Raiders of The Lost Ark

Following an opening couple of minutes that, via the clashing fonts that appear over tropical wilds, promise a knowing synthesis of old-fashioned adventure and modern filmmaking technologies, we're introduced to a hero who literally moves from darkness to light, then back again. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones character is consistently defined through contrast and conflict. Steven Spielberg's film containing a series of checks and balances that allow Harrison Ford's weather-beaten daredevil to push at a tougher, more morally complicated portrayal simply by quickly countering any question of perceived devilment with a less obliquely brutal answer. Agents, pursuing similar dramatic ends, are habitually deployed to instantly correct any lingering doubts the audience may have about Jones. Indy is always made the hero by these (often immediate) comparisons. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, working from a brief provided by George Lucas and Phillip Kaufman, structures key moments around opposing forces and ideologies that, naturally, track together towards violent antipathy.

A straightforward example of this method of characterisation comes early in the film when describing Jones' reunion with Karen Allen's Marion, a former flame that the rough and tumble archaeologist left heartbroken. Operating without the benefit of a source material or an extant franchise behind it, Raiders has to be rather blunt in how it establishes its hero. Jones has to be dangerous and desirable but, unlike say Sean Connery's James Bond, not quite a full-on cad. Considering that the couple are quickly at each other's throats - as if resuming an argument that hadn't ever reached an adequate conclusion - there is clearly bitterness between Marion and Jones. Ms Ravenwood holds the adventurer responsible for her diminished station, accusing him of taking advantage of her youth and, very likely, driving a wedge between her and her father - Indiana's mentor, the late Abner Ravenwood. Jones barely argues back, defaulting to insincere apologies and an all-too hurried talk about remuneration.

In these moments Jones directly acknowledges a sincere debt to Marion, one that he believes runs to thousands of dollars - life-changing amounts of money in the 1930s. Marion's use of the word 'child' sticks as well, especially since we've not long seen Jones as a university lecturer not exactly courting, but certainly enjoying, the attention of a classroom full of besotted students. It's crucial here that Jones' reaction is steeped in bemusement. An earlier and rather damning aside that had Jones packing off one particularly beautiful undergrad to his office, asking her to wait for him while he takes a meeting with Army Intelligence, was wisely jettisoned from the final edit of the film. In Raiders as released, Jones is consumed by his work to such a degree that the unresolved relationship with Marion is allowed to take on a larger significance both within the film and in Indiana Jones' life.

Far from a reconciliation, Jones and Marion's meeting is rough, instantly arriving at a fraught emotional pitch. Jones' clumsy talk of money is judged offensive when weighed against the sacrifices and disappointments that have defined Marion's life. The couple quarrel, lie to each other, then break - Jones apparently departing - before more guests arrive. Ronald Lacey's Gestapo spy Toht and a gang of assorted heavies saunter in from the cold, all loaded down with pistols and sub-machine guns. This intrusion provides an instant example of disparity. While Jones' offer may have been inelegant or emotionally inert, Toht's is instantly homicidal, quickly dispensing with aimless pleasantries to knuckle down to Marion's imminent torture. Thankfully, Jones intervenes and a shoot-out ensues - Spielberg and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe using long set-ups filed with crisscrossing action to emphasise just how close these warring parties are to each other. Eventually, Jones and Marion work together to rout the Nazis and hired thugs that have invaded Ravenwood's smouldering bar, cementing an uneasy alliance. 

It's not just Toht who is offered up as a misshapen reflection of Jones either. Raiders is filled with people that allow the filmmakers to drive at an idea of comparison when considering their own hero, Paul Freeman's rival graverobber Belloq being the most obvious example. Older, similarly charming, but damned by his willingness to work with the Nazis, Belloq uses the knowledge he has acquired to exert dominion over those suffering from an inferior preparation. This manipulative Frenchman is first met in the Peruvian jungle, his smoky entrance packed with visual allusions to (then recent) works that deal with unscrupulous and unchecked colonial intent - from the spears that hurtle straight into the camera, as in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, to the notion that a white invader can leverage his willingness to lie to an indigenous people and incite them to advantageous violence (as in Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novella that inspired Coppola's bad acid trip). Belloq is drunk - quite literally at one point - on his own power, an egotistical self-assurance that powers his eventual undoing. 

These call-and-response contrasts are just one arrow in Raiders of The Lost Ark's quiver though, a subliminal pulse that provides clues and context around a never-ending succession of bravura action sequences. The film's latter half is truly breathless. Scenes and situations bleed into each other; on-screen excitement behaving like a series of musical movements rather than strict, or even logical, incident. The strongest of these passages begins with Marion and Jones trapped in the snake-filled crypt that used to house The Ark of the Covenant. Indy manages to topple an enormous statue of Anubis, opening up an improvised exit out of this writhing mausoleum. Marion ventures forth first, stumbling into a chamber filled with desiccated horrors straight out of a Lucio Fulci film. Shrunken and shrivelled bodies wheeze then collapse out of their cluttered coffins, crowding and clawing at our shrieking heroine. 

