Hilarious 1977 STAR WARS Review Tears Movie Apart
When Star Wars: A New Hope was released in 1977, no one knew how big of a hit it was going to be. No one knew that it would change the world and spawn generation after generation of fans. I can't even imagine a world without Star Wars. It seems like it wold be pretty dull, though.
There were several bad reviews for the movie after it was first released, and I've read a few of them over the years because I was just curious. But none of the reviews I've seen have hilariously torn the movie apart as this one written by New York Magazine film reviewer John Simon, who called it "a set of giant baubles manipulated by an infant mind."
The full review can be read over on Google Books, and thanks to i09, we have a few of the best excepts from the review, which you can read below:
"I sincerely hope that science and scientists differ from science fiction and its practitioners. Heaven help us if they don't: We may be headed for a very boring world indeed. Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its high-falutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a "future" cast to them. Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like, that, in downtown Los Angeles today...
"O dull new world! We are treated to a galactic civil war, assorted heroes and villains, a princely maiden in distress, a splendid old man surviving from an extinct order of knights who possessed a mysterious power called "the Force," and it is all as exciting as last year's weather reports.... Why, even the most exciting fight is an old-fashioned duel, for all that the swords have laser beams for blades....
"Here it is all trite characterization and paltry verbiage... The one exception is Alec Guinness as the grand old man Ben Kenobi (Ben for the Hebrew ben, to make him sound Biblical and good; Kenobi probably from cannibis, i.e., hashish, for reasons you can probably guess.)...
"Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be children or unlucky enough never to have grown up."
Damn! That's cold. But it's also a very amusing read.