Apollo 11: First Steps Edition

Off to the cinema to see Apollo 11: First Steps Edition, an edited-for-IMAX version of Apollo 11, a documentary about the Apollo 11 lunar mission of 1969. The full-length film came out earlier in the year and attracted rave reviews, but here in the UK it only had a limited cinema release. I missed it, but luckily the Science Museum is showing the IMAX version, so I saw that instead.

NASA's goal with the Apollo project was to land two people on the moon and return them safely to Earth, preferably by the end of the 1960s. Now, I don't want to spoil the film, but despite many perils - suffocation, mechanical failure, radiation, extreme heat and cold, the risk of a catastrophic explosion, space viruses, the ever-present threat that Richard Nixon might stow away inside the capsule - I can reveal that NASA knocked it out of the park.

The next time the psychologist tells me that I'm being childish I will show her this document which proves that I am an ADULT because it says so right there.

I saw the film at the IMAX theatre in The Science Museum, London. The original cut is 93 minutes long, but for IMAX screenings a special version has been created that condenses the film down to 45 minutes. Why? I have no idea. With adverts it comes to a neat hour, which perhaps fits the schedules of museums; or maybe the sound mixing or cropping was really hard, I don't know. I also don't know what was cut from the full version. First Steps generally skips over the voyages to and from the moon, and the moonwalk itself doesn't take very long, so perhaps that's where most of the editing happened.

The Science Museum preceded the film with adverts for Amazon Alexa, Dacia, Sky Movies, Land Rover, and Pokemon collector's cards. This is the world in which we're living in.

The film has an interesting genesis. Back in 1969 a chap called Theo Kamecke was asked by NASA to shoot a feature-length documentary on the Apollo project. He used a mixture of 65mm Todd-AO film cameras and standard 35mm. The result was Moonwalk One, which had a short cinema release in 1972 and fell into obscurity afterwards. A low-resolution version is available here, on the website of a school in the United States.

Apollo 11 is essentially a streamlined remake of Moonwalk One, minus the narration. It uses the same basic 65mm raw footage, and even has some of the same shots. The CGI is designed to look like Moonwalk One's cel animations. The footage is often spectacular and the restoration is incredible, but knowing that it was shot years before by someone else lessens Apollo 11's impact somewhat; it's not so much one man's vision as a construction, rather like the Apollo project itself. If nothing else it's a good advertisement for 65mm film.

Moonwalk One vs Apollo 11

Moonwalk One used a mixture of source footage, including TV images and animations. The film-makers decided to print the film on 35mm with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Time hasn't been kind to it. In this series of images Apollo 11 is at the top, the same shots in Moonwalk One are at the bottom from a poor-quality TV transfer.

Note how the new animation for Apollo 11 is designed to look like the animation for Moonwalk One; this sequence in particular was more or less identical.

In both cases the film-makers seem to have based their animations on the displays in mission control, as per the following shot from Apollo 11.

The film's music is however all-new. Composer Matt Morton used equipment that was available in 1969, including this huge Moog Modular:

The end result sounds like a modern interpretation of the mid-1970s "Berlin School" of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze.

On a visual level the restored footage looks awesome on an IMAX screen. The opening scenes of NASA's crawler transporter ferrying the giant Saturn V rocket to the pad are stunning, as is an extended tracking shot of the rocket powering into a beautiful blue sky.

It reminded me a little of the 1989 documentary For All Mankind, which was an overview of Apollo set to a shimmering ambient soundtrack by Brian Eno. For All Mankind was conceived as a non-narrative film with music and visuals only, but the end result had interview voiceovers; Apollo 11 on the other hand is made entirely of contemporary footage, with audio from news reports and Mission Control's conversations with the Apollo capsule. The music is mostly low-key and there are no talking heads.

The crew of Apollo 11 had a businesslike relationship, with Neil Armstrong in particular being famously reticent, and perhaps as a consequence the film didn't grab me on an emotional level. It was at times tense and awe-inspiring, but I can't say I felt anything. The triumphant ending, with numerous shots of the Stars and Stripes set to the tune of "Mother Country" by John Stewart, probably meant more to viewers in the United States. It felt out-of-place in a film that's otherwise emotionally restrained.

Apollo 11 has some 1960s-style split screen effects - in the sequence at the top Mission Control staff give their OK for landing.

Beyond that my only major criticism is that the film tails off when the 65mm footage runs out. The extensive shots of the launch preparation are mesmerising, and our introduction to the crew is clever - their lives are summarised with a series of efficient montages - but as the film goes on the direction becomes increasingly literal, until by the end it feels like a very good television documentary.

It's not a great film and won't be remembered in the same way people remember Grey Gardens or Man on Wire or Grizzly Man and so forth, but there's nothing obviously wrong with it and it passes the time.

In contrast to the formal environment of Apollo 11, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean of Apollo 12 sound like two friends at a sports match.

Problems? Despite the audio restoration the narration is at times hard to follow, and on the IMAX screen the subtitles that pop up when people first appear are too subtle to register. There were no 65mm cameras in space, so post-launch the filmmakers had to rely on grainy 16mm footage shot by the astronauts. On an IMAX screen the grain is enormous and looks like tapioca. The lunar excursion itself is illustrated mostly with still images taken by the astronauts with their Hasselblads. Neither of those two last points were really problems, they're just an inevitable consequence of NASA's understandable decision to prioritise science and sample return over carrying a 65mm film camera into space plus an operator and batteries and thousands of feet of film.

I learn from the internet that NASA originally wanted the director of Moonwalk One to recreate Aldrin and Armstrong's lunar walkabout on a soundstage! No, that's not a joke. They actually wanted the director to redo it so that it would look good. Imagine if they had gone ahead with it. There would be no end of conspiracy theories.

Richard Nixon spoke to the astronauts while they were on the moon, using up some of their precious time, but in Apollo 11 he only appears for a split-second; John F Kennedy has more screen time, and gets to deliver the coda. Take that, Richard Nixon.

For the record, Apollo 12 followed four months later, and again landed two people on the moon and returned them safely to Earth, also before the end of the 1960s. Apollo 13 followed after another four months, but an explosion on the way to the moon wrecked the service module; after an agonisingly tense trip around the moon the crew returned to a hero's welcome, having survived incredible odds. NASA tentatively planned seven more manned missions to the moon, but the last three were cancelled in 1970, with Apollo 17 bringing the lunar aspect of Apollo to a close in 1972.

At that point the remaining Apollo hardware was used for the Skylab space station, and also the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous of 1975. From 1975 onwards there was a long gap in the United States' manned space programme until the flight of Space Shuttle Columbia in 1981.

And working backwards, Apollo 10 was a test flight that went to the moon with an overweight lunar module that couldn't land and take off again; Apollo 9 was a test of the same hardware but in Earth orbit; Apollo 8 flew around the moon with just the command module; Apollo 7 was a gruelling long-duration test of the command module in Earth orbit; the earlier Apollo missions were flown without a crew. The only astronaut fatalities in the programme were caused by a fire during a ground test in what would retrospectively become Apollo 1.

I was born in the Skylab era and grew up with the Space Shuttle. As a kid I was aware of Apollo, but it belonged to a different age. People in the 1960s were naive and full of drugs. They imagined that aliens from space would come to Earth and enlighten us, but that didn't happen. Instead their future was Watergate, inflation, successive oil crises, The Limits to Growth, endless double albums by Chicago, and of course the unglamorous space travel of Alien and cyberpunk and Red Dwarf etc.

The next logical step after the moon was a mission to Mars, but Mars is a lot more difficult than the moon. It has more gravity than the moon and an atmosphere, so landing on it and surviving is harder. The economics are such that a simple there-and-back flight would be enormously inefficient, but conversely a lengthy stay would cost a fortune, and for what?

So, when I was a kid, I understood that we would all have to settle for less.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Off to the cinema to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the latest instalment in the long-running Star Wars space saga. You wait thirty-two years for a Star Wars film and then three come along at once.

To paraphrase Howard Hawks, The Last Jedi has three good scenes and lots of indifferent scenes. It's overlong and repetitive and, as is the fashion with modern Star Wars films, it feels like a combination of bits from other Star Wars films. Did I enjoy myself? I did, although I would have enjoyed myself slightly more if the film had been half an hour shorter.

Now that Disney has its hands on the franchise the films have become an annual event. Next year there will apparently be a film about space rogue Han Solo. The year after that, who knows? Something about the bounty hunters, probably. Or a variation of Fifty Shades of Grey starring sadistic torture droid EV-9D9, and hopefully Maggie Gyllenhaal. Or the swashbuckling adventures of Lobot, which will be both an action film and a poignant exploration of autism. I don't know. I don't work in Hollywood.

I saw the film at London's The Science Museum. The Last Jedi was shot on good old-fashioned 35mm film with 70mm IMAX inserts. The Science Museum is the only place in the UK and perhaps all of Europe screening an actual film print. I went into the film without preparation. I haven't see any of the trailers or read any of the reviews. The film was released in the UK on 14 December 2017. I saw it on 14 December 2017. I was of sound mind and body.

For Force and Rogue the Science Museum introduced the film with cheaply-animated graphics of Darth Vader and Chewbacca. This time they have persuaded one of the staff to do a little filmed introduction in which he is strangled by Darth Vader. Mid-way through the screening the fire alarm went off, and we all walked out into the street, and then we walked back into the theatre and the film resumed. The end.

I've written about Star Wars before. The first film, just called Star Wars, was released in 1977. It was an enormously popular space adventure notable for its striking special effects and its sincerity. Although director George Lucas was an arty film school hipster, he treated Star Wars as if it was a real film, like Lawrence of Arabia, even though it was set in space and had laser swords and spaceships and robots. Audiences worldwide were eager to be distracted from Gerald Ford and punk music and William Friedkin's Sorcerer so they lapped it up.

The long-awaited sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, was released in 1980. Although Lucas took the risky decision to finance it from his own pocket he didn't compromise his artistic vision; Empire had a peculiar structure and a downbeat tone. Our heroes spent the whole film running from one catastrophe after another. The film ended on a bleak note, with one of the heroes maimed both physically and mentally and another imprisoned in a block of stone.

On both an artistic and technical level Empire remains the high point of the series and one of the best science fiction adventures of all time. Even today it looks and sounds awesome, all blue and orange, with cool stop-motion models and a rocking soundtrack by top orchestral mastermind John Williams. It has class; very few films have class.

The original film trilogy came to an end in 1983 with Return of the Jedi, which threw all the flaws of the Star Wars series into stark relief. The first film had been assembled from things that inspired George Lucas. There were bits of Dune, Buck Rogers, Dambusters, Japanese Samurai films, old westerns, Lensman and so forth. The sci-fi treatment felt fresh and new, but by the time of Return of the Jedi the series had begun to cannibalise itself. Jedi is by no means a bad film; at the very least it resolved the original trilogy in the most efficient way possible that didn't result in people asking for their money back.