Eventually Jones takes her hand, dragging her out of this nightmare. They topple an enormous sandstone block and find themselves on an impromptu airfield. The transition is clearly absurd - the Nazis have never thought to have even a brief nose around the crumbling catacomb that overlooks where they have settled their experimental aircraft? - but the passage from one problem to another is carried by how this new puzzle is presented and arranged: an undulating groan from the twin engines of a flying wing, an anachronistically futuristic craft surrounded by sand-caked staff who hurry back and forth. We hear the obstacle, and the danger it implies, long before Indy has had a chance to scurry all over it. A panting lunge directly into another fight might've lurched, instead Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn allow assessment to assert itself in these scenes. Jones and Marion sneak away from a sunken tomb towards a collection of barrels housed in a quiet corner of the airstrip. They discuss the imminent flight of the Ark away from this place before the film cuts to gloating Nazis, drinking and sunning themselves while their destinies are about to be cemented by gee-whiz machinery. 

The resulting mayhem is a series of mounting and intersecting calamities, with characters repeatedly thwarted and frustrated when attempting to deal with larger, impending perils. The inexpert-but-enthusiastic Marion and an increasingly swollen Indy slowly pick away at Afrika Korp arrogance until the attendant heavies are either whisked up the side of the prototype plane or riddled with bullets, all while flames lick at petrol dumps. The inevitable detonation is a physical effect, captured on the day from a telescopic perspective that tracks a white shockwave as it carries along the desert floor and underneath our fleeing heroes' feet, making every grain of sand stand on end. After a couple of brief asides, one of which invokes the Jones name as a spectre of calamity, we're being ushered towards the next spectacle. John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra launch into Desert Chase, a seven minute musical cue that batters back-and-forth between two voices: a galloping heroism ascribed to Indiana Jones and his horse and the mechanically regimented bark of a trundling German truck convoy. 

The sequence that follows provides a bridge between the seminal rodeo stunt work seen in John Ford's Stagecoach and The Road Warrior's (released six months after Raiders) description of a Neolithic biker gang hunting down a leaking Mack truck: Indy (Harrison Ford, as doubled by stunt men Terry Leonard, Charles Waters and Vic Armstrong) dismounts his horse, at speed, to scramble around the canvas cover of a mocked-up Mercedes, fighting off all-comers. Raiders hinges on the idea of a Godly historical artefact not only being real but actually physically obtainable in this present of 1936. It is a link to humanity's distant past - when we conversed with a higher power - that promises to confer unimaginable boons on its possessor. And so an idea of ownership drives this desert chase; the Ark as a touchable object that is traded back-and-forth between two warring parties. The crux of Raiders then - denying Hitler his prize - is expressed literally through action with Jones violently commandeering the vehicle housing the sacred testimony of the Israelites. As with the airfield fight, the sense of danger is not simply derived from one source. 

As well as the other Nazi trucks, cars and their mounted machine-guns, Indy must avoid collapsing building sites while driving along dirt roads that overlook bottomless chasms. He's not just hauling the Ark either, his truck also contains a squad of grizzled infantrymen, equally able to navigate the flapping carapace of a swerving semi. Jones isn't safe in the truck's cab. Although he is able to shake off several of his creeping foes, one assassin slips through the crashing palm leaves to blast a hole through Indy's arm. The injury is accompanied by fizzing blast of blood, the sort of visceral punctuation completely lacking in the rubbery conflict of modern blockbusters. Jones is now wounded and noticeably weakened, just in time for the most sensible, and therefore most dangerous, DAK trooper to make his way towards the head of the vehicle. Stunt man Sergio Mioni plays the tough who comes sailing in through the driver's window, crashing into Indy before quickly recognising that his opponent is wincing and clutching at his oozing arm. The soldier hammers on the bleeding limb - staining his knuckles red - then hurls Jones out of the windshield head-first, narrowly avoiding the camera. 

Indy's path back to the driver's seat is a sublime series of stunts built around the idea that Jones cannot catch a break. The hood ornament bends then breaks when Indy attempts to hold on; the grill snaps and crumbles when his panicked hands grasp at it. The truck speeds up, intending to crush Indiana Jones against the backside of a lead automobile carrying the archaeologist's most senior enemies. A mixture of quick-thinking and suicidal bravery takes Jones underneath the vehicle, his body pained and rigid as it bounces along not so much a road but a track that has been impressed upon jumping, gravelly debris. Back on the topside of the truck Jones races back to the front, making short work of this motor vehicle climbing frame. Indy enters the same way as the tough who dethroned him: by kicking the usurper in his face. Jones batters the soldier's head against all available surfaces, then sends him out through what remains of the shattered windshield. Mioni's panicked invader is much less successful than his American enemy, quickly ending up as a smear on the truck's tires. Relentless but never exhausting, Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark dances confidently from set-piece to set-piece, finding new ways to trap and exasperate its disheveled subject. Victories are won through luck and a teeth-baring resilience - rather than the all-conquering might of syringe pricked musculature - by a hero who is the human embodiment of a bad penny. Easily in the conversation for the greatest of all American action films.

Dune

Set in a distant future where mankind has scattered itself amongst the stars, transforming their adopted planets into machines of pure, smoke-choked industry or monuments to a scattered and arcane past, Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune - the director sharing co-writer credits with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth - is an unusual proposition for an American financed space opera. Unlike, say, a Star Wars or a Star Trek, Villeneuve's Dune neither portrays humanity as obscure or idealised. Instead eight thousands years of relentless progress may have given us incredible technological leaps, like an instantaneous solution to the enormous distances associated with space travel, but society itself has congealed into a kind of pre-industrial feudalism. 

