Lots of sci-fi this post. And a horror movie. Good to see AFI giving attention to some less-critically respected genres, even if they did pick the safest, most obvious works in each genre. Still, sci-fi and horror are sci-fi and horror, and their presence is a rare treat on this list. Let's savor that for a minute.
Ah, Star Wars. Holy cow, Star Wars. If The Wizard of Oz was the first movie on this list to hold a significant nostalgia-factor for me, Star Wars is the movie that holds the biggest nostalgia factor on the list, give or take Toy Story way back at the end. Whole swatches of my life are defined by the original Star Wars trilogy and the accompanying novelizations (plus all those Extended Universe works—Thrawn Trilogy all the way!), and I'm sure there are at least a couple other generations of kids who could say the same. I could write volumes in response to this movie. But I won't. Instead, I just want to point out the significance of AFI's preservation of the film's original title. Nowadays, this movie goes by Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, but the episode number and subtitle weren't added until after The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. That's important to note because it emphasizes how in 1977 Star Wars hadn't yet acquired a lot of the self-serious, mythological elements that came to define the series, like the nature of the Force, the specifics of Jedi philosophy, and the broader socio-political sweep of the titular Wars. Sure, there are hints of all that in Star Wars, but I get the feeling that a lot of those hints gained retroactive significance only after George Lucas and the sequels culled them into the scope of a larger series by adding Episode IV: A New Hope to the title [1]. What sometimes gets lost within the larger context of the sequels and prequels is just how childlike everything is in the original Star Wars. Not childish, mind you, but childlike, in the sense that the whole movie seems constructed with the sincere, innocent excitement of a child at play. With Star Wars, George Lucas has a singular vision of trying to recreate his childhood experience of watching sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon, so of course the movie plays out with wide-eyed attention to thrills and swashbuckling. People talk a lot about the heavy nostalgia of Lucas's other major early work, American Graffiti, but Star Wars is just as nostalgic an enterprise, if not more so; it's a movie about going to the movies as a kid, awed at the darkness of the theater and the striking light of the projected image. Fittingly, the film opens with the words "A long time ago," as if it's not just the plot but also the viewing of onscreen space battles that happened so many years in the past.
Psycho is still terrifying. It's not a shock-a-minute thrill ride or anything like that (in fact, there are really just three "scares" in the entire film), but when Hitchcock does decide to let rip with the horror, oh man, does he. And for a fifty-four-year-old horror movie in a genre whose scare factor doesn't tend to age that well (The Wolf Man, for example, is a fine movie, but not one likely to frighten modern audiences), that's saying something. Critics have done tons of analysis on how the cinematography and editing and sound design make moments like the infamous shower scene so viscerally frightening, and I agree with them wholeheartedly; the rapid cuts and screeching score in particular are scary in a way that I can't shake, even when I know to expect them. But I also have another, more subjective theory on why this movie continues to scare to add to all that fancy film school analysis: Psycho is still scary because it operates outside the cinematic conventions of its own subgenre. Here's what I mean by that: Psycho basically invented a whole new kind of horror movie, the slasher (in which pretty young people are murdered one-by-one by some menace; see also: Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc.), that ended up dominating the genre for a few decades. During all this domination, the slasher movie developed its own visual shorthand to scare audiences: killer POV camera, slow-building score that cuts silent right before the actual scare moment, and a whole host of other techniques that became so common that they became more of a signifier of fear than any sort of real scare. "Something scary is about the happen," they say. But Psycho, being the foundational text in the subgenre, doesn't have that convention to inform its cinematic style, so the frightening events happen in a way that feels completely alien—and therefore more startling—to modern audiences. Or maybe that's just me, and I'm a wimp. Either way, this movie rocks.
Out of all the films on this list, 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the one most hurt by my decision to not rewatch any movies I've already seen. Here's the deal: as of my most recent viewing, I did not like this movie; I found it tedious and needlessly glacial in its pacing, and the use of classical music in the score seemed overblown and portentous [2]. And then there was the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence, which felt horribly aged to me, a relic of psychedelia rather than the (what I then considered) superior, majestic sweep of the book's ending. I was a big fan of the book. And don't get me wrong, I respected things about the movie. I recognized that the camerawork was generally excellent, the special effects somehow still looked amazing (save for those awful color filters in the "...Beyond the Infinite" sequence), and I totally got behind the film's general philosophical—even religious—ambition of depicting mankind's encounter with the sublime transcendence of a power totally beyond human reckoning [3]. But that's all it was: respect. In the end, I reservedly respected the movie a whole lot more than I enjoyed it, and the parts I disliked, I disliked more than the parts I liked. And that's been my general feeling on the movie ever since. The thing is, though, I saw the movie as a senior in high school. A lot of things have changed about me since then, most relevantly to this discussion that I'm now much more likely to enjoy a movie based on its technical artistry and imagery than I was then. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that I would kind of love it if I saw it again. I probably will revisit the film soon. But I also think it's a valuable exercise in honesty to write down my long-held opinions on a film without altering them last-minute to something more in-line with the critical climate. Hence this post sans rewatch.
Next post, we'll finally hit a movie I haven't seen yet (The General, if you're curious). Until then, feel free to chastise me for my opinions about any of the movies here. Or you could agree with me; that's cool, too. Either way, I'm looking forward to hearing y'all's opinions. Until next time!
Read the previous entry in the series, #s 10-12 on the list, here.
Update: Read the next entry, #s 16-18, here.
1] Look no further than the novelization of each of the original movies for proof of this retroactive culling. Since the novels were written immediately following the release of each movie, each book is a fascinating time capsule of what the Star Wars series envisioned itself as at different times in its development. There's some weird, noncanonical stuff in those books, enough that it's clear that Lucas didn't exactly have a grand unification theory for the series until maybe Return of the Jedi. Throw in the totally bizarre (at least, in the context of what Star Wars would become) direct-to-paperback sequel, 1978's Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and you've got one head-scratching series identity.
2] Honestly, I think a big part of my problem with the classical pieces was my familiarity with them before seeing 2001. Pieces like "Also sprach Zarathustra" and "The Blue Danube" have been used in so many different cultural contexts (not the least of which is this cartoon, which I watched early and often in my childhood) that it was hard for me to separate those associations with the music. It's a weird and slightly parodic experience to picture cartoon ducks when I'm supposed to be in awe of waltzing spaceships. Now that I think about it, that may have been a large part of my problem with the film as a whole. It's such a famous, iconic movie that long before actually seeing it, I was already familiar with much of its imagery and signature moments through pop culture referentiality and parody. You can only see so many spoofs of that bone-to-spaceship cut, only so many Simpsons jokes, only so many tongue-in-cheek "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" appropriations, before the whole movie starts to feel a little laughable itself.
3] Say what you will about Arthur C. Clarke, but this recurring theme is his work knocks me flat every time. It's an incredibly powerful idea to me, and one that rings true not only with my Christian beliefs but also with my day-to-day experiences with creation. Humanity is so freaking tiny, man.
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