The fundamentally derivative nature of the series hurts The Last Jedi. Instead of drawing inspiration from outside the series, the filmmakers have remixed a collection of elements from the original films and from the flood of media that followed them. Yet again there is an evil superweapon which, yet again, has a weak point. For what must be only the second or third time, but feels like the millionth, our heroes easily infiltrate a heavily guarded military base by wearing captured uniforms. Again, the good guys attack enemy vehicles that can only fire forwards by approaching them directly from the front, instead of for example the sides. There is a technical problem that can only be resolved by plugging in some fuses, or opening a circuit board, at which point a door opens. Our heroes run for safety towards a spaceship which is blown up just before they reach it. And so forth.

The film picks up the story from The Force Awakens, which was released two years ago. I remember being impressed that it didn't suck. The new young cast could have been irritating but were instead charismatic, even Daisy Ridley with her plummy BBC English accent, and BB-8, the cute new robot. The treatment of homosexual love between dreamy space ace Poe Dameron and reluctant Imperial Stormtrooper Finn was sweet; the characterisation of the chief villain was unusually complex for a Star Wars film, although the absence of a truly hissable baddie left the film's drama feeling surprisingly low-stakes.

On the other hand John Williams' score had one good new theme but was otherwise weak, and the plot felt like a rewrite of the original film. Two years later I barely think of The Force Awakens, but then again there are very few things from 2015 that I think about, indeed I can barely remember 2015. It was the year in which no-one died. Sometimes I worry that all the sealed Force Awakens merchandise I bought might not pay for my retirement after all. The crate of Sphero BB-8 toys in particular cost a fortune. What if the batteries wear down? I'll have to pay someone in China to make new batteries.

The Force Awakens was overshadowed by last year's Rogue One, which was a prequel that filled in some of the storyline from just before Star Wars, using CGI to recreate some of that film's original cast, in the process returning Peter Cushing to the silver screen over twenty years after he died. Now that Christopher Lee is dead it would only require some deft legal manoeuvering to reboot Hammer's Dracula films with CGI versions of the original cast, perhaps including a CGI Ingrid Pitt, who is also dead. Madeline Smith and Gabrielle Drake are still alive. I hope there is a CGI model of them somewhere. I would pay money to borrow it.

Before you write in to complain, I am fully aware that Ingrid Pitt did not appear in any of Hammer's original Dracula films. I merely hope that some part of her is preserved so that she may continue to entertain audiences forevermore, even as whatever remains of her soul begs for the sweet release of oblivion. This may seem cruel and self-centered, and it is, but if this world was not created for my amusement, what was it created for? Or is the universe merely a byproduct of physical processes, created by no-one, for no purpose? Write your answers on a piece of paper and then throw it on the fire, because whatever answer you chose was wrong because there is no answer and we are all doomed.

The Force Awakens was overshadowed by last year's Rogue One, which despite production problems that resulted in a sometimes disjointed narrative - and another weak score, recorded in a rush when the original composer had to drop out - was possessed of some gripping and surprisingly brutal action sequences. The decision to make a darker film than its predecessor seemed self-conscious, and the two lead heroes were a bit dull, but overall the two films distracted me from the horror of life for a few hours, and for that I am grateful, but also resentful because they gave me hope in a world where hope is a lie.

But what about The Last Jedi? Is it any good? Is stoic hero Luke Skywalker a virgin? Sadly the film doesn't answer that. Did the audience applaud when space-princess-turned-military-commander Leia Organa appeared on the screen? No, they didn't. Leia is played by Carrie Fisher, who died almost a year ago to the day. The main credits end with a dedication to her; the audience applauded at that point. 2016 was the year in which everyone died, culminating in George Michael (25 December), Carrie Fisher (27 December) and Fisher's mother, Debbie Reynolds (28 December).

At the time it felt as if 2016 was Muhammed Ali and we were Sonny Liston; the year knocked us down in round one and then dared us to get up so it could knock us down again. Ali himself died in 2016. Sonny Liston was lucky. He died in 1970. If he had lived until 2016 he would have died as well, so it's perhaps lucky that he died earlier. The people who made The Last Jedi have access to a CGI model of Carrie Fisher - it was deployed briefly in Rogue One - but they have promised not to use it. Nonetheless it sits on a hard drive somewhere. Waiting.

Back to the film. Without wishing to spoil it, The Last Jedi borrows an awful lot from Empire. It begins and ends with an evacuation against seemingly impossible odds. The middle section has a training montage in which Daisy Ridley's Rey apparently teaches herself how to be a Jedi Master, while Luke Skywalker complains a lot; Yoda makes a cameo appearance, here rendered with CGI that's supposed to look like a foam puppet.

However it's not all Empire. The middle section also has a bit of James Bond with John Boyega's Finn and Kelly Marie Tran's Rose, a spunky space mechanic, who infiltrate an alien casino. This is, incidentally, when the fire alarm went off, so I missed a teeny-tiny bit of the action. The film has a bit of politics at this point. Our heroes turn into Jeremy Corbyn and decide to liberate the serfs and their livestock, although it's plainly obvious that just after our heroes escape the livestock will be either rounded up or killed and the serfs are put back to work. A short scene at the very end of the film suggests that the serfs were however inspired by Finn and Rose, so perhaps at some point they will rise up and slaughter their capitalist masters. Also, does that little kid use The Force to move a broom, or what?

I have to wonder. Do Islamic terrorists see themselves as freedom fighters? Do they see us as the evil empire, and our society as a den of rich parasites? Are they are in fact morally right, if legally wrong? As before, if you have any answers, keep them to yourself or write them on a piece of paper and burn it.

This section of the film has one of the three good scenes that I mentioned. A short but exciting chase on the back of an alien horse. What are the other two? There's a very short fight involving Luke Skywalker, in which it becomes apparent that all is not what it seems - the audience applauded this part, and I was impressed with its chutzpah. The highlight however is an extended light sabre battle involving a pair of unlikely allies. There's something audacious about it because it materialises out of thin air. It was the film's only punch-the-air moment.

Sadly however the second half of the film bogs down. The Rebel fleet becomes involved in a long chase with an Imperial squadron that seems to go on forever. Poe Dameron leads a rebellion against the Rebellion that goes around in a circle and leads nowhere. Along the way Laura Dern single-handedly destroys an Imperial Star Destroyer fleet with a tactic that made me wonder why it hadn't been tried before.* I found myself wondering why they gave her purple hair, and what happened to Laura Dern anyway? She was in Wild at Heart and Jurassic Park, and then seemed to fall down the same hole as Juliette Lewis and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

* EDIT: Now that everyone has seen the film several times, I'll elaborate. In a last-ditch effort to shake off the Imperial fleet, Laura Dern hyperspaces her frigate directly into the Imperial flagship. There is a soundless explosion of light. It's super-effective. Why didn't the Rebels try this against the Death Star? Why did the Empire bother with a Death Star, when the same destruction can be wrought by an asteroid fitted with a hyperspace drive? A more elegant dramatic solution hit me a few weeks later. Laura Dern is aware that her ship is being tracked by the Empire through hyperspace; in which case, why not hyperspace away, and then emerge directly into a black hole, or an enormous supergiant star? The Imperial fleet would follow her - and realise too late that they were being led to their doom. Back to the review.

By the final battle, which again borrows a lot from Empire, I found myself becoming bored. There are only so many times you can watch a bunch of attack craft speeding towards another bunch of vehicles before your brain starts to melt. My hunch is that the director had more of a handle on the physical action than the space battles. The fight scenes are exciting, the space battles dull, except for one short sequence in which the Millennium Falcon takes on some TIE Fighters and leads them through a crystalline tunnel. This was the film's fourth good scene. It was obviously a homage to a similar sequence in Return of the Jedi, but it worked.

Overall The Last Jedi passes the time but suffers badly from padding, especially in the second half. If every scene involving Laura Dern was cut it would have been slightly better. Not because Laura Dern is bad but because her "arc" is compartmentalised and pointless. The end.

What else? The toys this time are called Porgs. They're little bird things. At one point the chief villain uses the word spunk, in the old-fashioned way; the audience laughed. The film has a short cameo from Benicio del Toro, who plays a wasted variation of Han Solo. He's terrific but sadly only it in for a few minutes. Once again Gwendoline Christie is completely wasted behind a metal mask, although as before it's ambiguous whether she dies or not. A sequence in which a beloved main character survives certain death by floating through space is either heartwarming or ridiculous depending on how drunk you are. Andy Serkis is terrific as a motion captured CGI character, this time the evil Supreme Leader Snoke. I was surprised to learn that he voiced the character as well. His performance - with lots of close-ups of leering and bad teeth - is probably the best acting in the film. Lupita Nyong'o has a one-scene cameo that was presumably filmed in a shed somewhere. I missed her; her character in Force was entertaining.

Neither Mark Hammill nor Daisy Ridley can act, in a conventional way, but they both have charisma and Daisy Ridley has gusto, so I don't mind. Do you remember Anjelica Huston? She was a better actor than Daisy Ridley, but she didn't have charisma, so no-one remembers her nowadays. The cast of Star Wars were, for the most part, very limited actors, but they had charisma, and that goes a long way. Half of them were acting behind masks and they had more charisma than Anjelica Huston.

The Star Wars films take place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, which means that the writers have to be careful with language. The characters can't talk about miles or kilograms or hours or New York, because those things don't exist in the Star Wars universe. In this film a character uses the word "god", and another character uses the word "bastard", which surprised me; the Star Wars universe is usually very staid. A gag in which one character pretends to have a bad mobile phone conversation with another character feels un-Star Wars, and Yoda's cameo involves what may or may not be a metatextual dig at the masses of Star Wars books and merchandise that has appeared since 1977, or might not. I don't know. I just don't know, the end. Until next year.

Blade Runner 2049

Off to the cinema to see Blade Runner 2049, a new science fiction adventure starring Harrison Ford as an old man and Ryan Gosling as Jesus. Ford prepared for the role by growing old - he is 75 years old - and Ryan Gosling prepared for the role by not crying even though the cattle woke him up. Blade Runner 2049 is a sequel that nobody wanted but it's actually very good, so that's okay.

The original film came out long before you were born, and although very few people liked it at the time it's generally regarded as a minor classic nowadays. A minor classic if you are a film school student, a major classic if you love the way things look. The extraordinary production design was very influential. I have always felt that it had a core of fascinating ideas buried underneath a mediocre detective thriller, but more of that further down the page.