Throughout Villeneuve's Dune there's a sense that mankind has battered forward through the centuries to arrive at a point where, for all their boons, they are just better able to beam their failures and shortcomings out into space. This pitch black universe, rather than offering brand new opportunities or transcendental experiences, has turned out to be an enormous canvas, just waiting to be painted red with fire and blood. Timothée Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, the heir to House Atreides, a dukedom in a vast - and largely unseen - intergalactic empire underpinned by dutiful servants, who double as human computers, and a powerful cult of witches who plant prospects throughout the empire, armed with breeding instructions. Paul is the result of one of those procreations (if not necessarily the strict order that directed it), a young nobleman afflicted with involuntary glimpses of moments in his life he has yet to live. 

Although Paul's adventure remains incomplete here in terms of the original text - this telling concludes just as the young duke and his mother press deeper into the desert to join the mysterious Fremen - Villeneuve's film does register as a complete work, one centred around a parapsychological call and response within Paul's mind. This internalised conversation slowly overwhelms the shape and direction of the piece, carrying us away from rigid order, off towards an almost formless state of acquiesced myth. While still on his home planet of Caladan, a wind swept naval barracks, Paul dreams of the desert planet Arrakis and Zendaya's Chani, a beautiful young woman with blue on blue eyes. Although broadly walking a path that aligns with Campbellian heroics, the young Atreides is a more curious example of an anointed one; a character who slowly adjusts to his place within the manipulative, messianic, rhetoric whispered amongst nomads to massage his coming. 

A character like Luke Skywalker (an obvious point of comparison since George Lucas' film series clearly takes a great many cues from Herbert's work) might slowly attune himself to the same mysticisms that enveloped his father but the road to power he undertakes is deliberately portrayed as something to be seized. Paul Atreides is a different animal, a child raised amongst nobility and instructed in the politics of warfare. That's the aspect of the character defined by his father, Oscar Isaac's Duke Leto, and the seat of power Paul will come to hold should the Atreides reign remain uninterrupted. His mother, Rebecca Ferguson's Lady Jessica, has an even deeper stake in this child. We learn she had the power of design over his birth, selecting his gender to please his father and, in the process, thwarting the centuries long machinations of her spy masters the Bene Gesserit. Paul's is a destiny that isn't taken then, it's an ancient plan that he surrenders to. 

That Paul is male hasn't prevented Jessica from teaching him the ways of her all female religious order either. Slowly, he is coached to reproduce several techniques centred around coercion, the most powerful of which are the croaking words of a hag, a technique that allows the Bene Gesserit to overwhelm the weak-minded, bending them to their will. Paul's stewardship then goes beyond the basic act of training. He has, to some degree, been manufactured by Jessica; a notable bloodline directed - through her - towards the kind of figure that religions can be founded upon. Within Paul are the powers inherent to the male and female aspects of this strange universe working in, if not harmonious, then certainly complementary ways. The most terrifying aspect of Dune then is that Paul is conscious of this potential future and, eventually, works towards it; overcoming his disgust at having been physically and politically fabricated. The tension in Villeneuve's Dune is that of an assumption. What is it that makes Paul Atreides special? His tragic experiences? His possession of a mind that trespasses outside strictly ordered time and space? Or is it simply his willingness to be battered towards Godhood? 

THX 1138 - The George Lucas Director's Cut

George Lucas' first feature film imagines a near future that is chemically moderated and heedlessly consuming. THX 1138 presents a closed loop of production, humans working on vast assembly belts, heavily tranquilised to be able to perform the keyhole surgery style construction of their android overseers. This population is numb and mumbling, their home lives a mechanical routine of appliance assisted masturbation, capsule cocktails and the hammering, holographic, violence that passes for an evening's entertainment - the projected beatings metronomic enough to be used as a percussive lead-in to Nine Inch Nails' Mr. Self Destruct. Robert Duvall's THX is a worker on one of these robot manufacturing lines, his live-in partner, Maggie McOmie's LUH, is secretly varying his state-issued medicine doses, weaning him off the sedatives in the hope that they can then pursue a romantic relationship, in defiance of this society's laws. 

Despite the all-consuming repetition, putting together mechanical police officers is extremely dangerous work, often resulting in radiation leaks and fiery explosions. Workers, at the end of their seemingly lengthy shifts, are congratulated for completing their duties with only hundreds of lives ending. Later in the film, when THX and LUH have aroused suspicion in the spider-web of bureaucracy that monitors their day-to-day lives, we get some sense of why fatalities are so common. Burping his way through a particularly nauseous comedown, THX is mind-locked, an enforced halt that interrupts his painstaking tinkers, freezing him in a kind of seizure. In this expanded edit, the fizzing radioactive isotope THX had been handling, and attempting to thread into the face mask of a disassembled automaton, tumbles away from the mechanical arms he was animating. The tiny rod burns through anything it touches, setting off all manner of alarms. 

