Architect
of the Modern Blockbuster
I recently began writing
two successive blog posts that were essentially extended rants about the
aesthetics of the modern blockbuster. So far I haven't been able to finish them,
perhaps because deep down I suspect they contribute very little to the current
discussion beyond clinging to an imaginary standard that never really existed.
The crux of each post is tangentially related to the look and stylisation of
the Hollywood blockbuster as typified by the contemporary films of the Walt Disney
studio, and by extension, its ever ubiquitous Marvel subsidiary.
My main issue with these
films - beyond their derivative nature, questionable moral subtext and obvious
cash-grab mentality - is that, in their over-reliance upon green-screen
technology, motion-capture imagery and elaborate computer generated effects, they
seek to mimic the artificial look of the modern video game, but without the
interactive, immersive aspects that make video games so compelling and
multi-dimensional in their storytelling capabilities.
While I will attempt to
finish these posts at some point in the not too distant future, the subject
matter nonetheless got me thinking about George Lucas. Lucas is someone whose
work I appreciate only in fragments, but nonetheless he's a filmmaker I find
myself coming to the defence of whenever he's criticised for spurious reasons.
Like Fritz Lang before him, Lucas could be described as the architect of the
modern blockbuster. Countless filmmakers, from Griffith to Godard, Eisenstein to Hitchcock, could be charged with having changed the course of the popular
cinema, but Lucas has the rare distinction of having changed it twice.
George Lucas on the set of
Star Wars, circa 1976-77 [photo-credit: Lucasfilm]:
With the release of the
original Star Wars (1977), Lucas would build on the populist run of earlier 1970s
blockbusters - including, most prominently, The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975)
and Rocky (1976) - to create a film that placed the emphasis squarely on
spectacle, engagement and escapism. In doing so, the success of the film and
its subsequent shift in focus towards marketing and merchandise, brought to an
end a short-period in American moviemaking where the watchwords were introspection,
cynicism and ambiguity.
While earlier films of
this period, such as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider (1969), McCabe and Mrs
Miller (1971), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Taxi Driver (1976) to
name a few, had centred on the perspective of drop-outs and anti-heroes, the
theme of America's loss of innocence and the realities of male prostitution,
poverty, drug abuse, the Kennedy assassination and the war in Vietnam, Star
Wars would instead bring fantasy and mythmaking back to the popular cinema with
a story intentionally aimed at the largest possible demographic. As such, it
was devoid of anything that might prove to be too challenging, experimental or
mature. While the techniques and special effects were groundbreaking for the
period, extending as they did on the innovations of Stanley Kubrick's great
masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the storytelling and
characterisations - that theme of good against evil - were intentionally
retrograde; closer in fact to a 1950s western or science-fiction serial than to
a contemporary work such as The Passenger (1975), All the President's Men
(1976) or 3 Women (1977).
Star Wars would prove to
be a genuine cultural phenomenon. It spawned a billion dollar franchise, a host
of native and international imitators, and changed the way subsequent filmmakers
and studios thought about genre, merchandise and special effects. Tellingly,
it's a story that is still being told to this day, with five additional "Star
Wars" movies finding their way to the multiplexes during the last five
years and at least another five planned for the coming decade. This longevity makes
Star Wars arguably the most influential film of the twentieth century.
Star
Wars [George Lucas, 1977]:
Two decades after Star
Wars, Lucas would reshape the cinema once again with the release of Star Wars:
Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). While not as fondly remembered as the first
film, or even its immediate sequels, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), directed
by Irvin Kershner, and Return of the Jedi (1983), directed by Richard Marquand,
I would still argue that the success of The Phantom Menace solidified the
modern infatuation with the "brand" in popular cinema. Outside of the
James Bond series, The Phantom Menace was a film that proved to Hollywood
executives that an intellectual property with enough brand recognition could
transcend the generations; that a self-contained film that already had a
clearly defined beginning, middle and end could still be mined for more
content, so long as such content was marketed as a genuine event.
In the same year that
original works like The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense and The Matrix
were establishing a cultural identity for their own era, The Phantom Menace was
appealing to nostalgia. It was a throwback movie, specifically manufactured to
bring in the now adult audiences that grew up with the original trilogy and the
young audiences that had discovered the series more recently through repeat
showings on television or re-branded "special-editions" on VHS. The
Phantom Menace provided the blueprint that studio executives have followed ever
since: find an old property with a built-in fan base and create a follow-up
that also functions as a thinly-veiled remake. In its construction, The Phantom
Menace was designed to satiate the appetite for a new Stars Wars movie, but it
was also intended as a way of re-introducing the franchise to a new audience.
It presented a mirror image of the original narrative - with its young hero
taken under the wing of a Jedi master to learn the ways of the force, who meets
a series of colourful, mostly non-human supporting characters, and then gets to
grapple with the lure of the dark side - but with enough minor cosmetic changes
to appear new.
In its success - $1
billion at the worldwide box office to date - The Phantom Menace inadvertently
created the precedent for later franchise reboots such Batman Begins (2005),
Casino Royale (2006), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Rise of the Planet of the
Apes (2011), Fast Five (2015), Jurassic World (2015), Star Wars: The Force
Awakens (2015), Ghostbusters (2016), Ocean's Eight (2018), Halloween (2018),
and so on. The brand became king.