Blade Runner was released in June 1982, the exact very same month as ET, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, and John Carpenter's The Thing. Time has been kind to all of those films, but contemporary critics had a very different opinion. ET and Trek were well-received and went on to make big piles of money, ET in particular. The Thing and Blade Runner were however dismissed as hollow exercises in revolving gore effects and futuristic set design respectively. They eventually became popular on the home video market, then in its infancy, but in 1982 they seemed like self-indulgent wastes of money.

The two films have a surprising amount in common. They were released on the same day, June 25, the height of the summer blockbuster season. The villains are perfect duplicates of human beings, so perfect that they don't know they're fakes. Our hero has a devil of a time catching them, and at the end you're left wondering if he is a duplicate as well, or indeed whether it matters at all. Both films were intended to catapult their directors firmly into the A-list of Hollywood directing talent, but it didn't work out. John Carpenter's career never really recovered from The Thing and he spent the rest of his life directing intermittently brilliant B-movies.

In 1982 Ridley Scott was a brash limey wunderkind, the wave of the future, natural heir of Stanley Kubrick, hard-working advertising director made good, but this reputation took a hammering from the back-to-back failures of Blade Runner and Legend (1985), which lost even more money. Unlike John Carpenter he recovered, but although he subsequently masterminded a string of huge popular hits his output has been incredibly erratic. It's as if he picks scripts at random and then does the most incredible ultra-professional job of turning them into a film, but even Ridley Scott's special sauce isn't enough to compensate for the weak material. I wonder if it's a legacy of his days as a commercial director, when he had to take whatever work was available.

For every Gladiator or Black Hawk Down he has directed at least one huge flop (Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood) and half-a-dozen forgettable fillers such as White Squall or American Gangster or GI Jane that no-one remembers. On a visual level he seemed to hang up his laurels after Legend; his post-Legend films were good-looking but never class-leading. As a director of muscular sci-fi action horror films he was quickly overshadowed by James Cameron, and on an artistic level he never really had a distinctive voice. In the great ranking scheme of Hollywood directors people will always respect him more than the likes of Joel Schumacher or Tony Scott, who also filmed the 1980s with smoked-glass-filters and backlit steam, but imagine his career without Alien or Blade Runner; no-one would care very much about him. He would be David Puttnam or Howard Hughes.

~

I've always been ambivalent about Blade Runner. It's an interesting set of ideas buried underneath a boring film. On the surface it's a futuristic detective drama about a secret policeman, played by Harrison Ford, who has to track down organic robots who are almost indistinguishable from human beings. They are born with adult bodies and are given false memories of a past that they didn't have, and then shipped off into space to do jobs that human beings refuse to do. They are allowed to work alongside human beings but they aren't allowed to visit Earth, on pain of death. As the film opens, a team of these replicants has landed in Los Angeles. It seems that they want to have a word with the head of the corporation that created them and it's up to detective Deckard to find them and kill them.

Which he does, with some perfunctory detective work that mostly involves looking at a computer. As a thriller Blade Runner just doesn't work. Deckard does less sleuthing than the villains, and he's always a few steps behind them. Ultimately he fails to stop the chief baddie from achieving his goal and only escapes with his life because the villain has a crisis of conscience. This isn't necessarily the recipe for a bad film - Chinatown had a similarly hapless main character - but Blade Runner's detective plot is simplistic and uninteresting.

There's also a creepy romantic subplot in which Deckard romances a robot prostitute, played by Sean Young. The romance aspect was presumably mandated by the studio; it hasn't aged well. It's bad enough that Deckard forces himself on Rachel, but what makes it worse is that Deckard is aware she's essentially a brain-damaged child bred to be a rich man's plaything. Early in the film he humiliates her during an interrogation and reveals that he knows every detail of her fake past. If we accept that Deckard is a robot duplicate himself then the romance makes a bit more sense - he is emotionally simple and hasn't had his end off - but if that's the case the film becomes a big so-what, because the film doesn't follow through and, on a fundamental level, neither Deckard or Rachel come across as interesting people. All the other characters are essentially distinctive faces rather than people, and none of them do very much...

...with the exception of Rutger Hauer as lead villain Roy Batty. Hauer has limited screen time but is the most interesting actor in the film, playing the only interesting character. Although he is the bad guy Roy Batty is more sinned against than sinning. He was an unwanted child shipped off to fight in somebody else's war, and he now faces a lonely death because the robot duplicates are given a four-year lifespan. Whether this is a technical consequence of their construction or a deliberate attempt at planned obsolescence is left ambiguous, but either way it's horrible because the replicants are shown to be conscious and self-aware. They are aware of their own mortality, but unaware that death will strike them down in just a few years rather than in old age. They are presumably expected to die in battle, fed propaganda that they are fighting a desperate struggle against an implacable enemy, and the few that reach the end of the tours of duty are, I imagine, shipped back to Earth where they are euthanised, or perhaps they are simply dumped into space.

On a deeper level Blade Runner is essentially a soldiers-coming-home film along the likes of The Best Years of Our Lives or The Deer Hunter, in which soldiers are unable to reintegrate with a society that doesn't care what they have been through. The replicants are thrown on the trash heap by an ungrateful population that's not prepared to cut them some slack when the fighting is over.

As a soldiers-returning-home allegory and an early warning of the perils of genetic engineering Blade Runner could have been a stone-cold classic. If the film had concentrated on that, I would love it, but instead we have Deckard examining photographs and chasing leads like a futuristic Joe Friday. The film only really attempts to deal with its philosophical underpinnings right at the end, with a poignant final monologue apparently written by Rutger Hauer on the day of shooting. Batty accepts that despite living an extraordinary life he is doomed to die alone and unmourned, as are we all; he spares Deckard from certain death so that there is at least one person left to remember him. Batty raged against the dying of the light, but like Dylan Thomas' dad he died nonetheless.

Blade Runner raises far more questions than it answers. What does the common man in Blade Runner's universe think about the replicants? Is their existence widely-known? Can they reproduce by themselves? If they have superhuman strength, how come they don't realise that they're not human beings? Are they made to think that they are genuine human beings who have been genetically augmented? Why bother spending a fortune on replica human beings when the real thing is so cheap? Why make the replicants look like human beings at all? Why not make them ten feet tall and full of muscles? And so forth.

Sadly the film doesn't have time to answer any of those questions, and I imagine that Ridley Scott probably wasn't interested. He was a technically rigorous director whose goal was to get the script onto the screen as efficiently as possible without necessarily making a work of great art. Blade Runner suffers in comparison with idea-led sci-fi films such as Children of Men or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or even Total Recall because it doesn't work on the surface and the ideas aren't explored. It feels like sacrilege to compare Total Recall with Blade Runner, but in my opinion Recall was more successful at combining sci-fi ideas with a genre film.

Despite critical indifference two elements of Blade Runner attracted almost universal praise. Firstly there was its extraordinary look, which combined Scott's commercial-honed knack for arresting compositions with hyperdetailed street sets and state-of-the-art modelwork. The film took place in the rain-drenched darkness of Los Angeles circa 2019, in a future where the population is continually bombarded with animated billboards and advertising signs. It implies that Japan or perhaps China has achieved economic dominance over the United States - a scenario widely anticipated in the 1980s - and that although the human race has no shortage of bodies, the cramped and polluted conditions have made Los Angeles and by extension the entire world an oppressive hellhole. The film treads a fine line between accumulating subtle details in order to build an impressionistic portrait of a future world, and just introducing things arbitrarily so that we can marvel at them, but its world feels more coherent than that of the clones that followed.

Blade Runner's look and feel - and its dark, grim atmosphere, and occasional bouts of bloody violence - were lifted wholesale by films and computer games over the next thirty years. Eventually backlit steam and rain-flecked darkness became a cliché - the likes of 28 Days Later and Children of Men suggested a new visual language for science fiction - but Blade Runner is still an exceptionally handsome film.

The other thing that everybody except the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences liked was the score, which was composed by old-school synthesiser wizard Vangelis. Vangelis had a knack for catchy tunes, but beyond the beginning and end titles his music for Blade Runner was mostly atmosphere, performed with a mixture of acoustic piano, a big reverb unit, and a massive Yamaha CS-80 strings patch. He refused to release a proper soundtrack album until 1994, by happy coincidence in the middle of a boom in ambient electronic music ("Rachel's Song" was widely sampled, notably by Future Sound of London for "My Kingdom"). It overshadows the rest of his discography and has aged incredibly well.

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On to Blade Runner 2049. This time the music is by Hans Zimmer and some other guy. It briefly quotes Vangelis' theme but is otherwise standard Hans Zimmer, heavy on effects and texture rather than melodies. Zimmer shares with Vangelis a workflow whereby he sculpts the entire soundtrack in his home studio rather than writing music on paper for an orchestra, with the result that many of the musical cues in 2049 are sound effects rather than tunes. Alas his work on Blade Runner 2049 doesn't stand out, not because it's an insult to Vangelis' music but simply because Zimmer doesn't appear to have been particularly inspired. He was apparently given the job at short notice. It works in the context of the film but I can't imagine listening to it independently, unlike the original.

Visually the film goes for the gritty magical realism of something like The Revenant rather than the maximal gloss of the original. It's frequently gorgeous, but every film is gorgeous nowadays. Hollywood has for the most part finally got the hang of CGI. From the posters I was expecting a neon mass of teal and orange, but it has a subtle, almost monochromatic colour palette that would probably have lost nothing in black and white. The set design makes use of CRT monitors and old-fashioned computer terminals which are obsolete today and would be long-gone in 2049. As with the original there are prominent corporate logos, this time for Sony and Peugeot. Our hero's police car is made by Peugeot. I find it hard to believe that Peugeot will be around in 2049.

But is the film any good? In my opinion it's a well-made, tense thriller that largely fails as a sequel. The best sequels either present the further exciting adventures of a bunch of familiar characters, or they expand upon the original or take it in a new direction. Blade Runner 2049 simply repeats the first film with a single new twist, which feels less significant than the characters in the film imply. Harrison Ford, Sean Young '82, and Edward James Olmos make cameo appearances, but they exist largely outside the plot.

I say Sean Young '82 because they've used CGI to recreate Sean Young as she was in 1982. It's reminiscent of Rogue One's recreation of Peter Cushing, but Sean Young is still alive. I wonder why they didn't recreate Harrison Ford '82 and set the film in 2024? Sadly Rutger Hauer does not make an appearance, which is a shame because the film could do with a good central villain.

The plot this time is that the world went to pot after 2019 but recovered to a point where it is still shitty but people don't have to eat other people so that's nice. Ryan Gosling is a Blade Runner who must hunt down replicants and take them out of circulation, with the twist that he is a replicant himself. This becomes apparent in an early fight scene where he takes inhuman punishment from a much larger opponent but keeps fighting back. Everybody knows he's a replicant. It's not a secret. People hate him because he's not human, and also because he's good at his job. It transpires that the surviving replicants may be evolving, which may or may not be a problem, and it's possible that Ryan Gosling - his character doesn't have a name, only a serial number - might be the replicants' messiah, or perhaps he isn't even a replicant after all, who knows?

