OUR CRITIC RIDES A TIME MACHINE

By RICHARD CORLISS

On June 3, 1977, I officially got old. Just back from the Cannes film Festival, I'd been told by my editors at New Times magazine to catch up with Star Wars, which had opened to phenomenal business. And from the moment of the opening crawl, I was baffled. All these dense factoids about Galactic Empires and Death Stars--it was like some nightmare of a pop quiz in a course I hadn't taken. The sets were Formica, the characters cardboard; the tale had drive but no depth, a tour at warp speed through an antiseptic landscape. I admired George Lucas' attention to detail, his Tolkien-like industry in creating a host of alien life-forms, but I remained unmoved. Peering at Star Wars through the telescope of my disinterest, I made this fearless box-office prediction: "The movie's 'legs' will prove as vulnerable as C-3PO's."

That was eons ago, in pop-cultural terms. Records were still on vinyl; CDs, VCRs, video games and home computers were barely dreamed of; and films were shown in theaters or, years later, on broadcast TV. Before Star Wars, a blockbuster movie was one that everybody, of every age, wanted to see once. The big hits of the '70s--Airport, Love Story, The Godfather, The Sting, Jaws--were broad based, reflecting the audience's demographic democracy. Star Wars devised a novel equation: here was a film every teenage boy wanted to see a dozen times. Lucas spoke, from his bionic heart, to the American boy's love for shiny gadgets, spiffy uniforms, authoritative-sounding technotalk and a hot rod that shoots really cool laser blasts. The film certified a new wisdom: megamovies were now the province of the young male.

Twenty years later, much has changed, including Star Wars--not the few minutes of noodling by Lucas and his effects mavens but the way we look at the film. Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future, or of the technologically advanced past that Lucas imagined. Today we can wallow in the film's sleek retro-kitsch; even the opening logo has acquired the classic blockiness of a '56 DeSoto. One can find endearment in the lame badinage of C-3PO, in Carrie Fisher's bagel-like hairdo, in the whining and bickering of the lead characters, in the varying pronunciations of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the planet Alderaan. The invocation to "trust your feelings" seems a woozy echo of the '67 Summer of Love, not the '77 summer of Wars, but Alec Guinness carries himself with the majesty of a Jedi knight and an acting peer. The climactic dogfight, copied in a quillion arcade games, has thrust and logic; it's the clearest, most potent narrative section of the movie.

By the end, with starsurfer Luke and antihero Han Solo and all the pudgy, pasty-faced rebel pilots finally functioning as a team, Star Wars has declared its intention: to be a celebration of communal subversiveness. The Jedi Force is itself a kind of cosmic team spirit. So it's appropriate that the movie come back into theaters to give kids of all ages the communal kick of a big-screen experience. Some early viewers have applauded the new material; others (the true believers) have booed it. But all cheer when the Millennium Falcon zaps into hyperspace; it is a video game a thousand people can play at once, and a time machine into movie memory. Who wouldn't enjoy being in a huge theater with a familiar friend from long ago and far, far away?

In 1997 I'm still old. The Star Wars generation is middle-aged. But Lucas' epic has got younger. Innocence will do that to a movie.

--By Richard Corliss