If the original Star Wars
had helped to change the way movies were marketed, promoted and sold to an
audience, then the innovations of the Star Wars prequel trilogy also helped to
define a new language that subsequent blockbusters have taken to imitate,
almost as a standard. Over the course of their production, Lucas would move
away from location filming, relying instead on having his actors perform scenes
in front of a giant green-screen, with the backdrops added-in digitally during
post-production. By the second instalment he was no longer shooting on 35mm
film, but pioneering the use of high-definition digital cinematography, which
is now commonplace.
To this day, the
stylisation of the Star Wars prequels is a point of contention among fans.
Compared to the original trilogy, The Phantom Menace seems garish and
artificial. For all of its pioneering effects work, the original Star Wars was
a modestly budgeted adventure film that still showed the influence of Lucas's
work on his earlier, "new Hollywood" movies, THX 1138 (1971) and
American Graffiti (1973); markedly more grounded, even gritty films. The
special effects of Star Wars may have been a little more elaborate, but it
wasn't a film without precedent. One could recognise its aesthetic in
everything from the aforementioned 2001: A Space Odyssey, to films like Silent
Running (1972), Logan's Run (1976) or the television show Star Trek
(1966-1969). By point of contrast, who else in 1999 was
making films that looked like this?
Star Wars: Episode I – The
Phantom Menace [George Lucas, 1999]:
Images taken from:
https://starwarsscreencaps.com/star-wars-episode-i-the-phantom-menace-1999/
Flash-forward twenty years
later and it's difficult to think of a mainstream blockbuster that doesn't look like this. From Sin City
(2005) to 300 (2007), from The Last Airbender (2010) to A Wrinkle in Time
(2018), from The Avengers (2012) to Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), from Jupiter
Ascending (2015) to Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), to
Black Panther (2018) and beyond, the visual language of The Phantom Menace has
become ubiquitous. That it now represents the absolute aesthetic criterion for all
big-budget Hollywood and international cinema makes it easy to forget that this
particular style had no real visual precedent prior to Lucas's film. For all of
its faults and shortcomings, The Phantom Menace was a genuine game-changer.
While analogous
blockbusters, such as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), would employ green-screen
technology and extensive CGI, the result was still somewhat closer to '90s era blockbusters
like Jurassic Park (1993) and Independence Day (1995), or a then contemporary
film like The Matrix (1999), where, despite the reliance on computer generated
manipulation and digital world-building, there was still an actuality to the
images; a sense of real actors interacting with "real" locations and
comparatively more naturalistic lighting. In those films, the special effects
were mostly being added into live action environments. By contrast, The Phantom
Menace went all-in, creating fully realised digital worlds that its real-life
actors could explore and interact with. It was taking the CGI world-building of
Pixar's work, such as Toy Story (1995), and bringing that technology into the
conventions of the live action cinema.
The subsequent films of
Lucas's trilogy, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star
Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005), would only push the visual
aesthetic even further. By the time the third and most visually sophisticated
of the three films was eventually released, Hollywood had finally caught up. Even
Peter Jackson and the Wachowski's were now following in the same direction with
their subsequent efforts, King Kong (2005) and Speed Racer (2008) respectively.
The language of these films was being translated; the standard was being set.
Star Wars: Episode III -
Revenge of the Sith [George Lucas, 2005]:
Images taken from:
https://starwarsscreencaps.com/star-wars-episode-iii-revenge-of-the-sith-2005/
King Kong [Peter Jackson,
2005]:
Images taken from: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReviews21/king_kong_2005_dvd_review.htm
Speed Racer [Lana &
Lilly Wachowski, 2008]:
Guardians of the Galaxy
[James Gunn, 2014]:
While I'm no great fan of
this particular style of filmmaking, one has to concede that it's now a
recognisable part of the language of the modern blockbuster. Audiences are able
to accept visuals of this nature as the new normal, while for me they still
feel alien to my conception of cinema based on the kind of films I grew up
with. However, with the subsequent release of every new modern blockbuster,
from the aforementioned Black Panther, to Aquaman (2018) or Alita: Battle Angel
(2019), or to the more directly related Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), the technical
and aesthetic influence of Lucas and his prequel trilogy is plainly felt.
And yet, Lucas is not a
reference point for modern-critics when they rhapsodise about this kind of
cinema. The negative perception of the prequel trilogy means that the kind of
heightened imagery and CGI stylisations that Lucas helped to normalise are not a
part of the filmmaker's current narrative. For many, the prequel trilogy was unnecessary
and remains a black mark in the history of the franchise. For older critics, Lucas's
innovations are tired to his success and his success remain in the past; for
younger audiences, the modern cinema has taken its current shape simply because
the available technology has enforced a kind of designated user-model. Maybe
such opinions hold truth. But the fact remains it was Lucas who made that first
great leap into this kind of new-digital aesthetic, which Hollywood (and
elsewhere) has eventually followed.
In the same way that a
filmmaker like M. Night Shyamalan receives nothing but scorn and derision from
the mainstream American film culture, even when hugely successful and acclaimed
works like The Dark Knight (2008), A Quiet Place (2017), Us (2019) and the
upcoming Midsommar (2019) are plainly modelled on (if not derivative of) the
style and themes of his own films - specifically Unbreakable (2000), Signs
(2002) and The Village (2004) respectively - so too has Lucas's legacy been intentionally
diminished.
I think there's an element of spite in each of these instances. Since
Lucas and Shyamalan both made films that became successful enough to be
considered a "cultural phenomena", their historical significance was
assured. As such, it's been important for the establishment to ensure that this
early success is the only thing these filmmakers are known for; even if it
means sabotaging the reception and reputation of their subsequent work. To
wilfully deny any filmmaker their obvious influence on more acclaimed cinema is,
culturally speaking, shameful.