I don't want to give away the plot, but it doesn't make sense, at least at first glance. The chief villain - played by Jared Leto in a two-scene cameo - has a plan to fill the universe with people, but the replicants aren't good enough because they can't breed and he can't manufacture them in sufficient quantities, so he needs to create new replicants that can reproduce. But why not use people instead? Judging by what we see of Los Angeles in 2049 there is no shortage of them.

But here the film bamboozles me, because for every question I raise it has a potential answer. The script is either very lucky or very smart, and that intrigues me. Leto's character is childless; there's an implication that he doesn't care whether the replicants are economically viable or not, he just wants to fill the universe with creations of his own making. On the other hand he has no respect whatsoever for the lives of his supposed children, but on the other, other hand perhaps he is simply a very bad father. The film pulls this trick a few times. A lengthy plot point in which one character plants a tracking device on another - followed by a sequence in which a wounded character is apparently just left behind to be discovered by others - is less baffling than it seems once you re-evaluate the motives of one of the chief baddies.

Ditto the ending, which in theory doesn't work. The messiah that the replicants are prepared to rally behind is a faulty model that can only survive in an artificial environment. In fact I was amazed that the character wasn't brutally interrogated and killed. It would be so easy to do it without raising suspicion. The chief villain is still alive at the end of the film and there's no indication he has had a change of heart, and he seems the vengeful sort.

But again, the film suggests that perhaps the seemingly upbeat ending is just a brief pause before our heroes are scooped up and retired, and that the only escape from the nightmare future of 2049 is a peaceful death. They are visiting someone who is known to the baddies and the sky is full of surveillance drones; perhaps they have all gone there to die together.

Or perhaps it is a happy ending after all. On reflection it seems to me that the hero and villain actually wanted the same thing, in which case it's odd that the villain is such a bastard. In my opinion the characterisation of Jared Leto's villain doesn't fit the film. He's one of those quiet psychopaths who likes to spring into bursts of unexpected violence, which is a huge cliché. His analogue in the first film was more effective. Genetic expert Eldon Tyrell wasn't so much a violent psychopath as an uncaring bureaucrat; he hid behind a cloak of deniability in a world where there was no good or bad, just competing strategies, and that's more scary than yet another copy of Robert De Niro in The Untouchables.

Blade Runner 2049 is on surer footing as a thriller. It's prone to digressions and has a slow pace but it's hypnotic rather than tedious. Gosling's detective work isn't much better than Deckard's, but it looks more difficult and there's more of it and it's never boring. There are some brief action sequences of the Christopher Nolan variety, with wham noises and bloodless headshots, but they're surprisingly perfunctory. A sequence in which Harrison Ford gets to deploy the famous SMACK! punch sound effect from Raiders of the Lost Ark is silly, but Harrison Ford isn't going to be in many more action films, so why not? Some actors will be remembered for their most famous lines, or their hairstyle; Harrison Ford will be remembered for the sound of a baseball bat thwacking against a pile of leather jackets.

But why is Deckard nostalgic for the 1950s? Harrison Ford was alive in the 1950s but Deckard hadn't even been born then. Even if his memories are false - the film leaves that ambiguous - they wouldn't be of the 1950s. This will haunt me.

Earlier on I pointed out that the original Blade Runner had some interesting ideas buried under a boring detective plot. The sequel mostly fixes that. The detective plot is interesting and the philosophical ideas underpinning it are given sufficient coverage to make the detective plot feel meaningful, although Leto's speeches owe too much to the cod-philosophy of The Matrix. There is however one large idea that is glossed over; we learn that the replicants have amassed a secret army poised to attack the city and take over. That would have been an interesting film. Blade Runner 2049's big flaw is that it's essentially a remake of the original, but expanded, and with a greater emphasis on the main character's ambiguous humanity. It's a shame it didn't push in a new direction. It's still a very good film though.

I haven't talked about the performances. Ryan Gosling has a dumb grin on his face for most of the film, but his characterisation makes sense because he's an emotionally retarded robot. A sequence in which his mask of reserve slips is effective, but if the film wanted to show him progressing from numbness to human passion it doesn't work, because he reverts back to the dumb grin for the rest of the film. Jared Leto's performance is hammy. Harrison Ford growls a lot. The female characters are stereotypes. No-one else stands out. It's not going to win acting awards.

This being 2017 I have to cover diversity issues. Sadly the film gets poor marks. The only female characters are a live-in prostitute - introduced to us while cooking a meal, no less - and another prostitute, and a stereotypical high-kicking ice lady who is probably also a prostitute. The one female character who isn't a prostitute is a police chief, who at least has an air of competence although in the end she doesn't achieve very much. Her sloppy grasp of computer security helps the baddies track down Ryan Gosling. In a lazy piece of writing the villain simply asks the police chief's computer to locate him, which it does immediately. That's not detective work. It's Google.

The two main black speaking characters are a low-rent criminal fence and a Fagin-eque slave driver who abuses children but is a snivelling coward when confronted with the wrath of the white man. As with Minority Report the purest, most innocent character is a thin white Scandinavian woman, a kind of stoner pixie dream girl. The replicants are presumably supposed to represent the trans community, but although they're physically strong they are portrayed as mentally stunted. Sadly therefore I can only give Blade Runner 2049 zero marks out of five. And I thought it was pretty good.

A note about the screening. I saw it at the BFI IMAX in London. If you're going to see a film, see the hell out of it. It wasn't shot in the IMAX format or on 70mm film, but it still looked wonderful on the big screen, although the deep dark blacks were a kind of muddy brown. Blade Runner 2049 was shot on good old-fashioned digital at a resolution just less than 4K. It's a 2D film that has been computer-converted into 3D. I wanted to see the 2D screening; I clicked the wrong button; I saw it in 3D. There is one really good 3D shot (of rain trickling down a window in the foreground while the characters interact in the background) but beyond that the 3D effect quickly wore off, at which point it felt like watching a film in 2D but with glasses on my face.

The screening was introduced by a peppy lady called Sebda or Sedna. We entered the cinema separately and left separately. We did not connect in any meaningful way, and yet barely a moment has gone by in which this woman has not haunted my dreams. How can something so pure, so beautiful, survive in a world like this? She is too good for me, and that makes me sad. I have not yet begun to drink.

Dunkirk

Off to the cinema to see Dunkirk, a new historical drama in which thousands of British soldiers are trapped in northern France and they can't get home because every time they board a ship it explodes and sinks but they keep on trying and I don't want to spoil the ending but eventually some of them do manage to get home.

Who would have predicted that there would be a big-budget Hollywood film about Dunkirk? Hollywood is often criticised for portraying the entire world as an adjunct of the United States, but Dunkirk was filmed within a few hundred miles of the real-life location and has an all-British-Irish-French-Dutch cast directed by the mostly-British Christopher Nolan. The music is by Hans Zimmer, who is German, but it was all a long time ago and it wasn't his fault. He couldn't choose his parents.

Back in 1958 the British film industry produced its own film of the Dunkirk evacuation, which I admit that I haven't seen. It starred John Mills and Richard Attenborough, who are both dead and gone, along with the British film industry of yore, and yet Dunkirk exists. At a cost of $150m it's unlikely to make its money back at the UK box office. How will it do in the United States and China? The film has a clutch of recognisable stars but they either have small cameos or, in the case of Tom Hardy, they spend almost the entirety of the film wearing a mask. Why does Christopher Nolan insist on casting such a beautiful man as Tom Hardy and then making him wear a mask? There's nothing wrong with Tom Hardy's face, far from it.

Is Dunkirk any good? It reminds me a little bit of Mad Max: Fury Road, or Gravity. Some time ago Hollywood pondered the question of how to make a serious historical adventure film in the age of Michael Bay; Dunkirk is one possible solution, along with the likes of The Revenant and The Martian and Wall-E.

They belong to a new tradition of kinetic, visual adventure films that have minimal dialogue, the skeleton of a plot and an emphasis on physical acting. They are the distant ancestors of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jacques Tati's Playtime. When done well they are transcendent works of pure cinema, but when done poorly the result is like listening to a friend describe one of his dreams, which was fascinating to him when he dreamed it, but boring over coffee. Dunkirk unfortunately has a split personality. The visual aspect is terrific. The 70mm format allowed the cinematographer to go ape with creative depth of field effects - a few shots are even out of focus - and if Dunkirk had more hardcore it would be a harrowing masterpiece. The problem is that director-writer-producer Christopher Nolan lost his nerve.

Technical Notes
I saw the film at the Science Museum, on an IMAX screen. It was shown with an aspect ratio of 1.43:1, filling the screen. The film was shot with 70mm film and then edited with a computer and printed out to 70mm again - the digital intermediate model that was common in Hollywood before all-digital became practical. The titles wobbled a bit but otherwise the picture was sharp and clear, with grain visible in only a couple of shots, and even then it might have been a computer effect. There was one film defect (a tiny insect appeared to have got into the projector).

The Museum had a Second World War-themed "here are the exits" introduction starring one of the Museums' employees, a game chap called Mario. The queue for the beer was too long to get beer, so I watched the film sober. The Science Museum isn't an obvious choice to watch a film, but it feels like an event when you do. You have to go up an elevator to the theatre, as if you were ascending to cinematic heaven, n.b. the rest of the museum is fab as well and if they want to give me free tickets I won't say no HINT.

Lost his nerve. Dunkirk has a schizophrenic quality. The shots of destroyers exploding and turning over are horrible, but the visual poetics are interrupted with character pieces that don't work nearly as well. It feels like one of those 1970s disaster films where a potentially fascinating disaster was used as the backdrop for little character cameos that added plot without amounting to anything. A lengthy sequence involving Cillian Murphy as a shell-shocked soldier goes nowhere and feels like something from a television drama. It's supposed to illustrate the civilian cost of the war, but it feels trite. A sequence towards the end of the film in which a group of squaddies requisition a boat was presumably written so that top-billed Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles could do some acting, thus making them eligible for acting awards.

The talky parts; the film is never downright bad, although one brief scene in which Tom Hardy's fuel-starved Spitfire appears to shoot down a Stuka as if by magic is downright silly and at odds with the film's overall grim tone. At one point a soldier reads out Churchill's famous "fight them on the beaches" speech, but again this comes across like something from a television history dramatisation rather than the real world. The emphasis on the final part of the speech, in which Churchill voices the hope that the United States will enter the war, feels like an attempt to make the film sell in the United States.