Although THX had found this precision work difficult in his tremoring condition, he was still able to slowly complete the process. This stuttering approach isn't good enough though, interrupted simply on the basis on a perceived mistake. The system simply will not tolerate this quiet irregularity in its components. Not that the lanky, cattle-prodding, cops that ceaselessly patrol the city operate with a perfect record either. We see a couple locked into degraded routines, striding purposefully into walls then cueing up a repeat step, as if expecting a different outcome. As with Lucas' later film Star Wars, there's a tension underlining THX 1138. You do not feel that this is a civilisation that has naturally tracked to this point of technological fluency, there are missing pieces, a pervading sense that something primitive and aberrant has been plugged into a pre-existing procedure. Originally released in 1971 THX 1138 was, like its space opera follow-up, given Lucas' now-customary Special Edition pass. THX's occurred in 2004, re-released to compliment the first DVD release of the Star Wars Trilogy. 

As with the Skywalker series, THX 1138 - The George Lucas Director's Cut has become the only version of the film currently available, leaving a couple of previous cuts and r-edits to languish on analogue formats like video cassette and LaserDisc. Lucas' alterations - conceived and executed following the production of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones - are, by now, either pleasantly quaint or conspicuously artificial. The quantum leap in special effects seen in Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith is, notably, still just out of reach here. The creature animations used to depict the mutated Shell Dwellers - originally played by actors with dwarfism, dressed in tatty monkey costumes - are the most obviously jarring, both in terms of their crude motion and the slippery, not-quite-perfect, interactions between the new character models and the vintage footage of Duvall. This admittedly fleeting sequence is a rough gear shift, conjuring up memories of the Jabba meeting that Lucas insists on keeping in Star Wars - a million dollar carbuncle squatting on the middle-act of an American classic.

Not all of this film's additions prickle an acute revulsion, a few inserts are actually beautiful. Skywalker Ranch and ILM's best work in this George Lucas Director's Cut come from the corrections applied to the previously spare android assembly line. The abstracted tinkering of the theatrical cut is given a golden wash, stressing both the unstable energy output of the construction materials and (strangely) the Champagne colourways of Pioneer's combination DVD and LaserDisc players - perhaps the film's intended home? Similarly, the low polygonal androids being repaired have the same simple structure and gleaming carapace as a Hajime Sorayama piece. The robot as a splayed, naked, body rather than just disassembled machinery. For the most part though these computer generated additions are used to expand the otherwise claustrophobic scope of the film, shrinking the captured photography of underground carparks or hotel lobbies into the corner of a frame, then filling in the new space with structures that grow away from the original image. 

These tweaks have a tidying effect on the film, stressing a hive-like sterility already present in the work. The added vertical and horizontal expanse is similar to that seen in the white-out corridors of The Empire Strikes Back's Cloud City or the Kamino clone farm that Obi-Wan investigates in Episode II. Lucas making the connective tissue between THX 1138 and Attack of the Clones - two films produced more than 30 years apart - explicit. Both films are premised on the unnerving horror of a human battery farm. A callous, unnatural, kind of reproduction presided over, in both instances, by tranquil beings completely disconnected from the shock experienced by a human witnessing the slavery of his race perpetuated on an industrial scale. THX 1138 explores a perspective that none of the Star Wars prequels (or sequels for that matter) seem interested in pursuing - that of a person with skin in the game. THX is the product, a genetically engineered person slowly finding their way out of a chemically maintained fog. The film traverses this shock of self-determination, examining how THX's struggling psyche copes with an avalanche of new information, before locking this now enlightened cog into a jet-powered car chase. 

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker doesn't pay shallow homage to the Buster Crabbe serials that wowed a young George Lucas. The film takes on both the structural and aesthetic peculiarities of those drip-fed cliffhangers; mixing the breathless, full-speed-ahead pacing with a mise en scene that is deliberately recycled from earlier, related sources. Writer-director JJ Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio seem to have arrived at this wavelength in their efforts to design their sequel as not just the ultimate summation of Star Wars as an organic story, but also as a piece that talks about, and comments on, the systems and mechanisms that have always underwritten the series.

Rise of Skywalker then is a strange film that attempts to account for both its place within this saga, and its various, dangling plots, as well as its status as a cultural touchpoint that is now stuck combining nostalgia cues with mythic storytelling to wring the maximum amount of spend from its audience. As a sequel to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rise of Skywalker is obtuse and contradictory, junking much of that film's playfulness and rolling sense of mystery to arrive at hard, extremely specific solutions. Rey has an identity forced on her that, at first contact, feels not just illogical but pandering. The answer that Rian Johnson's film so adequately provided is voided to place this young woman at the centre of another dynastic struggle.

George Lucas' monotone rhythms may be back but the knowledge they provide does, at least, build on ideas and inference scattered throughout the wider legend. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Ian McDiarmid's Emperor Palpatine took a moment to explain to his pupil, Anakin Skywalker, the ways in which the dark side of The Force could be used to manipulate our concepts of life and death. All Skywalker hears is a route to keeping his beloved wife alive, but the audience discovers something different. This tragic recounting of Darth Plaugueis' fate basically states that wrinkly old Sheev is a key figure in Skywalker's immaculate conception. Star Wars: The Force Awakens seemed to be contextualising Rey in similar terms - another rootless vessel of overwhelming power called into being to answer a specific, metaphysical need.

