Feel the force

OKAY, let's get one thing straight before we go any further; I hate science fiction. I hate Star Trek, I loathe Dr Who, I abhor both Mulder and Scully with an equal passion and I especially despise Red fucking Dwarf. I don't want to hear your unblinking, goggle-eyed argument about how the latest season of Deep Space Nine has improved immeasurably since they introduced three new robots and brought back the Next Generation's script editor. Science fiction sucks and I defy anyone under 20 stone to tell me it has a place anywhere outside their over-strained hearts. Space-opera is the most despised of all genres, the last hiding place of the ugly and socially malformed and the only people who disagree with any of the above are immediately disqualified from the debate for ranting at their newspapers right now in correspondence-course Klingon. Science fiction fans are a large, but mercifully confined sect and we should gleefully mock them at every opportunity.

That said, I think it's safe to say that we all love Star Wars, don't we?

Whatever separates Luke Skywalker and Jabba The Hut from an unconvincing Star Trek extra in a hairy suit is admittedly paper- thin, but the facts are undeniable; every human male of a certain age is anticipating the release of the new Star Wars trilogy with an excitement we haven't seen since Three Wise Men started stalking a perfectly innocent star in the desert some years ago. Other science fiction movies come and go, but the Star Wars phenomenon has stayed with the public like a bad case of syphilis and there's no sign of it ever clearing up. The actual scale of the feat writer/director George Lucas accomplished by propelling a movie featuring Muppet-style aliens and funny, talking robots into the mainstream consciousness is often overlooked and certainly worth mentioning. Genre movies rarely stretch beyond their target audience, but the tiniest details of the Star Wars trilogy are regarded as the easiest questions in pub quizzes everywhere. After all, who can't tell me that Han Solo flies the Millennium Falcon? Who doesn't know that Luke's best friend on Tattooine was Biggs? Is there any two-legged life-form on Terra Firma unaware of the fact that Darth Vadar's real name is Anakin Skywalker? The most obscure Star Wars trivia is somehow considered socially acceptable in even the coolest circles these days; providing, of course, you're under 35. The age factor is a seemingly crude measurement of Star Wars devotion, but an accurate one nevertheless. Basically, if you can remember what it was like to be governed by someone prior to Margaret Thatcher then you probably can't tell your Wookies from your Nicholas Witchells. Anyone over 35 now must have been at least 13 years old when Star Wars was released 22 years ago and probably old enough to know better, but I'm happy to say that, at 29, I'm smack bang in the middle of what was 20th Century Fox's target audience. I participated in "the Star Wars experience". I was there, man, sucking my Kia-ora, as hypnotised and willing as Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan, when that seemingly endless Imperial Cruiser flew over my head. Every frame was a potential photograph in every Star Wars storybook I was soon to buy. Every character was an action figure, a transfer, a poster or a sticker I would have happily followed any stranger into any car to possess. Every line was a gem to be endlessly repeated. Star Wars was the first movie which was sold to kids using every conceivable method, from crisps and socks to comic-books and ice- lollies, and we could think of nothing else during the long, hot Summer of '77. Just as anyone seeing Jenny Agutter in Walkabout at an impressionable age has been erotically-imprinted on school uniforms for the rest of their lives, the Star Wars generation feel a rush of blood to the loins at the opening bars of John Williams' classic soundtrack. We weren't born. We were created. It's hard to believe now, but big Hollywood movies didn't always rely on special effects. The late Sixties and early Seventies saw an influx of serious-minded young innovators breaking into the field and an experimental shift towards a more adult, European style of movie- making which signalled to many that cinema was at last growing up. Star Wars, I'm delighted to say, killed this dead overnight and we were spared endless explorations of race, identity and gender and given something we could have on the side of our lunch-boxes. How tedious it must have been growing up during a period when Bonnie and Clyde was a box-office smash. Did kids actually knock on doors and ask their pals if they wanted to come out for a game of 'Funny Girl'? Star Wars fleshed out the notion of the cinema-goer as a consumer and, if we learned anything from the Eighties, customers must always get what we want. It was no longer enough to just give us a movie; the Star Wars generation want a multi-million dollar spectacular and every single cent has to be right up there on the screen. The end result of the Star Wars phenomenon is that we have an industry today where any movie costing less than $60 million and featuring less than three medium-sized explosions rarely holds the attention of a modern audience, but Star Wars was the first to deliver everything we craved within two hours of flimsy celluloid. Robots, mutants, light-sabres and aliens, all wrapped up in a fairy- tale about good guys rescuing a princess from the forces of darkness? Who wouldn't be mesmerised? Few would suggest that Star Wars was the greatest movie ever made, but a pseudo-historical adventure fusing science fiction, humour, romance and action together with its own, weird form of mysticism certainly made it the first of its kind and, like Connery's Bond and Armstrong's first steps on the moon, this fact alone pretty much guarantees immortality. Liam Neeson, one of the stars of the upcoming Star Wars prequel, the Phantom Menace, last week announced that the experience of working on these kinds of movies was so creatively crushing that he planned to retire from Hollywood altogether. His argument was that the very notion behind the modern blockbuster, trying to jam