Few things are as endlessly fascinating as the idea of men on other planets. Scientists may try to spoil the fun with news of mere oxygen on Pluto, or herbs on Jupiter, or Martian stones that grow on Earth only in the carbon monoxide of car exhaust, but what we want are human beings, who, if necessary, have pointed ears, but who are definitely able to speak. Until the first astronaut set his clumping boot on the moon, we all secretly believed in the man in the moon: a gentle man, on occasion made of cheese, who craved well-mown lawns in his life among ashy craters, wandered desolate around the moon lakes cherishing romantic notions, and was as scared as we were of the dark side of the moon. According to nursery superstition, he opened one eye to stare back at us malevolently if we looked at him on his thin crescent through an Earthly pane of glass. Before the anti-romantic moon landing, the man in the moon was a creature clear in every Earthman’s consciousness: rubicund; all for love; obviously lonely in his life without any moon mate; possibly rather foolish; with a physical system well adjusted to the waxing and waning of his interesting home.
Science, Cape Canaveral, astronomers’ maps have tarnished our fancies about the universe. It remains for filmmakers to restore dreams of humanoids on other planets, other moons. Having made an increasingly oppressive and unwizardly mess of our own Earth, we find much relief in any film or comic strip or TV serial that conjures up other worlds. “Star Wars,” written and directed by George Lucas, is about an interstellar row that happened “a long time ago” but is technically far in advance of the H bomb. It is soothing to find a funny film imagining something a great deal worse than South Africa’s possessing nuclear weapons. When the film opens, we are in a galaxy inhabited by tiny, chattering, evil beings and Tenniel creatures of high individuality: a caricaturist’s dream in the form of a henna-dyed wolf man who is an accomplished space navigator snakes with the look of higher mathematicians. There is a rebel princess called Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), with apple cheeks and Tyrolean plaits around her ears, who possesses the secret plans of a sinister moon-shaped spaceship designed to destroy hostile planets by sending out beams of colossal energy that create lethal Fourth of July fireworks. There is a venal-seeming sophisticate (Harrison Ford) who turns out well in the end, and a good man (Mark Hamill) in storm-trooper disguise who is said unkindly to be very short for the role he is pretending to. And there are a huge number of strange spacecraft, shaped like opened grape scissors, or silver platters, or crossed fish forks, that hurtle through the galaxy at speeds rivalling the speed of light. Above all, there is Alec Guinness as an ancient sage, looking like a monk who has walked a long way; dressed in a brown habit, he seems to have come to us from the Bible. In the end, he dies that we should live. He knows the power of the Force, which is the film’s word for what is sometimes called “the life force.” When the power is used for moral ends, it seems to be the power of belief and devoutness in the face of unbelief and evil. The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep.
No sci-fi film—not even a sci-fi film set long ago—being complete without a robot and a computer, there is a gold-plated robot who walks as if his feet hurt, like a primal woman shopper, and an overweight computer who is a mixture of bald pate, traffic lights, and mailbox, and who transmits rapid information in a language that evokes Eskimo. The computer is the robot’s dearest and most irritating companion. They trudge together across a desert that is actually Tunisian, arguing like man and wife. The robot is intimately rude to the computer, and calls him “you great gob of grease.” To others, he talks like a valet; nothing is too much trouble, in spite of his obvious bunions. Alec Guinness speaks in the phrases of a non-denominational Jesus. “May the Force be with you,” he says.
George Lucas, who made “American Graffiti,” has put together a sci-fi film that draws on any number of associations. “Star Wars” is both amazing and familiar. The robot-and-computer couple seems to be out of Beckett or vaudeville. The astonishing spacecraft have wars that summon up the effect of a bundle of kindling thrown onto a bonfire. The scuttling evil persons—never has there been such a hive of villainy—look like an ant heap under a magnifying glass. Alec Guinness, using a silver light-sabre to fence with an enemy chief, in black armor and carrying a gold light-sabre, is the archetypal messiah. He plays a character as old as allegory, as old as any deity, ready to die that others might live. Salvation through the self-sacrifice of a prophet is one of the oldest religious ideas. Guinness seems to be thinking of the Acts of the Apostles: “For we are in danger to be called in question for this day’s uproar.”
So after Guinness has crumpled, the others escape the uproar, only to return in their eerie Spitfires to attack the enemy, crashing through a gully of great architectural grandeur and narrowness which looks like a pantry corridor in a pyramid. There is something dazzling about a sci-fi film that manages to call upon the energies of both futurism and long-held faith. The movie is not to be compared in ferocity of imagination with Kubrick’s “2001”—significant that the music here is merely illustrative, never caustic or memorable, and that there is nothing of Kubrick’s vision of a blanched form of existence—but it is exuberantly entertaining.♦