As it turns out, Rey's origins are rather blunter than that but the data (and it is data, rather than something a little more organic) Rise of Skywalker provides still ends up positioning the character in the same monstrous, emotionally tempestuous terms as her prequel ancestor. Just as Adam Driver's Kylo Ren has allowed the sequel filmmakers to salve and redesign Anakin's explosive, teenage tantrums, Daisy Ridley's Rey provides the opportunity to explore the path Anakin Skywalker chose not to take. Instead of siding with bottomless, ancient evil, Rey can call on the positive teachings and affirmations she has experienced to help guide her decision. Unlike Anakin (and, really, even Luke), Rey has matured in the company of masters who genuinely care for her. This very real, parental, affection allows her to vanquish not only a deeper, hereditary temptation, but the sickness it has transmitted out into the galaxy.

The Rise of Skywalker demands to be considered in these familial terms. Not only are we explicitly dealing with the children of the characters and movements that drove Lucas' original trilogy, the film is also built on top of the intriguing-but-discarded ideas detailed in JW Rinzler's wonderful The Making of... books. The half-formed, usually supernatural, notions that Lawrence Kasdan or Lucas only briefly considered are brushed up here and reevaluated. This necromancy doesn't always work, indeed a number of the more in-your-face, character specific callbacks flounder so badly because they ask the audience to engage, emotionally, with a film that has built itself, almost completely, out of rolling action and hyperbolic imagery. Terrio and Abrams don't accomplish the impossible then but they do deliver a conclusion that feels indebted to a series of films that has run the gamut from genre-defining classic to infuriating waste of time.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - TELL ME ABOUT IT STUD

JJ Abrams can pile on as much C3PO-with-murder-eyes, stroke Evil-Rey-is-Kylo-Ren's-saucy-Dagobah-tree-fantasy misdirection as he likes, the one thing you cannot take away from the Star Wars series is the sheer, awe-inspiring scale of John Williams' music. A couple of creeping notes and you're instantly transported to this place of space opera adulation that you might not even otherwise possess. That's the power in Williams' brooding, heroic score - it's authored - connecting you with an instant sense of fondness that no temp track snippet could ever inspire. 

Return of the Jedi

Viewed hot on the heels of the Prequel Trilogy, Return of the Jedi sings, managing to tell an emotionally engaging story that thrives on character moments. Jedi is simple, once the gang has disposed of the Hutt fraternity the focus narrows to two mutually supportive storylines - the rebel army's attempts to scuttle the second Death Star and Luke's collision course with Vader. Unlike the messy second trilogy, there is very clearly a main character, Luke Skywalker. His mission is both effortlessly understood and thematically rich.

It would be easy to frame Luke and Vader's confrontation as two gunslingers lumbering up to see who's top dog, but that requires an animosity that neither character possesses. Vader's intentions are particularly cloudy, we're not sure if he's preparing to invite his son into the family business or staging a needlessly complicated suicide attempt. When he talks to Luke he rambles on about fate and the inevitability of Skywalker corruption. Vader is old and broken, a deadbeat father who could never fully pull himself together. Lacking any sense of certainty other than violence, Vader cannot understand his son.

Vader's thinking is built on presumption, he assumes he understands Luke's dilemma, but he doesn't. Neither, for that matter, does Yoda. The ancient Jedi coaches caution first and foremost. He understands the inevitability of Luke and Vader's conflict but his ability, or willingness, to guide is slim. Vader and Yoda both think in the abstract, they understand their power as an ability to tap into something greater than themselves.

Since they both consider this power ultimately unknowable they allow this intangible might to steer them. They are passengers. Luke is not. The Force does not overwhelm his thinking, it is a tool in his arsenal. Luke has not only made peace with his heritage, he has decided it can be changed. Fate is malleable, Vader can be saved. Luke is a redeemer, he allows himself to be captured by his father and The Emperor because it isn't a setback. Luke's identity is fixed and immutable. They won't change him, he will transform them.

This is what makes him so threatening, Luke is certain that no matter what he will not waver. Yoda feared what close proximity to Vader and Palpatine would do to the young Jedi. The father turned, why not the son? He needn't have worried, Luke is not so weak willed. When father and son meet on Endor, Vader attempts to gloat about his son's capture. Luke brushes it off, then lasers in on their predicament. There is good in Vader and Luke intends to draw it out.

Vader is instantly subordinated. As the prequels went to great lengths to illustrate, Anakin Skywalker has always been a hollow child desperately seeking approval. He wasn't born into the Jedi's inhuman religion, he was captured by it, crowbarred into a lifestyle that did not suit him. All his misery rooted in a blood-test and some half-remembered prophecy. Luke is different, he sought this life out, seizing it in the company of Obi-Wan Kenobi and conquering it under the tutelage of Yoda.

Luke goes even further than his masters, able to control both The Force and the untidy emotional drives that the Jedi feared and buried. The Prequels are built around an order of Knights that shrink at the sight of their own shadow. Any dalliance with their humanity is treated as an opportunity for total calamity. Luke Skywalker has transcended this limitation. He feels and loves, willing to lay down his life in order to draw out his father's goodness.

When the Force Ghosts appear to Luke at the end of Jedi, they are acknowledging not only his success but also his superiority. He did what they could not. Luke knows love, he felt it and expressed it. He understood its value and therefore its power. Luke walked into Jabba's lair unarmed to rescue his best friend, he removed himself from Leia and the Endor rebels as soon as he realised Vader could track his Force signature.

