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Thanks to my amazing mother-in-law we got a night out (and more importantly a lie in tomorrow) and went out for dim sum and then on to see the new Star Wars film. I don’t want to give you any spoilers, but it turned out that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father (but then hey, everyone’s related in this incestuous ganging).
I am not the biggest fan of Star Wars. I didn’t really get into it as a kid, as we rarely went to the cinema (it wasn’t something my family did very often, though my dad helped run a Film Club at our school which showed less current films, though my biggest pleasure was looking through the big books of potential films to rent and catching the occasional glimpse of side boob in some of the pictures for the racier X movies) and missed out on Star Wars the first time round. As I got into my teens I started going on cinema trips with friends and I think the first blockbuster I saw was the second Indiana Jones film. My main memory is feeling a bit left out as the rest of the audience laughed at and cheered the back references to the first one.
And I think maybe you would need to have been caught up in the magic of Star Wars the first time round to really get loads out of this new film. It seems to have been created as a nostalgic remake and even to me there was something satisfying about hearing the music strike up and the retro scrolling writing appear.
I enjoyed it, though pretty much knew what was going to happen due to having watched the original Star Wars and even with my more peripheral interest a lot of this stuff is burned into my psyche. Star Wars maybe became the smash it did as a result of a mixture of timing, fantastic casting and brilliant design. And even now the Storm troopers and the (sadly not very sexy, though I’d have a crack at C3PO) robots and the spaceships look fantastic. And like that other smash hit success, Harry Potter, it succeeds by doing a sort of pick n mix from other classic bits of film and literature. In this one the baddie looks very like Severus Snape and manages to magic his light-sabre towards him, just as Harry Potter can magically transport his wand. All films are based on the same seven stories, supposedly, but at times it was hard to tell if this was Star Wars, Potter or Lord of the Rings. Or at least, where the current bit had been borrowed from.
It’s much better written than the original Star Wars and I still had a smashing time and liked the 3D and the fighting and the predictability and Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher being fucking awesome (but couldn’t they have had even a little kiss?). And I hadn’t seen anything except the trailers and had heard no spoilers so there were some surprises in store. Apparently it’s done OK for takings anyway, regardless of what I think about it. But a bit like watching the second Indiana Jones film all those years ago, I knew I would have enjoyed it more had I been pumped up about it as a ten year old and having seen it then and feeling like it belonged to me.
Look at all the stuff that monthly subscriber monthly draw winner John Murray has got coming to him in the post! A smart watch, a signed script, a book about Norwegian Wood that I was sent unsolicited (not the song or Scandinavian erections- actual wood), a copy of the Wolf of Wall Street that I was given when I was being considered for a web series where I took the mickey out of films, one of the unclaimed 12 shows T shirts and much much more.
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