What little dialogue there is treads a thin line between simple and simplistic. Top thesp Mark Rylance as the wizened captain of a small boat delivers a series of platitudes that put me in mind of the main characters from Raymond Brigg's When the Wind Blows - well-meaning but dim - which surely wasn't the intention. Kenneth Branagh spends the whole of the film standing on jetty looking worried, and my attention drifted to the moles on his chin. Can't he have them surgically removed? He's supposed to be a grim naval officer, but there's something too jolly about Kenneth Branagh for that to work. He stood out in the late 1980s because he was a refreshing throwback to the older style of extroverted, theatrical acting that had gone out of vogue in the 1960s; he feels out of place in Dunkirk because the film calls for a naturalistic style that he can't pull off. Furthermore his dialogue is numbers-heavy exposition, which much have been painful for him. The film does a surprisingly poor job of showing the huge scale of the evacuation - we see a couple of destroyers and a dozen or so small boats -leaving Branagh to essentially tell us, the audience, that 300,000 men were taken off, which again feels like something from a much older film.

Whitehead and Styles are newcomers to the screen, and most of the rest of the cast seem to have been picked for their faces rather than their names, and so the celebrity cameos feel out of place. Did the investors demand big box-office names for the post? A version of Dunkirk in which Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy fought off the Germans all by themselves would have been ridiculous, but giving them smaller roles has the effect of drawing attention from the main characters. Again, it's as if Christopher Nolan lost his nerve.

All of this ill-will evaporates when the talking ceases and the action takes over, particularly when Hans Zimmer's score starts up. The music lifts the film up a notch. Zimmer doesn't stretch himself, but the familiar mixture of ticking clocks, chattering violins, and groaning bass notes amplifies the tension of incoming bombing raids to an almost unbearable level. At one point the score segues from dissonance into a version of Elgar's Nimrod, which should have been naff but was audacious enough to work. Nolan paces the film out by playing with the passage of time, freely cutting between events that take place at different points in the story; at first it seems like poor continuity but eventually it makes sense. The film is occasionally repetitive, and the Spitfire battles have a samey quality, but if the film had just been ninety minutes of stunning visuals and Zimmer's music it would have been much better.

Ultimately Dunkirk is a well-made kinetic action poem punctuated by unsatisfying specks of a lesser film, like a big tasty cookie dotted with flecks of poor-quality chocolate. It entertained me for its running length and will be an awesome 4K demo, and perhaps it will inspire other filmmakers to tackle British subjects that have been neglected by the cinema, but I won't remember it in the future as I remember The Revenant or Gravity.

Mental Notes
The review is over. Do I have any more thoughts? From a contemporary British perspective there's something jarring about Dunkirk. It has a bunch of older British actors wearing military uniforms, but they're the good guys. They don't order their men to open fire on unarmed civilians or burn down a native village. The officers aren't even portrayed as uncaring buffoons with stupid moustaches. This isn't necessarily a British problem - officers are rarely depicted positively in Hollywood films - but after decades in which British people are the baddies it is odd to see some who are not.

The film has attracted some criticism for its entirely white, male cast. As far as I can tell no-one has criticised it for ignoring the fat acceptance movement (none of the characters are overweight) or for ignoring issues that face the trans community. There is an argument that history as an objective record of events is impossible, because history is filtered through the recollection of the dominant class if not actively perverted by their censors, and there is an argument that even if it was possible to record an objective history it would be pointless to dig up the past unless it could be used in the present for a practical purpose such as increasing Labour's share of the vote.

There is an argument that racist white Britain will lap up Dunkirk because it reminds them of a past-time paradise in which Britain's cities didn't have those people. And there is an argument that it's wrong to show the film nowadays because it upholds the wicked rotten lie that Britain was mostly white until after the Second World War, and furthermore it will be used as propaganda for the Tory Party, etc. All of this will be fodder for other people's blog posts and a meal ticket for people who would otherwise be unemployed.

It struck me while watching Dunkirk that the mid-century British people depicted in their small boats were as alien to me as the Aztecs of Apocalypto or the Somali gunpeople of Black Hawk Down. London circa 2017 only has a few white people left, and I imagine that for the remaining population Dunkirk is basically science fiction, as irrelevant to them as Bollywood cinema is to me. Even for white people people my age the Britain of 1940 is a foreign land populated by foreign people who grew up in a completely different world, with a different mindset and different dreams.

At first I thought that the aerial battles were CGI, and that this was the first film ever with a CGI model of a Bristol Blenheim, but most of the aircraft are real. The German Me-109s are played by post-war Spanish 109s, which is noticeable because they have a more bulbous nose than the real aircraft. The Stukas and He-111 bomber are presumably CGI. The Germans are shown flying their 109s in tight formation with the bombers, but this didn't happen until a few months later during the Battle of Britain, and then only under protest.

The last of the British soldiers were evacuated on 03 June, Churchill gave his "beaches" speech the day after, and it wouldn't have been reported in the newspapers until the day after that, so it's unlikely that the closing sequence could have happened in real life.

Just before Tom Hardy miraculously shoots down a Stuka whilst gliding down to the beach there is a shot of Kenneth Branagh, and over his shoulder I could have sworn there was a brief glimpse of an aeroplane crashing down to earth. Perhaps it was a piece of debris.

I have never had the impression that the evacuated soldiers expected to be mocked as cowards; that doesn't fit the British psyche. "Thank God they're safe" would have been the attitude. They had five more years of fighting ahead of them, first in the deserts of North Africa and latterly in France and Germany itself. Over a third of a million British soldiers were killed during the war, coincidentally almost the exact same size as the British Expeditionary Force of 1940, but thankfully we had replacements. The survivors were rewarded with the NHS and Milton Keynes, so there is that.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Off to London's Science Museum to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Fourth of the Star Wars films. The Science Museum has a big 70mm IMAX print so I decided to see it there. They're showing it in 2D, which suits me fine. If God had intended for people to see films in 3D, he would have given us three eyes and depth perception. NB If you're the kid that dropped your blue iPhone - you were sitting in front of me, then you and your dad moved back up into the stands - I handed it to one of the attendants. There is good in me.

Star Wars films come around once in a blue moon. The last, Return of the Jedi, was released thirty-two years ago. I have vague childhood memories of the marketing hype that surrounded it. The first three films were extremely popular and have stood the test of time, although putting it diplomatically they are good in different ways. Nonetheless director-writer-producer George Lucas grew sick of them, and although they continued to be popular in the years that followed there was never a serious attempt to revive the series until recently. Now George Lucas is gone, but his dream lives on.

Other mythologies have arisen since 1983. Nowadays kids draw pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog instead of Darth Vader. Young adults have sexual fantasies about My Little Pony characters instead of Carrie Fisher in a gold bikini. Imagine that. Imagine Carrie Fisher dressed up as a My Little Pony character, wearing a gold bikini, and you are in a speedboat. And behind you ten naked women are keeping pace with the boat, and they are dolphins - sexy dolphins - and the boat is made out of biscuits and you are that man from the Old Spice commercials. He is sexy too. Everything is sexy. Even though you learned how to set the thermostat, you don't need it because the weather is unseasonably mild. Imagine all of that. I did. Just now.

Olympus Pen F / 40mm f/1.4 / HP5

Is The Force Awakens any good? Yes, it is. It surprised me. The new people are surprisingly charismatic, the general tone is simultaneously modern and old-fashioned, dark and light. Kids will love it, and so will grown-ups. Ignore anyone who pooh-poohs it; they are just trying to be controversial. Nonetheless I have a couple of reservations. The plot is essentially the same as the original Star Wars, down to the details. There is a long sequence in the desert that introduces the characters and then non-stop space action, albeit that the pacing is better this time. There are a couple of good action sequences in the first half of the film, whereas Star Wars had Luke Skywalker moping around for what seemed like eternity before the film really got going. The parallels even extend to the main villainous threat, which is another one of those giant space lasers that can destroy planets. The space laser of Star Wars drove the entire plot, and although the final battle to defeat it was quite short it had meaning because the film had been leading up to it. In contrast the space laser of The Force Awakens appears without forewarning about half-way through. Its live fire trial wipes out a planetary system, but the death of billions is treated as a minor upset. The eventual plan to destroy the weapon is literally made up on the spot. I realise that we're supposed to call Star Wars something else nowadays, but I'm old enough to remember when it was just Star Wars, and that's what it's called. It says Star Wars on the front of the soundtrack LP.

The final battle is another one of those multi-stranded things where there are space fighters flying around and people fighting on the ground, and in typical Hollywood style The Force Awakens takes place in a universe where a two-minute countdown actually takes ten minutes, and exploding fire does not hurt. But this is nit-picking. The parallels with Star Wars feel deliberate, as if director J J Abrams and team were trying to ease people into the Star Wars vibe; The Force Awakens isn't a reboot, but after thirty years so much has changed in the world that a straightforward Return of the Jedi sequel would seem odd. The Force Awakens acknowledges that we now have black people, for example, and also Scottish people. Not just heroic Californian Anglos and sneering white British people.

There are a lot of British people in the cast. Watching the film in London's Science Museum as a British person surrounded by mostly British people, I was tempted to raise a Toby jug of Marmite-smeared warm beer every time a British person appeared. The Peter Cushing role is played by David Mitchell of television's Mitchell and Webb, except that he seems to have lost a lot of weight. I think he was David Mitchell. I could be wrong. Chief baddie Kylo Ren is played by Adam Driver, who was born in San Diego but could pass for an Englishman. He snivels and sneers like an Englishman and he probably has kinky sex. The new Luke is played by John Boyega, who is really good in the role. He starts off cowardly and inept but gradually grows a backbone, just in time for...

Backbone, hahaha. It'll grow back, I'm sure. No, I don't want to spoil anything. I've never even heard of John Boyega before, but he's genuinely charismatic in a role that could have been the kiss of death. It's hard to pretend to be a coward without coming across as a complete weed, but Boyega manages it, and his eventual heroism is impressive. Albeit that it results in one of the film's slightly unsatisfying moments - he has a duel with a chainsaw-wielding stormtrooper that he wins out of sheer luck, which felt wrong. The stormtrooper deserved a better demise. Yes, there is a chainsaw-wielding stormtrooper. It's not really a chainsaw, of course - it's a space chainsaw - but it's close enough. The Force Awakens has a number of things that impressed me. The space chainsaw was one of them. There is something about watching a man with a glowing sword fight an armoured stormtrooper wielding a space chainsaw that appeals to the dessicated corpse of the young boy slowly decaying inside my soul.

