars movie, so the Good Guys have to win – right? Everything always turns out fine in the galaxy far, far away, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not. A few seconds into the contest, and already we’re not so sure. After maybe a minute, we’re starting to panic.
Especially when Darth Maul pulls an unexpected move and runs his radiant red blade clean through Liam Neeson’s center mass. One down. Ewen, playing the young Obi-wan Kenobi, still at this point an apprentice in the Jedi order, is left to confront the monster by himself, and we’re all afraid he’s well out of his depth.
The second clip attached above shows McGregor and the actor/stunt man Ray Park practising their exquisitely choreographed swordplay. They became so good at it, moving so fast, with such precision, that Lucas decided he had to slow down the shots in post-production, reducing the apparent tempo. He reckoned that if the combat was left at its actual speed, exactly as filmed, everybody would assume he’d accelerated the frame rate to make it look more exciting.
Absolutely badass.
Here’s a longer documentary on how it was all done, if you’re keen:
