I don’t understand. Otherwise ?
Apart from all those things that are wrong with it, it was OK?
English humour FR!
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Amongst many other sources. I’ve always thought Star Wars was most heavily “influenced”* by Lord of the Rings. Our orphan hero, encouraged by a wise old man, sets of on a quest. On the journey he picks up an assortment of fellow crew members, they have some testing encounters along the way to an evil place inhabited by a dark and evil lord.
- = I wouldn’t want to accuse George Lucas of plagiarism.
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George Lucas is on record – many times – as saying that his biggest influence (certainly in the original trilogy) is Japanese cinema, specifically Akira Kurosawa. The plot and characters in the great director’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress, was a major inspiration. The other great influences Lucas drew on was the classical Hollywood Western, especially the films of Hawks, Ford and Budd Boetticher. The epics of Lean and Leone also permeate (what I’ve seen, at least) of the original 77-83 trilogy. All the other SW films I can’t comment on, as I have never seen them.
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Lucas lifted the whole Jedi piece straight from the Bene Geserit breeding programme for the Kwisach Haderach “chosen one” later butchered with the whole “medi chlorine’s” in phantom menace.
Folding space and shipping Guild concept was so well developed in Dune.
Star Wars were part of my early childhood and I love the films, I first read Dune probably aged 12 or so.
Apologies for the terrible spelling of some of the above but couldn’t be arsed to go checking and pasting.
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Not really. For me it was a very bad movie. 4 years before Lynch made Elephant man. And two years after Dune, Blue Velvet ( great, so addictive !).
Ah ok. I understand now. It’s like : « we were at a dinner tonight, in a restaurant. The meat was cold, there were some flies in the soup, the neighbours were very vulgar and noisy. But apart that, it was ok. «
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One of the great things about the picture business is that generally everyone is quite open about their influences and inspirations, and paying tribute – obliquely or otherwise – to one’s cinematic heroes and forebears is very common.
It started way back in the early silent period, between about 1905 and 1920, when Chaplin paid tribute to his hero Max Linder, and DW Griffith drew upon the impressive Italian epics of Giovanni Pastrone for his own monumental movies The Birth of A Nation and Intolerance.
There are a number of film-makers, mostly no longer with us, whose influence on every director from the 1970s on is inescapable and all-pervasive – Chaplin, Griffifth, Pastrone, Hitchcock, Carl Dreyer, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Victor Seastrom, Ingmar Bergman, Alice Guy-Blache, Keaton, Sergio Leone, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Robert Siodmak, FW Murnai, Satyajit Ray, Luis Buñuel, Jean luc Godard, Rene Clair, Sergo Paradjanov, David Lean, Michael Powell (with and without Emeric Pressberger), Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Joseph L Manciewicz, Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozo, Kenji Mizoguchi, Preston Sturges, Federico Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian, Billy Wilder, Sergei Eisenstein, Jules Dassin, etc etc
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I would like to add Andrei Tarkovsky to this otherwise iconic list!
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Lucas’ inspiration for Yoda is apparently the character Dersu Uzala from the movie of the same name. Dersu Uzala is a fantastic movie. I highly recommend it.
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Lucky you
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Hi FR,
I agree that it is deeply flawed, but there is still much that I enjoy. My preferred version is the expanded Fan Edit. For me the good includes:
Much of the set and costume design;
Some great casting;
The dialogue plucked striaght from the novel.
The poor includes:
The cube like ornithopters;
The use of voice over - show don’t tell;
The ending, with rain on Arakis;
The failure to show how deadly Paul and Jessica are as fighters;
The ‘weirding’ modules.
The issue in the film is that UNLESS you know the story the film is all but impenetrable, especially in the theatrical cut; although many of the elements have been borrowed by later writers and so modern audiences have been pre-programmed to a certain extent.
The opaque nature of the narrative is such that the big emotional beats just fail to land.
Agreed! I can’t get back the time wasted queuing up to buy tickets, then queuing up to see Episode 1 Phantom Menace. Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
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Dersu Uzala has to be seen at the pictures, it was filmed in 70mm. Lovely-looking picture, and Kurosawa’s only non-Japanese language film (Mosfilm of the USSR provided the funding).
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The last trilogy it’s made for turn off the brain ( completely).
I prefer the Mandalorian series approach.
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I have to confess that I didn’t read the book. Maybe I would have a bit different opinion then.
There’s very few good Sci Fi movies nowadays. A bit sad.
Recently I enjoyed a lot « DEVS « serial movie. I know, it’s not the kind of Sci Fi as Dune or Star Wars. But Sci Fi however, and it’s rare to see good ones.
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A solid recommendation, might make you, like me, sad about what could have been with this film.
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What made Blade Runner 2049 a great movie for me was the female characters.
Not the eye candy of Ana de Armas, more the totally visceral presence of Sylvia Hoeks and Carla Juri. Not to mention Robin Wright.
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