by Pauline Kael
The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head; for young audiences Star Wars is like getting a box of Cracker Jack which is all prizes. This is the writer-director George Lucas’s own film, subject to no business interference, yet it’s a film that’s totally uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect with the mass audience. There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the double sunset. It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. An hour into it, children say that they’re ready to see it all over again; that’s because it’s an assemblage of spare parts—it has no emotional grip. Star Wars may be the only movie in which the first time around the surprises are reassuring. (Going a second time would be like trying to read Catch-22 twice.) Even if you’ve been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension—a sense of wonder, perhaps. It’s an epic without a dream. But it’s probably the absence of wonder that accounts for the film’s special, huge success. The excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to childhood.
Maybe the only real inspiration involved in Star Wars was to set its sci-fi galaxy in the pop-culture past, and to turn old-movie ineptness into conscious Pop Art. And maybe there’s a touch of genius in keeping it so consistently what it is. even if this is the genius of the plodding. Lucas has got the tone of bad movies down pat: you never catch the actors deliberately acting badly, they just seem to be bad actors, on contract to Monogram or Republic, their klunky enthusiasm polished at the Ricky Nelson school of acting. In a gesture toward equality of the sexes, the high-school-cheerleader princess-in-distress talks tomboy-tough—Terry Moore with spunk. Is it because the picture is synthesized from the mythology of serials and old comic books that it didn’t occur to anybody that she could get The Force?
The New Yorker, September 26, 1977
2 thoughts on “PAULINE KAEL ON ‘STAR WARS’”
What a load of waffle lol, Star Wars is amazing
I’m replying to a years old comment from a decades old review, but tant pis. You can’t always measure when events strike you. The fact is, in two glorious little paragraphs, Kael summarized not just this film but the entire franchise and its growing pile of spin-offs, and in equal space dismissed them with perfect scorn. She gave to this film every column inch it deserves and not an inch more. For the money involved, the runtime, the manpower, the gross physical space, it is a laughably empty piece of art. You could only justify dedicating more space to it in hindsight; for the long-reaching damage it’s done to film, perhaps it deserves one paragraph more. But she left that to future critics. Unhappily, as this franchise grew, so film criticism shrank until it became a niche concern. Now people read these reviews with a tonic sense of nostalgia and pine for the days of good criticism. (Directors like Tarantino and David O’Russell dine out on that kind of nostalgia; it allows them to snub bad reviews of their own work.) But it was exactly these types of critic-proof machines, Star Wars and Spielberg’s juggernauts, that swept good criticism out of the mass reading diet. It’s a clear shame.