Andy Serkis is back as a CGI puppet, a role he plays so well. Lupita Nyong'o and Gwendoline Christie are also heard but not seen, which is sad. Lupita plays a wise old barkeeper lady and Gwendoline Christie is Captain Phasma, a butch stormtrooper with a fantastic name. Lupita's voice-CGI character could have been insufferable, but she works. Christie on the other hand is basically wasted. We never see her face and she just disappears from the plot without a satisfying goodbye. What's the point of hiring two actors with such interesting faces and then never using them? Lupita is the most conventionally beautiful person on the planet at this point in time and Gwendoline has one of those eccentrically odd faces, like Maggie Gyllenhaal, that no artist would ever dream of but is fascinating all the same. The New Han Solo is played by Oscar Isaac, who is of Latin extraction and has one of those "what a guy" demeanours possessed of the Old Han Solo. He walks like a hero.

"Could have been insufferable". The Force Awakens is one of the most well-executed films I have seen in recent years. The plot is driven by coincidences, and whenever a character is knocked to the ground another character swoops to the rescue, but that's par for the course with Star Wars. It's expected. As with the original films, The Force Awakens didn't really happen; we're watching the legends of another time, and just like the Bible or Lord of the Rings a certain amount of dramatic licence is acceptable. So many things could have gone wrong. There's a cute little robot, and dated camp stereotype C3-PO returns. There are Force duels where the actors have to thrust their hands about and pretend to be reading minds, which could have been silly. Yet it all works. Cute little BB-8's peeps and whistles are endearing, and he moves in a way that's cute without being slapstick. C3-PO is used sparingly and has a genuinely funny introduction. Anthony Daniels is back in the role, although he doesn't have as much to do as Peter Mayhew, who returns as Chewbacca. When Peter Mayhew was born with a genetic condition that caused his hair to grow at a furious pace it must have seemed that his life was ruined, but luckily, as if God planned it, he has managed to turn this problem into a successful albeit intermittent career as a giant walking carpet.

I've missed out one of the cast. Daisy Ridley. She's the new Princess Leia and also the new Luke. In fact she's the real star of the film. She won me over. Initially her English accent is jarring - I can accept English people in a giant metallic war machine, but in the desert? - but it wears off after a minute or so. She's spunky without being irritating; she can fight with a stick and fly a space freighter, but she doesn't come across as an unsympathetic know-it-all; she is vulnerable without being wet and tough without being a bully. There is a lengthy subplot involving Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, which is initially given to John Boyega's Finn, but he's no good with it and it seems wrong. I spent the rest of the film waiting for Daisy Ridley's Rey to get hold of it, and when she did I let out an internal mental cheer. Towards the end of the film she opens a can of whoop-ass on a particularly slimy villain and I suspect the rest of the theatre was cheering her as well, although they weren't literally cheering her because this was the Science Museum in London. We are British. There was polite applause at the beginning and end.

The Science Museum screened a 70mm IMAX film print. Only one sequence was shot in full-size IMAX, so the rest of the film was blown up from the original 35mm to fit the screen. Despite this it looked great. The film has been run through a computer and so it's really just as digital as any other film. If I squint my mind's eye, some of the fast-paced action sequences had a kind of judder that comes with a native 24fps workflow. Not necessarily a bad thing. The IMAX projector was bright and the screen was so large that I could see every little wrinkle and mole on Mark Hamill's face. I have waited thirty years of my life to see a gigantic close-up of Mark Hamill's face. Sadly I missed Slipstream when it was on at the cinema. If I'm being honest with myself, he looks like a tramp that smells of wee, but what did I expect? He is sixty-four years old. That's old! For the sake of posterity the Science Museum showed no trailers. No, tell a lie, there was a trailer for a Clash of Clans spin-off that featured the actor who played Blofeld in Spectre(!). He delivered his lines with gusto and I felt a bit sorry for him.

The screening had a "please turn off your phone" animation with a crude animated graphic of Darth Vader, and an introduction done in the same style, with Chewbacca, that explained the 70mm print and also that the theatre exit doors were at the back. The animation was basically a graphic of Chewbacca's face with a crudely-done mouth and eyes. It was crap, in an endearingly crap way. It's the kind of thing that will be lost with time so I thought I'd mention it. In another world J J Abrams would have filmed a short introduction, explaining why he used film and why he used IMAX, but we do not live in that world. I guess the Science Museum's staff were told to come up with something as quickly and cheaply as possible, anything.

A few paragraphs up the page I describe The Force Awakens as well-executed. It reminds me of the computer game Half-Life 2, in the sense that it's recognisably a continuation of a long-distant prequel but feels slicker and fundamentally more modern, without changing very much. Stormtroopers are still gunned down willy-nilly, but the film tries to make the corpse-strewn battlefields look like a bad place to be, rather than a bloodless child's playground. In the original films Tatooine felt like a television western, whereas the new desert word of Jakku has at least a nod towards verisimilitude. The camerawork is in the modern toned-down jerkycam style - every shot bobs a little as if filmed with a handheld camera - although early on there is an old-fashioned pan across a desert that was perhaps supposed to evoke Lawrence of Arabia. In the background a giant cliff is revealed to be a buried Star Destroyer, and in one clever shot we find out that Rey's home is a destroyed AT-AT. As per every film made in the last twenty years the colours have been tweaked so that everything is either yellow or blue, but to its credit The Force Awakens adds some more colours as well (red and a very muted green), and of course the original films were like that anyway, particularly Empire. In those days they did it with coloured lights and chemicals. The Force Awakens has received a lot of positive press for its emphasis on practical effects. It's not exactly Andrei Tarkovsky, but overall the film deploys its flashy visuals sparingly rather than making every shot look like the neon meate dream of a octafish.

Boxout: The Dark Shadow of George Lucas' Shadow
There are a number of events that loom large in the memory of my generation. The loss of the Shuttle Enterprise; the assassination of Ronald Reagan; the 1991 collapse of the Warsaw Radio Mast, which at a height of just over 2,100 feet was the tallest structure on Earth at the time. We all remember that. It has become a symbol of a hubristic age. If God had intended mankind to broadcast radio waves from a metal mast over 2,100 feet tall, he wouldn't have smote the Warsaw Radio Mast.

I remember where I was when I heard about George Lucas. It was like learning about a distant relative that you hadn't heard from in years. He didn't so much invent the Star Wars universe as patch it together from existing material, but the first Star Wars film exhibited an intriguing personal vision that was progressively diluted in the two sequels. In the case of Empire the decision to bring in Lawrence Kasdan as co-writer worked; Lucas knew his limitations and Kasdan was obviously enthused with the material. The pair reunited for Return of the Jedi, but the pressure to wrap up the story while also selling lots of toys resulted in a film that was derivative and disappointingly straightforward. It concluded the trilogy in the most efficient, least adventurous way possible without feeling like a rip-off. Lucas failed to follow up the Star Wars films with anything of note. The odd thing is that The Force Awakens is even more derivative than Jedi and yet it feels smart, whereas the part-finished Death Star of that film was a cop-out.

We will never know how George Lucas might have directed the new films, assuming he chose to direct them. He showed all the signs of going soft with age, but on the other hand George Miller is of the same generation and Mad Max: Fury Road was a ferocious action triumph. Ridley Scott is even older and still occasionally demonstrates that he has it, while close contemporary Steven Spielberg puts out good films and bad films alike at a rate of roughly one a year. Whatever problems might have faced George Lucas, age was not necessarily one of them. One day Star Wars will come to an end, but George Lucas will not be there to see it, so from a certain point of view perhaps it is better this way.

The original trilogy was visually stunning without having a particular visual style. Star Wars had little nods to the geometric, cod-Kubrick compositions of THX 1138, but they were fleeting. The lightsaber duel between Luke and Darth in Empire was striking but resembled a Gary Numan concert, and Return at times looked like a television movie. The Force Awakens has many more arty-shots-for-their-own-sake, with big dark shadows that will look awesome on a big television. At the same time it has a modern, toned-down visual language that's hard to describe. Back in the early 2000s it was fashionable to fill every frame with CGI details, so that films started to look like cartoons, but The Force Awakens has a neo-realistic look that puts me in mind of the 2012 Judge Dredd film. It manages to be very plain at times without being ugly, notably in a sequence where Rey searches for Luke Skywalker in what appears to be Cornwall*. Cornwall is famous for its ice cream, meat pasties, and fudge, which might be why Luke Skywalker has decided to hide there. Elsewhere the CGI is indistinguishable from genuine battered metal lit by the actual sun, and on the whole The Force Awakens feels more real than its predecessors. The locations breathe.

* But is in fact Skellig Michael, Ireland. As with all of the writing on this blog, this article is a glimpse into the subjective reality of my mind, rather than a description of the objective reality of the real world. A creative artist that simply describes reality isn't an artist at all, he is a security camera. Luke had to build his own light saber before he could become a Jedi; I have to build an entirely new universe.

The aerial action sequences are a little bit choppy - and surprisingly brief - but they are visually coherent. There is one particularly wizard extended shot in which a hell of a pilot shoots down half a dozen TIE fighters and then blows up some stormtroopers on the ground for good measure, dancing round the sky as if his X-Wing had proper aerodynamic wings, which it doesn't. Let's assume that the engines keep it up, not the wings.

It is an unusually mild winter - I went to the screening with my special trousers - but nonetheless the ice rink still works.

Do you remember the old X-Wing computer games? You flew space battles in a variety of spaceships, and there was a sequel where you could fly a TIE fighter and do evil things. They were fun but unsatisfying because you were just wheeling around in space. There was nothing to fly between - space is empty - so you ended up pulling tight turns over and over again in the empty darkness of dark empty space. The Force Awakens solves this problem by moving all of the battles down to the surface. There's one great moment where the Rebel cavalry arrives, swooping in over a lake, and later on our heroes have to fly around mountains in order to blow up the superlaser's inevitable weak point. Surprisingly, the film suggests that the great victory over the Empire in Jedi was inconsequential. You'd think the Empire would have trimmed their budget, but they seem to be just as powerful as ever.

The political aspects of the Star Wars galaxy are very muddled, and raise the question of what happens when the Empire is weaker than the New Republic; will the New Republic become the bad guys? What if some star systems prefer to be ruled by the Empire? In its twisted way the Empire appears to be competent, and I've always assumed that the desert scavengers living on Tatooine and Jakku had been in desperate straits long before the Empire came along. The film implies that the Empire once ruled Jakku, but has been vanquished, in which case what good did the Republic do? Rey is still doomed to a miserable life of barely surviving. The Empire in the first three films had a mad grandeur because it was huge and powerful, but for The Force Awakens it would have been interesting to see the Empire pushed into a corner, like the Nazis in the later stages of the Second World War. Early-war Nazis were bad enough, but late-war Nazis were evil beyond belief because they had nothing to lose and nowhere to run, and they were starting to fight amongst themselves. The Force Awakens simply revives the Empire (it's now "The First Order") without changing it much.