so much into a single movie, leaves little room for creativity and he was tired of being treated like background scenery or one of the digitally-enhanced aliens. Neeson may be right, but my own feeling is that Michael Collins could have done with the occasional speeder-bike chase and Schindler's List would certainly have been cooler if Neeson himself had faced Ralph Fiennes in the final act with a double-edged light-sabre. As one of Thatcher's Children, I want to experience everything when I go to the cinema and, if retiring from screen- acting means that Liam Neeson won't give us anything as tedious as Rob bloody Roy again then I'm writing to my MP and proposing that George Lucas is given a Bob Geldof-style, honorary knighthood immediately. As has always been the case, commercial success is regarded with suspicion by the eternally unmotivated. The colossal takings of the previous movie trilogy is currently estimated at $1.8 billion and this is only a fraction of the overall revenue created by the near- infinite merchandising machine. Internet conspiracy theories abound as to why the public have grasped these characters to their collective bosom and everything from subliminal experiments used to brainwash the BMX generation to George Lucas' links with NASA and the CIA can be found on countless unauthorised Star Wars web-sites and news-groups. The one possibility critics never take into account is that so many people like these movies because they are actually very, very entertaining. Michael Ignatieff or that unamusing Irish wit on Late Review are never going to deem Star Wars as important or worthy, yet audiences everywhere have voted with their cash and some are already queuing to see the first of the three prequels. The Star Wars franchise has touched more lives and excited more people about cinema than the entire works of Welles, Cocteau, Fellini and Truffaut and yet the very notion of The Empire Strikes Back as art would be an affront to the critical establishment as if populism and integrity were impossible to square. A common line of attack against the movies is Lucas' self- confessed cultural kleptomania. It's true that he had a hand in the pocket of just about everything which had ever come before him, from the old Flash Gordon Saturday morning serials to Joseph Campbell and Jack Kirby, but anyone who superimposes the X-wing dogfight at the end of Star Wars over the World War Two battle-sequence at the finale of 636 Squadron isn't being underhand or derivative. Lucas was just the first to sample everything we ever liked and mix it all together into something we had never seen before. The source material was never diminished by the arrival of Star Wars, but found itself completely reinvigorated thanks to a renewed interest by a whole new generation. American comic books, an industry I've worked in for the better part of a decade, were a major inspiration for Lucas, but they were dying on their feet until Star Wars made the fantastic marketable again. 2000AD, Britain's sole science fiction comic and, in many ways, all that's really left of the UK's comic book industry, was launched in the months following the release of the initial movie and, 22 years later, it's still going strong on the back of what must have seemed like a temporary trend. I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that I wouldn't be enjoying the tidy living I make today were it not for the effect Star Wars had on both me and society. Would we have had Superman The Movie or Indiana Jones if Star Wars had flopped? Would anyone have dared back Independence Day or Armageddon with $80 million budgets? Star Wars is directly responsible for more than half the movies we can see listed in the Top 100 highest-grossing flicks of all time and our culture would be undeniably different had it never existed. Star Wars was a great movie in the right place at the right time. If it had registered on our retinas even as little as a decade earlier, it would never have had the same impact. It rode the wave of the special effects explosion and was cynically marketed by evil geniuses, but I genuinely believe that the timing of its release is intrinsic to its success. Star Wars offered us an identifiable hero who came from a family at least as dysfunctional as our own in the Seventies. Luke Skywalker's mother was dead, he'd been dumped in the middle of nowhere with a boring aunt and uncle who didn't like him, his father was the most evil being in the universe and he was unwittingly developing an incestuous relationship with his natural sister. Star Wars might have been the same certificate as Lady and The Tramp, but it didn't pull any punches. Luke proved to the first generation of kids who were crying themselves to sleep every night because their Mums and Dads didn't live in the same house any more that you could be the son of Darth Vadar and still grow up to save the universe. The subconscious impact of this was enormous and a whole new generation of fatherless boys ate up the Lucas film mythology all over again when the movies were re-released last year to whet Earth's appetite for the Second Coming; also known as the new trilogy. The Phantom Menace is the most eagerly-anticipated movie ever made. However, as much as I'm looking forward to it, what could possibly live up to this kind of hype and expectation? As the end credits roll, the guy who's been sitting at the front of the queue which has been forming for weeks outside Mann's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles is inevitably going to realise that it's just two hours of sound and moving images like any other motion picture. The Phantom Menace isn't going to change his life in any immediate way. He's still going to hate his job. He's still going to be paying tax to a government he doesn't like and indirectly funding bombs NATO are dropping on children in Kosovo. He's still going to need a blast of his inhaler when a good-looking girl passes him in the street. But for those two hours on May 19, when The Phantom Menace opens in the United States, none of those things will matter. And maybe that's the whole point

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