Star Wars, Episode [IV/VII]: [A New Hope/The Force Awakens] ([1977/2015])

Directed by [George Lucas/J. J. Abrams]

Perhaps Episode VII should have been named The Same Old Hope…. While there are admittedly a couple of stretches in the parallel, by and large this adaptation from Ross Douthat’s piece in the New York Times online [LINK] is dead on:

You’ve got an orphaned Force adept unaware of [his/her] powers living on a desert planet near an old man played by a famous British actor who probably holds secrets to [his/her] past; [he/she] then meets up with a droid carrying secret plans that its [Rebel/Resistance] owner hid inside it just before [he/she] was captured and tortured by [the Empire/the First Order]. You’ve got teams of stormtroopers scouring said planet in search of those plans, killing innocents along the way. You’ve got an evil general who wants to rely on a planet-destroying superweapon instead of the Force and who’s in a rivalry with a mysterious cloaked figure for the trust of a strange deformed [Emperor/Supreme Leader]. You’ve got the stop at a cantina-style watering hole filled with smugglers and crooks. You’ve got the destruction of [a] planet(s) crucial to the [Rebel/Resistance] effort midway through the movie, and then you’ve got the threatened destruction of a [Rebel/Resistance] base on a verdant planet by the same superweapon, which can only be averted by an X-Wing attack on a single weak point. You’ve got a confrontation between the cloaked figure (actually, decloaked by this point in the story) and an older, wiser force for good who knew him intimately before he fell, which ends with the older wiser figure being killed while our young hero[ine] looks on in horror. And then you’ve got the X-Wing attack itself, which succeeds in blowing up the entire enemy super-base literally seconds before the superweapon is scheduled to fire on the base where [Princess/General] Leia and a group of [Rebel/Resistance] leaders are watching the attack unfold.

To be fair, I did enjoy it, but there was little new here. Just the original film recycled for a new generation, with some critical elements retooled to the sensibilities of said new generation. Maybe that’s what was needed. Perhaps most importantly, given the misbegotten mess that Lucas himself made of the film franchise, this first post-Lucas offering did look and feel a lot more like “real” Star Wars than the “prequels” that came between. Hopefully with that being accomplished, Episode VII may serve as a springboard for Episodes VIII ff. to actually add something to the mythos.

Cheers, and Thanks for reading!

Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy (Dark Horse, 2009)

Reprinted from three six-issue comic-book miniseries (1995, 1998, and 1999) based on the prose novels by Timothy Zahn (1991-1993), adapted by scripter Mike Baron and various artists

I was there, nigh on two and a half decades past, when Star Wars seemed a fad of the past after a dearth of several years in the late 1980s after the completion of the “trilogy” with the appearance of Return of the Jedi in 1983. Little if any merchandising was being published when suddenly there appeared in 1991 a new novel, Heir to the Empire. I was there … but I didn't actually pick it up until it appeared in paperback the next summer, and read it during that bit of a lull in my graduate studies between finishing up my M.A. thesis and beginning my doctoral studies. I thoroughly enjoyed it, of course, picked up the paperbacks of the sequels – Dark Force Rising and The Last Command – as they appeared in paperback the next two summers. Together, they told one long, fast paced, intricate story that basically created what came to be known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Characters, worlds, concepts, a history spanning millennia would be elaborated by many other creators in both prose and comics – some even being “canonized” by incorporation into the revived film series, most notably the Imperial Capital of Coruscant, which was first named and described in Heir to the Empire.

May the Fourth Be With You!

Happy Star Wars Day!