Luke will die for the people he loves and is willing to bet, given the opportunity, his father will too. The Emperor scoffs and ridicules Luke, assured of his fall, but the son is playing a longer, deeper con. Luke appeals to Vader on the most basic, biological imperative - blood. Service to a dusty old crone is nothing measured against the adulation of your child. In this moment, wracked by Force lightning, Luke is the master offering Vader salvation.

Worry surrounds Luke in Return of the Jedi. His masters advise prudence and his sister pleads with him to flee. Even worse, his enemies assume that Luke's defeat has already been written. Rather than try and understand what Luke has become, everyone appraises this chosen one using their own limitations. When he sets the pyre that burns away his father, Luke Skywalker has become the most dangerous being in the universe. He has surpassed them all, Sith and Jedi alike.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

The prequel series is marked by a conceptual dithering. Writer-director George Lucas invokes certain themes and ideas but only in a superficial way, so you end up wondering if the insinuation was even intentional. Big, interesting topics exist only as suggestions, colouring the edges of incessantly bland, inhuman exchanges that defy any sense of personal identification. In The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones it's apparent to the audience that the Jedi are not the infallible collective of legend. Their robotic behaviour doesn't mark them as intergalactic samurai, it's the obvious, preventable flaw that is very clearly sowing the seeds of their impending downfall. In that respect then Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a marked improvement. It's an iterative instalment that at least attempts to address some of this phase's communication issues. Most immediately this means giving Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker someone to talk to who is sympathetic to his experience. 

Skywalker doesn't normally hold conversations you see. Instead he bubbles over, spewing venom and invective at whoever is near, usually either his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi or his wife Senator Amidala. Revenge gives him someone prepared to talk through his thinking rather than just pull a grim face then try to forget he's even spoken at all. Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine fills a crucial role for Skywalker then. He offers a guidance and understanding missing elsewhere. He doesn't criticise Anakin for his feelings either, he sympathises and even congratulates him. Palpatine wins Skywalker's heart by positively reinforcing the violent, impulsive behaviour that will be soon be useful, once their insurrection is underway. Anakin has never had a father figure in his life and, unfortunately, none of the Jedi seemed willing to take on the role. The late Qui-Gon Jinn, played by Liam Neeson, came the closest before his own, untimely death but the senior Jedi who have followed are either dogmatic and numb or openly contemptuous of little Ani. 

On the rare occasion that any of the Jedi do attempt to engage with their messiah (for that is exactly what they all believe him to be), they assault him with infuriating rhetoric that condemns perfectly reasonable feelings of adolescent inadequacy. Palpatine takes the opposite tact. He flatters and encourages the resentment seeping out of Anakin, grooming him essentially. Palpatine presents himself as a friend who claims, very convincingly, to understand the dark, terrible humanity that lurks inside this troubled young man. Not only is this what the character Anakin Skywalker wants, it's exactly what this film (this series) needs. Their coupling reinvigorates Revenge. Suddenly there's a foothold for investment that goes beyond simply appreciating ILM's maximalist approach to computer-generated special effects. The two warlocks conspire; Palpatine slowly seducing Anakin and taking an almost sexual delight in his apprentice's pain and moral decay. This Emperor then is, basically, Dracula: an impossibly old evil that fosters then feeds off youth and turmoil. All told, the Star Wars prequels are a deeply peculiar series of films. George Lucas, in subordinating his space opera to the pop iconography of Ralph McQuarrie's gas-masked menace, has built three-acts around a vapid, hollow monster who is, tragically, simply desperate for love and direction. They'd be a wonderfully strange science-fiction triptych if they weren't so relentlessly dull.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Like The Phantom Menace before it, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones occupies a non-committal middle ground that strangles any possible hint of enjoyment. Anakin Skywalker's slow metamorphosis from a nasty, entitled brat into a nasty, entitled murderer is played at arm's length. Writer-director George Lucas unwilling to really spend time and engage with who, or what, Hayden Christensen's hero is becoming. Therefore Skywalker's story is bracketed off from the usual derring-do, told to us in embarrassed gasps. Finally let off the Jedi's leash to protect ( or perhaps more accurately, harass) Natalie Portman's Senator Amidala, Skywalker conjures up a reason to return to Tatooine and visit his mother. In a profoundly sterile film that centres around the soulless reproduction of an entire race, Anakin's uncomplicated - even childlike - desire plays as refreshingly human. Once home, Skywalker follows a harrowing breadcrumb trail, eventually finding his mother bound and brutalised in a Tusken Raider camp. He reacts as Ethan Edwards, the bigoted cowboy from The Searchers, might have: he slaughters each and every one of the Sand People.

Now while this reaction is neither moral nor heroic, it is emotionally coherent; especially coming from a venomous, supernaturally powerful teenager. Again, self-serving wickedness just seems so much more understandable than Master Yoda's alarming desire to scoop up the galaxy's Force sensitive children, separate them from their families and cultures, then rechristen them as Younglings. Lucas, perhaps mindful of revelling in such knee-jerk violence in a PG rated film, keeps Skywalker physically and emotionally detached from the audience. We're never allowed to occupy the same head space as this murderous Jedi. Anakin's poison is kept at a discreet and revolted distance. The fate of Shmi Skywalker is a crucial moment in the Star Wars prequels though, indicative of an alarming disconnect between what we're being told and what we're actually being shown. That Shmi was consigned to slavery at all voids any moral high ground that the Jedi presume to occupy. All the money and resources at their disposal and they couldn't buy out Shmi's contract then place her in some apartment on Coruscant? Is the emotional and spiritual well-being of their messiah so unimportant to them? Lucas makes the Jedi a monastic cult of Knights who kidnap and brainwash the vulnerable, demanding they measure up to a set of ideals that prioritises emotional remoteness. These are the people we're supposed to root for?