The final sequence is a mish-mash of elements from the first three films. There is a trench run that turns into the attack on the second Death Star's reactor. There is an ice planet and a desert planet. A character has to creep around the Imperial base, tinkering with things. Another character takes a tumble from a dangerous catwalk, because in this universe there are no handrails. There is a tense duel between two important characters that causes everybody else - heroes and stormtroopers alike - to stop what they are doing and watch. The end is a mixture of Star Wars (the villain is vanquished but not killed, the planet-killing weapon is put out of action) and Empire (one major character is left badly injured). I suspect J J Abrams was trying to reassure fans of the original series that this is the same Star Wars, and perhaps there are only so many ways to stage epic action, but I hope that if there are sequels they have a bit more variety.

The music is a disappointment. John Williams is back! But the music is just the old Star Wars score with a few cues played in a minor key. The old character themes reappear as homages, but they are used so many times that they overwhelm the few new themes John Williams came up with. I was disappointed, because some of the new music early in the film ("The Scavenger" on the soundtrack album) had promise that Williams and Abrams were going to come up with a new musical language for the series, but no, the rest of the score is warmed-over Star Wars. There's nothing wrong with the music, it's just that I barely noticed it - ordinarily a good thing, but not in a Star Wars film.

The Theory of Ruin Value
The Star Wars films have aged gracefully. In the 1930s top Nazi architect Albert Speer developed Die Ruinenwerttheorie, an approach to architecture which attempted to create buildings that would look impressive even in the distant future, by which time they would be ruins. Speer reasoned that ancient Greek and Roman ruins had outlasted most architecture of the middle ages and still looked grand in the 1930s because the designs were simple and they were constructed of immortal stone. This appealed to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Hitler wanted people of the far future to look on the ruins of his thousand-year-reich and despair at his greatness, and I like to think that George Lucas was of a similar mind. Star Wars is full of pre-aged touches. The props were famously built to look used and worn, the actors were told to use the blaster guns and mobile communicators as if they had been around forever, and in general the series deliberately avoided any explanation of how the technology of the Star Wars universe was supposed to work. It is enough that there is a talking robot and a spaceship that can travel from planet to planet within a few hours, the audience doesn't really care how it all works. When Han Solo's Millennium Falcon breaks down it sounds like a broken car; when he fixes it, he tinkers with the engine as if it was a Volkswagen Beetle. In The Force Awakens Rey mends the Falcon by ripping out a small PCB covered with wires. In general the technology we see has a 1940s look that was supposed to evoke World War 2 fighter planes. I don't own a spaceship myself, but I reckon that in real life a hyperdrive unit would be a non-user-serviceable plastic lump.

The Ruinenwerttheorie extends beyond the sets and technology. The Star Wars films are not supposed to be real-real. They are supposed to be myths, passed down via oral tradition and countless different translations of ancient source material. Perhaps there was a real Luke Skywalker, but he was just a desert freedom fighter who died in a nameless battle. In real life the Death Star was destroyed by a team of Rebel pilots, but in order to make the legend more exciting ancient historians attributed it to Luke, and Luke alone. In real life Darth Vader lived two hundred years after Luke, and they never met. Darth's black costume is based on a single surviving holoimage that may not even be him. I'm digressing here. Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford return as space lady Princess Leia and smuggler rogue Han Solo respectively; on a physical level they are like craggy old Roman ruins. Age has given them gravitas, and they both play types rather than characters. Fisher comes off best. Leia has spent her life sending people out to die for an ideal, and there is a sorrowfulness to her characterisation.

Solo doesn't quite work as an aged man of action. I felt that his shooty-shooty-punchy sequences were written just so we could see him shooting and hitting people again. He is introduced like a character in a sitcom; here's Han! He gets some of the best lines in The Force Awakens although I felt that the writers were struggling to give him something to do.

Over the last twenty years it has been fashionable to take film franchises in a darker and edgier direction. That might have worked with Star Wars, but Abrams has instead made his film just slightly darker and a little bit edgier than before. The villain is more obviously unbalanced than Darth Vader. The opening sequence suggests a bleaker tone than the rest of the film, and the desert setting of course calls to mind modern-day Syria and Iraq. I wonder if ISIS and the like imagine themselves as the chosen ones, fighting an epic battle of great import for the soul of the future. In Star Wars the supernatural Force is unambiguously real whereas in real life I don't think anybody seriously believes that priests can make objects fly through the air. Religion is a social construct.

The Force Awakens is a kind of post-post-everything film that does not have an agenda or a particular spin. Arch conspiracists might point out that Jon Boyega's character begins as the kind of stereotypically inept, cowardly black person that was the stuff of pre-war black stereotyping, and of course this is a film directed by the Jewish Jeffrey Jacob Abrams, about a race of chosen elites who have special powers and treat those who are not of their kind as tools or obstacles. And the main hero is a posh white English woman who is naturally better than the scummy desert dwellers because she is a woman and she is posh and white. There comes a point when the agenda you see in others is in fact an agenda inside your own head.

On a fundamental level The Force Awakens is heartening because it is about people whose lives have meaning and purpose, unlike our own; people like to imagine that they are special. That was part of Luke Skywalker's appeal. Kids watching him could imagine themselves in his position, plucked from obscurity to save the galaxy. That will never age, and now a new generation of kids will have the same dreams as me. I like that.

Memories of Star Wars
The review is pretty much over at this point. I'm just old enough to remember the first three films. I was a little kid in 1977, when Star Wars rocked the box office, and I was still little in 1980, when Empire Strikes Back confirmed that George Lucas' family-friendly sci-fi franchise had legs. The films were accompanied with a blizzard of merchandise. I have fond memories of playing with some of the toys in the deep snow of winter 1981. Memories lost in time like tears in the rain. In the snow. Rosebud.

Star Wars and Empire belong to the world that existed before me, the real world. There is something sacred about them. The third film in the series, Return of the Jedi, has always felt small. It belongs to the profane world. The adverts and "making of" features demystified it. In my mind Star Wars and Empire belong to the world of myth and legend whereas Return of the Jedi belongs to a world where it rains on Sunday and cats die and life consists of stupid people hitting each other.

The three films made a fortune at the box-office. A second fortune was generated by sales of toys, novels, soundtrack albums, shampoo bottles, the list is endless. The Force Awakens has been marketed with bottled water, soup, wristwatches, pepperpots, probably electronic massagers and lingerie, I haven't checked. It's easy to mock this marketing blitz, but it must have worked because I did go and see the film. I would never have dreamed of seeing The Force Awakens otherwise. For children of my generation the films were actually the least part of the Star Wars phenomenon, because there was no way for us to see them at home. Star Wars wasn't released on videotape until 1982, and video machines were still very expensive. The film premiered on UK television in October of that year. That must have been the first time I saw it. Two hours of happiness and wonder, a brief respite from the pain and fear.

Boxout: Star Wars, Postmodernism, the New Hollywood, and Cinematic Unrealism

Elsewhere in this article I describe Star Wars as a exercise in postmodernism, which sounds pretentious, but George Lucas was a pretentious young man and Star Wars was just as much a clever experiment in storytelling as it was an actual story. It is sometimes dismissed as a shallow load of nonsense that killed off New Hollywood and opened the floodgates for the blockbusters of the 1980s, but I think that's unfair. If New Hollywood had a style, it was minimalist; the films were differentiated from films of the past by their subject matter and tone, and also nudity and swearing. Star Wars was their inverse, a simple story presented as the mythic history of a distant past, told with the medium of cinematic sampling - Lucas threw in samurai films, westerns, war films, pirate movies, a dash of naval history, even a smidgeon of Vietnam. Conceptually Star Wars was far more adventurous than the classic New Hollywood films. The likes of Nashville and The Man Who Fell to Earth had clever editing but they were still fairly straightforward tales of love and loss, whereas Star Wars was positioned as the middle segment of an ongoing mythology in an entirely different universe.

George Lucas attended the University of California's super-arty film school in the super-arty 1960s, where he was part of a generation of cinematic hipsters who went on to revolutionise Hollywood in the 1970s. They had hipsters in the 1960s - they were called hipsters. I like to think that film school hipsters get the hipsterism knocked out of them when they finally have to persuade someone to give them money to make a film. Lucas had a lucky break early in his career when good friend Francis Ford Coppola and Warner Brothers agreed to fund and release his disconcerting sci-fi dystopia THX 1138. In 1971 Spielberg was still working in television, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese were working with the underground and b-movies respectively, so in theory little George Lucas had beaten them all, but alas for him THX 1138 was a flop. Worse than that, it didn't even win any awards. Instead it just faded into obscurity.

For his next picture, American Graffiti, Lucas set himself the task of creating a film that ordinary people might enjoy, on a budget that would almost ensure at least a modest profit. He pulled it off with aplomb, and in doing so he became the archetypal "modern artist who knows how to paint properly", which might explain why Star Wars worked so well. The massive commercial success of Graffiti made him a multi-millionaire, although it was still a very long and difficult road before his space opera got off the ground.

What is postmodernism? The best definition I have written says that postmodernism is "fannying about after the end of the world". Star Wars is both a film and a mindbending treatise on the nature of myth. If I was writing a university thesis on the topic of reality and the cinema, I would probably choose to write it about Star Wars. The other students would pick Blade Runner or The Matrix, because Star Wars is too obvious, but in my opinion the very obviousness of Star Wars makes it - ironically - un-obvious. Less obvious. Makes it less obvious.

No, tell a lie, the perfect choice would be Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or perhaps Life of Brian. The Monty Python films are ostensibly comedies, but they also work as deconstructions of history. Again, this sounds pretentious, but Terry Jones had a degree in history from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and the rest of the Pythons were clever people.

Life of Brian deconstructs the past with strong writing, Holy Grail does it by playing around with form. The ancient knights were warmongering sociopaths; a modern-day historian romanticises them, but is offhandledly slain mid-sentence simply for getting in the way; the knights eventually stumble into the modern world, where instead of being fêted as conquering heroes they are arrested like common criminals and bundled into a police van. As with the real-life Crusades, their quest expended a great deal of energy for nothing and ended in ignominy, and Grail ultimately captures the spirit of the crusaders in the guise of a comedy. Grail and Brian are essentially the anti-Star Wars, in that they took giants from the past make them small. The Monty Python team were British university graduates of the early 1960s, and perhaps because of this there is an undercurrent of contempt running through their work. Lucas, on the other hand, was the product of a young nation during an economic boom, and with the exception of THX 1138 his output was fundamentally optimistic.

