Tonight I watched Star Wars – or should I now call it ‘A New Hope’?

Anyway, the amazing thing is that I was 15 when the first Star Wars film was first released, so I was right in the target audience. Most people my age grew up with it, many becoming totally obsessed by it. Apart from being the right age, I am also a fairly big reader of science fiction, and watcher of SF films. Given all that, its a bit strange that I had never seen the original Star Wars until tonight.

Its hard to believe but its true. When the first film came out I was away at boarding school and was not in the habit of going to the cinema really. When it finally came out on VHS I decided that either the film lived up to all the hype, in which case I didn’t want to watch it on a tiny TV, or it didn’t live up to the hype, in which case I wasn’t too bothered about seeing it. I did catch a bit on TV once, but, as is my habit on christmas day, I fell asleep. When the ‘new’ films came out I saw them and bought them on DVD. And now that I have a big TV and surround sound amp I felt that it was worth getting the original films at last.

So what did I think? I thought it was enjoyable, but vastly over-rated. It looked and sounded good. The only way it showed its age was in the youthfulness of actors like Harrison Ford. Even the weird animals like the Banthas or Jabba looked OK (or is that due to CGI touching up?) Maybe I am being a bit of a heretic here, but I found it to be an average action film: exciting while being watched, but with nothing to really take away. I can’t see why so many people get so obsessed with it.

Obviously I have seen clips and stills, I have played the video games and seen comedians doing impressions. I have seen loads of parodies of the film, been on the rides at Disneyland, and even visited the place in Tunisia where the desert scenes were filmed. So I thought I knew roughly what to expect. What I didn’t expect was to find that main characters on whom the film focused most of the time would be the two robots. And I still can’t get over how crappy they are as robots. In a place where anti-gravity has obviously been sussed, why would they build droids that run on wheels? If they know how to build speech into droids, why make some that can only squeek and whistle? How come guns that fire energy bolts have a recoil action on them? And why can you see the energy pulses go from gun to target? shouldn’t they move at the speed of light?