Star Wars Episode VII: A Newer Hope

There was a time when Gungans didn’t exist.

But if you’re like me, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember what that was like. In fact, I find it almost impossible to remember Star Wars the way it was. Another George – Orwell, not Lucas – once wrote that “he who controls the present controls the past”, and that was the problem. For too long the history of that galaxy far, far away was at the mercy of an incurable revisionist, someone who didn’t mind treading on the memories of others. This persona of the meddlesome tinker, however, masked a more embarrassing reality, I believe – and it’s that despite being both the creator and custodian of this universe, Lucas never really got what made it so special.

Let’s quickly look back at the prequels. (The point of this piece isn’t really to take them to task, by the way. There are plenty of those out there, if that’s what you’re in the mood for.) The Phantom Menace was, in so many ways, a dream come true for fans of the series. If you were there, the summer of 1999 was burdened with glorious expectation but also bursting with excitement. Everyone wanted to believe. I was one of them. But in the end, and hopefully we can now all admit this publicly, Episode I never felt like Star Wars. I kept hoping, until the very last frame, that the magic would return, but I’m still waiting for my epiphany. Having re-watched the film four times since, I’ve pretty much given up hope.

Exciting moments are scattered throughout the prequels, as are likeable characters and moments of intrigue, but it’s all so haphazardly assembled that I’ve long suspected that these are little more than kind accidents. When considered together, as a trilogy, as Star Wars films, it’s clear they’re deficient in so many of the qualities that the originals had in abundance – genuine warmth, wry humour, real charm – but more detrimentally is the total absence of that less tangible property that made Star Wars so unique. It differs between viewers, but for me, it was always a hopeful sense of wonder, a secret knowledge that a greater destiny waits for us amidst the constellations. I think its at its most palpable when Luke watches the twin suns set on the desert planet of Tatooine.

Nothing in the prequels ever came close to drawing out this emotion. Again, I find parts of them entertaining, but they’re oddly hollow experiences – too bogged down in recounting the bureaucratic origins of the Empire to ever truly reach out to grab the stars. And ironically Lucas’s passion to innovate and use cutting-edge technology, which made the originals such landmarks in the history of cinema, actually undermine the prequels quite badly – so much is left looking synthetic, cold, and dated. Lucas mistakenly believed the magic of Star Wars resided in the Universe he had created, and that simply showing more of it would be enough to satisfy fans. He was wrong.

Star Wars is now in very different hands, of course, and while those hands might be hidden within plump white gloves, Disney has already shown that it’s acutely sensitive to how long-term fans of the series feel in the aftermath of the prequels. Recently, I attended Star Wars Celebration Europe where I saw Kathleen Kennedy, the executive producer of Episode VII, talk about the approach of the new film. Character and story were being prioritised above everything else, she said; effects would be at the service of the story; CGI would work in tandem with more traditional forms of effects work – miniatures, set-building, shooting in exotic locations. As Kennedy presented this new creed, it was greeted with hungry applause by the congregation. This is what everyone wanted. The fallout from the prequels has made audiences realise that it wasn’t simply the universe they loved – it was the timeless approach to storytelling and the way it had been made, principles that had been forgotten at the turn of the millennium.

Abrams and Kennedy are facing a problem that Lucas couldn’t solve. How do you reverse engineer the magic of Star Wars?

Kennedy’s the right producer to be overseeing Star Wars, but putting her long-standing relationships with Spielberg and Lucas aside, her appointment is interesting for other reasons. She was involved in the very first use of CG in cinema, and produced Jurassic Park, a seminal film in the history of CG effects. At Star Wars Celebration, she spoke about the excitement she experienced when she first saw that wireframe model of a dinosaur sprint across a CRT monitor at ILM. She knew, using this technology, it was possible to make the impossible – that dinosaurs could return from extinction. The brilliance of Jurassic Park lies in the sparing use of CGI and how it’s deftly balanced with the use of more traditional special effects, like animatronics, and shooting in fantastically beautiful or strange real-world locations. It was clear that Kennedy recognised the dangers of embracing CGI too openly, forgetting its limitations and the deadening effect it can have despite its inexorable march towards photorealism. Bad CGI creates the uncanny – something convincingly lifelike but totally lifeless.

But it’s the emphasis on writing that’s really reassuring. They’ve even called Lawrence Kasdan to attend daily script meetings. Kennedy, when she spoke about the film’s director, described J.J. Abrams primarily as a storyteller, with a background in screenwriting and television touted as his most impressive and valuable credentials. His Star Trek reboot pulled off that most paradoxical feats: a canonical reboot. It didn’t ignore the disregard what came before, but with one swift movement, it avoided forty years of densely-tangled continuity. And nobody’s delicate memories were trampled or even wrinkled in the process – every mission of the Starship Enterprise still took place but just in another timeline. It had moments of sentimentality, but on the whole it was a remarkably forward-looking, assured film that decanted what made Star Trek special. (Incidentally, one of my biggest problems with the sequel, Into Darkness, was its decision to revisit old frontiers.) The reboot proved it’s better to be daring, than deferential.

This desire to look back to the originals for inspiration seems to extend across other Star Wars projects now in the works. The new animated show Star Wars Rebels, for instance, is revisiting the legendary concept art of Ralph McQuarrie, which had such a profound influence on the look and feel of the Star Wars universe. The show’s producer Dave Filoni has spoken at length about the importance of McQuarrie’s work, and how the show is going to great lengths to capture his unique art style, creating a set of digital brushes that mimic the way McQuarrie painted. But this attention to the texture of the originals extends deeper, right into the archives housed at Lucasfilm. Filoni and his team have studied the film’s shooting itinerary, trying to replicate not only the exact camera movements and lens used in the space battles but also trying to recreate the grain of the original film. All this for an animated show.

This detail – the desire to give a CG-animated show the texture of the original’s film stock – has stayed with me. I’m sure it’s simply an attempt to recapture the aesthetic feel of those early films. But in my head I have an image of artists and writers frantically burrowing down in the archives housed at Lucasfilm, studying negatives and shooting schedules, desperately trying to figure out what it was that made those films so special. It is possible to reverse engineer magic? Maybe it is. Or maybe what they’re really doing is returning to what has always made for good cinema: the timeless principles of storytelling, strong and unpredictable characters, the judicious use of advanced technology, and old-fashioned craftsmanship.

I was a bit sneaky earlier. I didn’t give that Orwell quote in full. Here’s the rest: “He who controls the past controls the future.” As I see it, that’s where Star Wars is right now. There seems to be a newfound respect for the past, and a humble desire to learn from it, not rewrite it. The new creative talents involved have a reverence for the source material in a way that Lucas never could. And by looking backwards, Star Wars Episode VII may have inadvertently picked up its most potent weapon: nostalgia. As fans of Mad Men know all too well, nostalgia in Greek refers to the pain from an old wound – a nagging, dull sort of pain, tugging at your insides, making you remember the initial cut. And that’s how I feel about Star Wars – I remember the way it was, how it made me feel as a child, but those feeling have faded over time. Episode VII has re-opened those old wounds, and that twinge is the dormant pain you only get from a new hope.

Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.

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