5/4/2023 0 Comments Unscramble flickery![]() The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis recently called it “a cradle-to-grave entertainment experience”, which is literally true. Now, with the series due to resume when The Force Awakens is released next month, I’m obliged to admit that Star Wars is inescapable. Portman, however, overcame her disdain and accepted the job, and I gradually caught up on DVD with the five episodes I’d missed. From then on, my attitude resembled that of Natalie Portman, who remembers shrugging indifferently when she was offered a role in the first prequel: “I was like, Star what?” I wasn’t tempted to see the sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, when they appeared early in the 1980s by the time the writer and director George Lucas added The Phantom Menace and two more prequels to the series between 19, I had made up my mind that only teenagers obsessed by gadgetry went to the cinema, so I left them to it. My enthusiasm faded soon enough, and I binned the poster. I liked this pair so much that I even bought a poster of them, which I pinned up in my college rooms in Oxford, discreetly out of sight of the student to whom I was teaching English literature. Upsetting traditional hierarchies, two metallic servants – the polished, prissy butler C-3PO and his squat companion R2-D2, apparently a dustbin with a brain – bossily managed the affairs of their accident-prone masters. Individuals were redefined as digital wraiths, whose data could be loaded on to a disc and disgorged from a machine as flickery holograms. I also had a preview of our cybernetic future. I sampled other worlds, peopled by creatures belonging to no known species, and I watched a blue planet like our own blow up in a re-enactment of the big bang. ![]() ![]() Star Wars deserved its terse, bold title: here was a cosmic carnival, a flaring light show that was violent but mercifully harmless. Two hours later I stumbled back into the empty streets, my head reeling as I hummed the fanfare by John Williams – a march through space scored for blaring trumpets and thunderous drums – that introduced a wild, unstoppable ride, a rollercoaster of giddy delights.
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