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Star Wars, thanks to some canny salesmanship by George Lucas, quickly became the poster boy for a deluge of blockbuster movies patterned after Joseph Campbell's studies into the monomyth. Although the Luke Skywalker we see in Star Wars isn't a particularly interesting character, he does, per Campbell's instruction, depart from the safety of home and experience profound change in his life. This personal and spiritual growth is something that he himself chooses to pursue. We watch Luke face challenges big and small, building a repertoire of skills that could conceivably take him to the point where he is able to dead-eye a pinhole vent on a cosmic death machine.

In 1977 George Lucas understood how to build a relationship between a character and his audience. Luke is a dreamer who transforms his aspirations into action. He also displays a certain nobility of character, one that allows him to hold steadfast while the world around him becomes insane. We watch him become a man basically. One of the many reasons why Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace doesn't work is that it doesn't have a character we can completely track this kind of growth with. Anakin Skywalker, although crowbarred into this role, cannot fill it. We find him as a complete person, despite his lack of years.

Once discovered by the Jedi order, Anakin is subjected to tests that instantly confirm him as special. This point is hammered home by an exchange between Qui-Gon Jinn and Anakin's mother Shmi that explicitly organises the child as an intergalactic anointed one. We don't watch Anakin becoming something more, he's already an expert blessed with supernatural Soap Box Derby skills. David Lynch's adaptation of Dune took a similar approach with another Man-God rising out of boring political turmoil, but that film at least had the sense to lose its messiah in escalating, identity-shredding violence.

Dramatically, The Phantom Menace is a series of dead ends. Anakin's brush with war is about as damaging as a roller-coaster ride and, despite Pernilla August's nervous, beleaguered performance as Shmi, neither is there any great revelation lying at the heart of her son's conception. Given the hesitant chemistry between Liam Neeson's Jinn and August's Shmi, it's a shame that Qui-Gon isn't a sinner Jedi seeking amends by rescuing his enslaved, illegitimate child. Unfortunately, Anakin Skywalker really was just willed into being by The Force. It's a purely mechanical development that robs everyone around it of any possible agency. That's The Phantom Menace in a nutshell. A strange, passionless film that reads more like an information dump than an organically told tale.

SDCC Nostalgia Boner 3 - Star Wars: The Force Awakens

A weepy, practical effects reel to get the comic con crowds whipped up into a frenzy before they all shuffled out to a John Williams concert and made Kevin Smith feel like a piece of shit. Still, it's really encouraging to see Star Wars migrating back to physical effects. If there's one thing that the Harry Potter series repeatedly hammered home it was that digital stages are nothing compared to expertly dressed sets.

STARKILLER

So far, the most impressive aspect of JJ Abrams' approach to Star Wars is that the director isn't content to just sit back and replay specific beats from previous, successful films. He's gone back a little further and fell in love with the concept universe Ralph McQuarrie dreamt up. That scrapped Star Destroyer is more exciting than anything on offer in the Terminator: Genisys trailers. It's world-building rather than just reconfiguring.

AWAKEN

Star Wars hasn't looked this visually dynamic since Genndy Tartakovsky was quietly shown the door. Stylistically our first look at Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens is the complete opposite of the static wides used to tease Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Instead we've got John Boyega stumbling towards us gasping and the camera pushing-in on Daisy Ridley dressed like a Ralph McQuarrie doodle. A trio of tight close-ups reintroduce us to the Empire's bully boys, the clipped, insert inflected energy of the shots stressing something almost hand-held. Everything's moving, from the Falcon's graceful loop de loop to the hammering, lopsided stride of the newest Sith lord.

BENDY FINGER

A recently surfaced blooper reel for Star Wars. Outtake delights include drunk Cantina aliens acting belligerent, the cream of British acting talent pulling faces, and wildly over-egged explosions. That Storm Trooper looks concussed! If nothing else, this two minute montage gives us a brief glimpse at the raw shit poor, thankless Marcia Lucas had to beef up.

REVENGE

Tinker

With the Star Wars Blu-Rays finally on their way, can we expect yet more legacy tinkering from George Lucas and his army of ILM Yes Men? Badass Digest reckons we can. The above clip purports to include a leaked sound file from the new HD masters (married to vid footage from the existing DVD release); specifically some audio additions to the throne room throwdown from Return of the Jedi. I'm sure strongly worded boycott petitions are being drafted as we SPEAK.

EXCISED

After an underwhelming tease showing Luke boringly constructing his Return of the Jedi lightsaber in a papier-mâché cave, I wasn't exactly giddy at the opportunity to see more cutting room floor sweepings from the incoming Star Wars saga box sets. Maybe that's why the raw, high plains physicality of Luke disappearing into a violent sandstorm in this Blu-Ray hype clip got my attention? Jedi's not exactly known for its lyricism. The new glimpses of massive, practical sets, and vanity close-ups of ugly space puppets helped too.

