Now that I’ve thoroughly dissected HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis, we will pivot this high caliber analytic cannon of a blog toward our next target; a comparison of the Star Wars and Marvel Superhero movies. The movies that Martin Scorcese pointedly described as “not cinema”, igniting a firestorm of publicity for the Marvel movies and whatever he was working on at the time, I don’t really remember, but I do remember my appreciation for the sheer snootiness of his comment, and I remember that he and some other directors were concerned about some gloriously worthless and unbelievably snooty cause, something about preserving old movies on original handcrafted plates or something, and someone from Empire magazine interviewed him about it and asked him what he thought of all the superhero movies, probably hoping to get some priceless comment in a comic book store guy voice, and that’s probably the only interview in Empire magazine that people like me will refer to for years to come. 

So are the Marvel movies “cinema”?  I have no idea because I don’t know what that means. Are they artistic? Are they literature? I don’t think so. 

I think the first Star Wars movie is artistic. I think Lucas created a new type of fantasy with it, a re-imagining of the fantasy genre by replacing the medieval outfits with California new age cult robes and replacing the horses with spaceships and laser swords. I don’t think he brought anything new to the sequels, and I think his weird desire to tell an anti-technology parable with movies that glorify a mix of technology and fantasy fatally interfered with his storytelling instincts. He stopped going for the 70’s realism vibe that mixed so interestingly with the fantastic elements in the first Star Wars, maybe I wonder responding to criticism from his pompous film school friends or, worse responding to praise from Joseph Campbell. He needed someone outside his circle to bounce ideas off, maybe. 

Of course I could clear my throat and point at yours truly now, but that would be tacky. We’re here to talk about George and how we could help him, or could have helped him in 1980, after Empire Strikes Back and before the Ewoks. Or maybe the Ewoks existed in his mind at the time and so many beautiful people had called him a genius to his face that he’d already lost it and he wanted to be mentally naked and bare his mind Ewoks and all on the big screen. 

So it’s 1980 and we’ve walked through a time portal with a message for Lucasfilm.  

It just so happens that in a previous post, we had a book, That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis,  from which we had removed the first six chapters or so, and were kind of left hanging there until now by, once again, Yours Truly. 

It’s all coming together now. The first two Star Wars movies - I’m not going to dignify that prequel Roman numeral crap with a turgid discussion of which came first - will take the place, in a multi-media format, in place of the removed chapters of That Hideous Strength. But whenever Obi Wan or Yoda talk about the force, they add a bit about the macrobes and how the leader of the bad macrobes on earth turned Darth Vader to evil. 

But what about Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra? Totally improved with a judicious injection of laser swords and Star destroyers. Ransom visits Mars with an earth colonial battle fleet, and foments an insurrection after connecting with a mystical guerilla leader named Oyarsa Malacandra, who teaches him the force and gifts him a sweet lightsaber to fight the earthling empire. 

It gets better in the new version of Perelandra. Ransom gets word that a new super Jedi lives on Venus, named Perelandra. She’s green skinned but human in form, kind of a mix of a Yoda and a human. She rides around the oceans of Venus on a floating vegetable mat powered by her force-magic at triple digit speeds. Ransom teaches her to channel her energy for righteousness, but the emperor lands on his personal shuttle and tries to woo her to the dark side. Surprise! She joins the Emperor and kills Ransom in a duel, after Ransom wounds the emperor, who falls in a Venusian lava flow. The green lady rescues the Emperor and he becomes Darth Vader. 

Here’s the twist in the third book, the evil green Sith replaces the Princess in the Star Wars chapters. 

Now get ready for awesomeness - in the Empire Strikes back she’s the one who trains Luke in the swamps of Venus, no Yoda, and after the big reveal of Luke’s father, we’re ready for part three with Jabba and the fight between the rebels and the empire on earth. 

We go Meta at that point: Darth Vader turns out to be George Lucas. He’s the president of several film conglomerates, and also President of the US, and Chief Justice and Speaker of the house, and Secretary General of the United Nations. He’s been making movies about his own interstellar empire! The audacity! 

I would wrap up both series with a double wedding of Luke, Han, and the Green Lady, with the audience slash reader still the only ones wise to her big secret. Sequel anyone? Yes, I believe I’ll have another slice -of both streams, please!

PS: I know we never included the superhero movies in our critical discussion - Sequel anyone?