All films are unreal. Consider a film such as All the President's Men or United 93. They are lightly fictionalised portrayals of real events that happened in our world. The details have been changed but fundamentally a drama-documentary such as President's or United presents a version of true reality for the benefit of the primary audience, e.g. us. Now consider Goldfinger or John Wick or Annie Hall. They are entirely fictional stories that take place in a fictional universe modelled on our own. Within this universe there are people we never see; ordinary Joes who live their lives, for whom Auric Goldfinger really did storm Fort Knox, or John Wick really did kill a lot of people in a nightclub - they would have seen it on the television news - and somewhere in Manhattan a cinema usher sold tickets to a pair of upper-middle-class nobodies who were falling in and out of love. These films take place in a fictional universe, complete with a fictional audience; we are still the primary audience, but there is a secondary audience of people who did not participate in the film's events, but for whom the events and characters were real. The majority of Hollywood films belong to this group. The in-universe audience is usually taken for granted, but it occasionally plays an element in the plot (as in Ghostbusters, for example, or The Truman Show).

With Star Wars, George Lucas took this one step further, because Star Wars has a hidden primary audience that we never see. Early drafts of the script envisaged the films as a set of bedtime stories told to children who belonged to this hidden primary audience; this was written out, but nonetheless the characters of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are not real even within the fictional universe of Star Wars. The fictional universe of Star Wars is a fiction within a larger and presumably more mundane fictional universe, in which the Death Star was just a big cannon, the Force was obviously mystic rubbish, the battles were unsatisfying drawn-out affairs and the rebels were no better than the Empire they fought against. So, ultimately, Star Wars isn't a space adventure. It's a highly fictionalised, mythologised adaptation of historical events presented as entertainment for the benefit of an invisible fictional audience, for the benefit of us, the actual real audience.

To what end? I like to think that George Lucas was pragmatic enough to give himself an "out" in case he boxed himself into an inescapable corner - the events we see are part of an unreliable narrative, as in The Princess Bride - but ultimately he didn't need to resort to this because he wanted Star Wars to feel real, even if it all happened a long time ago in a galaxy etc. The problem with stories-within-stories is that it's hard to feel tension or jeopardy when the characters aren't even real within the film's fictional reality. We naturally accept that film heroes are not really-real, because we're used to it. It's unsatisfying when the unreality of film heroes is made explicit because we want to believe. For two hours we want to be transported to the dreamtime we cannot have, and it's to George Lucas' credit that such a complex narrative construction appears seamless. With Graffiti, Lucas demonstrated that he could make a perfectly conventional, human film; Star Wars was both a populist juggernaut and a pinnacle of the postmodern movement, and it's a shame he doesn't get more credit for this.

Toys
As I kid I remember losing interest in Star Wars. Return of the Jedi brought a new wave of toys, but within a year my generation had turned its attention to Transformers and other, less successful toy lines that followed in its wake. Kids are fickle, and a few years later we were no longer kids; the likes of Robocop and Predator made the Star Wars films look bland. But even as teenagers my generation still respected them. They had class, and they were smart in a way that seemed effortless. The class made them stand apart from Battle Beyond the Stars and Battlestar: Galactica; the smarts separated them from the likes of The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which aspired to intelligence but were just dumb. George Lucas set out to make a space epic for kids as if it was Lawrence of Arabia, and he kept going until he succeeded. He had numerous shortcomings as a director - he couldn't write dialogue, and he didn't have much rapport with actors - but he was smart enough to work around his limitations rather than ignore them.

It's impossible for modern audiences to appreciate how odd Star Wars must have seemed in 1977. On one level it was an exercise in postmodernism; an affected homage to the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s and 1940s. It had simple characters mouthing comic-book dialogue. Instead of cutting between scenes, Lucas used old-fashioned fades and wipes, and instead of having a hip disco soundtrack or something by Tangerine Dream he commissioned portentous classical-style music from John Williams. In the hands of someone else Star Wars might have come across as a less obviously spoofy variation of the 1960s Batman television series; a big joke that kids could enjoy and adults could laugh at. But George Lucas sincerely loved his source material, or at least sincerely understood the way that kids love comics. Not blindly, but prepared to forgive. As with Quentin Tarantino many years later, he understood that comic books have their own level of quality, a level no less valid than that of supposedly more serious art forms. Grand opera often feels silly; the music of Scott Walker takes a bit of acclimatisation until you can appreciate it; the paintings of Jackson Pollock look like splashes of paint at first, yet some people enjoy all of these things, deeply and sincerely, and at some point in his life Lucas asked himself what was so wrong with that? And even if pulp science fiction was trash, what was so wrong with trash? George Lucas went to film school in the 1960s; he was a product of a postmodern, pop art era that refused to dismiss a medium simply because it was a vehicle for trash. To paraphrase Pauline Kael, what mattered was whether it was great trash, and George Lucas and his generation were not afraid to make fantastic trash. At heart they wanted to make serious works of great significance, but they were not afraid of trash, not like their parents.

All of this seems obvious now. Nowadays works of high art are essentially investments. No-one seriously believes that high art will usher in a new age of humanity. The twentieth century saw huge advances in the field of art; huge advances that did nothing to improve the lot of humanity or stop wars even though it seemed they might. Back in George Lucas' day there was still a sharp divide between trash and high art, but despite the success of Star Wars - and Richard Donner's contemporary, respectful take on Superman - it took several decades for Lucas' approach to become mainstream. The Force Awakens has arrived at a period in Hollywood history when comic book movies about superheroes and living toys and gentleman spies are not only extremely popular, they are also amongst the best-written and best-made films of the day. Lucas was fated never to know it, but he won. His generation of young Hollywood bucks shaped the modern world.

Back in 1988, Empire Strikes Back was ITV's big Christmas film, but Return of the Jedi was shoved out on Boxing Day the next year, almost as an afterthought. I think of the late 1980s as the low water mark for Star Wars. Watching Jedi on Boxing Day, after eating leftover turkey, I saw naff stop motion effects and plainly-visible matte lines, an ending that felt both tortuously drawn-out and rushed. The Star Wars films no longer interested me. By the late 1980s the toy range had ground to a halt and although the original films were classics, their supporting infrastructure had been dismantled. They were museum ships, grand reminders of a bygone fleet, slowly ceasing to have meaning as they journeyed from their past into our future.

There comes a time when a museum exhibit becomes so meaningless to modern audiences that it no longer justifies its place in the display cabinets. I often wonder if museum-keepers periodically dispose of their older pieces. Perhaps they don't destroy them, they instead sell them on; and if the new owners have them tossed into a trash compactor, that's their business. I can't think of an example of a major motion picture that has been allowed to disappear, at least not since the early days of cinema. Erich Von Stroheim's Greed, perhaps, or the original cut of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Perhaps there are Nazi epics that were systemically hunted down and burned.

Hundreds of films have been lost accidentally, many more survive in truncated form, but cinema is too young for the wheel of time to have done its work. Lord Time, Field Marshal Indifference, and General Hate. Time chose to kill the stars of music hall before their work could be recorded; indifference allows manuscripts to rot; book-burners consign art to the flames. We hope that brave renegades might save forbidden art, but what if we are all book-burners? If the government decided to erase Bernard Manning from history, who would bother to save his work? No-one. He would be gone, just like the majority of everyone who has ever lived, because everything and everyone is forgotten eventually. As humanity's collective memory is transferred to the cloud, and as our capacity to generate data strips away our capacity to archive it locally, there comes a risk that a meteorite strike on a data server might wipe out a chunk of our past. As if the internet had a stroke. We like to believe that Star Wars will live forever, but people once thought the same of Easy Rider or Timothy Leary, or top eighteenth century horse painter George Stubbs. An afterlife of endless preservation without rediscovered is no different from death.

Star Wars never quite left the mainstream, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s fandom seems to have moved onto the dark new underground medium of the internet, where nerds engaged in passionate debate as to the relative military strengths of Star Trek's Federation and Star Wars' Empire. On the one hand Star Trek had teleporters and beyond-visual-range combat, but on the other hand the Empire had planet-destroying lasers, but on the other, other hand the Federation had the planet-destroying Genesis device - and teleporters, but then again the Empire had The Force. Would The Borg defeat the Empire? Could Superman defeat the Empire? Could Superman defeat the aliens from Alien? Yes, apparently.

I rediscovered the films in the mid-1990s via USENET whilst hacking into NORAD, looking for warez. By this time the kids who enjoyed the films had matured into dynamic, intelligent young men such as myself. My generation grew up loving the Star Wars films, then forgetting them, but in the 1990s we came to our senses and recognised that for all their faults there still hadn't been anything to match them. No-one had seriously tried to make a new, epic space science fiction film franchise since Jedi. In fact the new wave of decent sci-fi was playing out on television, with Babylon Five, The X-Files, and Deep Space Nine. But they didn't have the mindless escapism of Star Wars, the damn-the-subtlety sense of fun.

The cleaned-up, digitally-restored THX video and laserdisc re-releases of 1995 revealed that the films still looked and sounded awesome. The THX remasters were available in letterboxed widescreen, at a time when widescreen televisions were taking off, and they were a great way to show off your expensive new television. My hunch is that positive sales of the THX boxed set piqued the interest of George Lucas and 20th Century Fox. A few years earlier Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire novels had been surprising best-sellers, but they were unfilmable (Awakens ignores them totally) and novels are for sad old cat women anyway. In the way of the VHS re-releases there was a new wave of Star Wars video games, notably Dark Forces (1995) and Shadows of the Empire (1996), and suddenly Star Wars was hip enough to be re-released to the cinema. Lucas took the opportunity to run his films through a computer, but he went further than that. The cost of digital editing and computer-generated imagery had fallen throughout the 1980s and 1990s to a point where it was economical to tweak the films to Lucas' satisfaction. The resulting Special Editions were released through the first half of 1997, and to everyone's surprise they became massive box-office hits once again. All three films debuted at number one in the US, and Star Wars went on to be the eighth-highest-grossing film in the United States that year. Empire and Return of the Jedi were less popular but still made one hundred million dollars of pure profit between them.

Star Wars had been funded by 20th Century Fox, but after the massive success of the film Lucas decided to pay for the sequels himself. He took a huge risk in exchange for complete creative control. Empire was thus the most expensive indie film of all time, and if it had been a flop Lucas would have been ruined financially. In interviews he often said that he would use the money he made from Star Wars to create smaller, more personal works, but instead his productions of the 1980s and 1990s were, with the exception of the Raiders films, mostly naff. Either outright failures, as in the case of Howard the Duck and Willow, or half-baked Oscar bait like Mishima or Tucker.

It's fascinating to imagine what George Lucas might have done with new CGI technology. It might have been tempting for Lucas to overuse this new technology, but he was smart enough to recognise his own limitations as a director, so I'm sure he would have been smart enough to recognise the limitations of CGI. The Star Wars films were maximalist, but never excessive. The thought of a newly-enthused Lucas creating a new trilogy - let's say in the late 1990s, early 2000s - with subtle CGI assistance and the best screenwriters money can buy is intriguing, but we will never know. We will never know. v2