The Empire Strikes Back

The Empire Strikes Back is Darth Vader's movie top to bottom. George Lucas has spoken at length about how the prequel trilogy firmly contextualises the entire Star Wars saga as a redemptive arc for Anakin Skywalker, but a substantial amount of those threads begin here. The film moves on Vader's whims and desires. Armed with a continent sized spacecraft, the Sith lord scours the galaxy searching for his son, and other Force sensitive, Luke Skywalker. Vader's hold on the film is such that eventually his image begins to bleed out into the world. At his most powerful Vader is surrounded by tense, screaming, industrial facilities, all cast in his piteous pitch black.

Popular culture usually identifies Vader as an insoluble leader figure in the Galactic Empire so it's interesting, when actually watching the films, to see that this isn't quite the case. In the original Star Wars Vader is more of a henchman to Peter Cushing's lizardy politician. Rather than sit high in the imperial hierarchy, Vader seems to be a brutal wizard barely tolerated by his fascist contemporaries. Likewise, in Empire Vader issues orders, but subordinates wait for a nod from their actual superiors before proceeding. Vader is a phantom, drifting about observation decks, punishing those whose mistakes keep him from his child. He exists in an untouchable bubble, separated from any notions of rank or military bureaucracy. He is hated and feared by all.

The only figure Vader answers to is a projected image of the Emperor. In the 1980 mint of this sequence, Vader communes with a boggle-eyed witch that wishes to transform young Luke into a corrupted ally. This Emperor delights in his minion's aggressive immorality, smiling at Vader's impassive solution. The recent DVD remix of this scene adds Ian McDiarmid, and a few lines to clarify some duplicity on behalf of Vader, lending the sequence an element of pleading. Beats of silence warp the intent and intonation of Vader's speech, stressing a yearning paternal interest. It's just about the only addition these films have been subjected to that demonstrates any sort of dramatic impulse.

"Coming to your Galaxy, next Summer!"

Today is the 30th anniversary of the US cinema release of The Empire Strikes Back. To celebrate, here's a vintage trailer! That's Harrison Ford on the shill, contemptuously struggling through mandatory ad copy. Eagle eyed viewers may notice a brief fragment of an unused scene at the 1:32 mark - C3PO vandalising a sign that marked a Wampa Ice Creature holding pen in the hopes of wrong-footing advancing Snowtroopers. Hopefully, Mr Lucas will get his shit dry sometime soon and release a BD set of the Original unaltered Trilogy. Anamorphic this time please.

"Somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now..."

Star Wars was 32 yesterday, so here's a vintage trailer! 20th Century Fox's pre-release shill-short is a curiosity in of itself, the sounds especially. It evokes a totally different mood having droning shriek music bracketing proceedings doesn't it? The lack of John Williams' triumphant fanfare makes everything seem rather desperate and fatalist. Our heroes will barely survive! They're pushing Chewie like a headliner too, his framing and the frequency of his profile shots in the opening seconds seems to posit him as the male lead. A rather excellent notion, I'm sure you'll agree. Contrast that with Han Solo's screen time, fleetingly glimpsed frantically plugging away at endless soldier robot thingies. What's his role? Maybe a quick death diversion whilst the Princess and her hirsute bodyguard make a break for it? Hopefully the plucky child manning their laser-cannons can keep the intergalactic fuzz off their tails! It's also quite amusing to hear mention of thousands of alien worlds, then have the trailer cut from a Sandperson to Ben Kenobi. He's from the wizard planet!

Star Wars

Viewed for the first time in an age, it's exciting to note how much of Star Wars' screen time is apportioned to two puppets bickering and struggling through a desert. Compared to the immediacy of the blockbusters the hugely successful film begot, it's almost an art house move. In these moments George Lucas and his team manage to wring a sympathetic, childlike, performance out of a remote control bin and a couple of bleeps - the minutiae of this universe is so well conceived that when R2 wanders down a dark sand crevice it's actually quite distressing.

Lucas' biggest coup is the pervasive, used-universe dressing. Technology in Star Wars isn't brand new or even clean, it's leaky trash, cobbled together by space pirates. It tells a story - a great civilisation has vanished, their whizz-tech now in the hands of simpletons and bushwhackers. The digital elements added along the years tend to undermine this distressed, analogue mood. It's impressive enough to see a sand monster sunbathing at the corner of a frame, we don't really need to see it capering in the foreground. The design work in Star Wars is imaginative enough to exist as the effect, without any need for hyper-mobility. It's a shame then that Lucas doesn't seem to agree; the original cinema release is only available (officially) in a deliberately marginalised, non-anamorphic DVD that requires zooming to fit the dimensions of a 16:9 television set.

Enough griping. It's easy to see why Star Wars became such an immediate success. Lucas stages two equally exciting, successive, climaxes. The daring rescue of Princess Leia would be quite enough for any usual hero yarn, not Lucas' though. As soon as the rescue party dock they're being outfitted for dog-fighting - blasting off in nimble X-Craft for a suicidal space war. The attack on the Death Star is still a thoroughly dazzling sequence. Aside from some incredible model work, it's refreshing to see so much absolute carnage. The tension, courtesy of editors Marcia Lucas, Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew, ratchets up into the stratosphere as stereotypical cosmic pilots are zipped and zapped by faceless Reich robots. Soon only The Chosen One is left. Use the Force Luke!