Avengers: Endgame and the endless character reset

At the beginning of Avengers: Endgame we find Thor having given up on himself, grown fat on beer and hamburgers. He must learn to embrace his godhood again. Tony Stark has retreated into family life, he must rediscover what it means to be a hero again, eventually giving his life for the cause. Hawkeye has descended into a violent quest for revenge, he must relearn to value his friends who still care for him.

At the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War we find Thor humbled after losing a fight to Thanos. He must journey to the far edge of the universe to forge an axe and learn to embrace his godhood again.

At the beginning of Thor: Ragnarok we find Thor overconfident, believing he has prevented Ragnorok and saved Asgard. He is soon humbled by a new, more powerful enemy, has his hammer destroyed, and winds up in a hellish, insane world where he is reduced to a gladiator slave. He must learn to embrace his godhood in order to escape and save his people.

At the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2 we find Peter Quill cocky and reckless, happy to dismiss his adoptive father and to ignore his friends when he is united with his natural father. He must learn to take himself seriously and value his friends.

At the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy we find Peter Quill cocky and reckless, a thief and a self centred opportunist. He must learn to take himself seriously and value his friends.

At the beginning of ... well, you get the idea.

I have only picked films I liked for the above list, and only ones I can remember well, and yet I could go on. In particular I did not work my way back far-enough to hit an origin story, where an ordinary person finds they have superpowers and must, inevitably, learn what it means to be a hero. Thor (my personal favourite of the bunch) is a particularly egregious example; in five different movies he seems to need to rediscover what it truly means to be a god. Tony Stark, too forever seems to be learning how to balance a life between being Tony and being Iron Man. Peter Quill twice learned to be more serious and less self-centred, yet last we saw, on the fight on Titan, he costs the Avengers victory over Thanos in a moment of impetuous anger.

These personal journeys are nothing surprising, they are part of the well understood formula for storytelling, but over multiple films the endless character reset becomes jarring. Yet there have been multiple movies following the same superhero before without this niggle. It is new.

In the Richard Donner films, Superman never has a character ark beyond advancing his relationship with Lois Lane. He ends the movies no more committed to truth and justice and the American way than he began them. In the Tim Burton and Joel Schumaker Batman movies, Batman achieves no personal growth beyond his initial origin story. Stretching the definition of superhero, James Bond (his superpower is not falling over after three martinis) never learned anything about himself or confronted his own failings. Jet Li's marvellous Wong Fei Hung never discovered what it really means to be a Kung-Fu master.

Moving beyond the medium of film; the endless tea-time TV superheroes of my youth: Lou Ferrigno's Hulk, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, Manimal, The A-Team, Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, the protagonists of Knight Rider and Airwolf, all ended each episode exactly the same person they began.

Comics are too wide a medium to make sweeping pronouncements on, but the dime-store periodicals where these characters began are famous for simply producing adventure after adventure after adventure. Superman might start an episode weakened by Kryptonite, but he never starts it with character flaws to overcome.

In novels too; Conan, Tarzan, Alan Quatermain, the myriad 'knight of the plains' cowboys modelled on Owen Wister's The Virginian, James Bond again. None of them are known for learning how to be heroes over the course of a book.

So has something has changed in the way we tell ourselves superhero stories?

Yes. Something simple. Something obvious. They're very popular now.

There are not enough superheros with the cultural cachet of Superman or Spiderman to populate a cinematic universe. Those two might get some buy-in from audiences before the curtains have risen, but Iron Man? If you want an audience of millions to watch an Iron Man movie, if you want to make a good film about Iron Man, you're going to have to introduce him to them properly, and make them like him, and make them care. You do this through good writing and acting, by creating a character who goes on a journey and grows as a person. It is what makes these characters attractive and the movies fun.

It is perhaps important to say that I think the Marvel movies are good movies. I'm not a huge fan (I like the funny ones best), but viewed as a single body of work the consistent quality is impressive; they are not always great but they are always fun. They are kind, and witty, and human. They have an admirable commitment to embracing all the camp visuals and wild lore of the comics while simultaneously bringing the characters down to earth, giving them real problems and real preoccupation. They try to embrace broader, more complex themes than just good versus evil while also eschewing the easy nihilism of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. They take place in the real world (even when they take place in space) where actions have consequences.

So the character reset is a property of good writing, not bad. The only problem is that superhero stories -hero stories if you prefer- impose one strict limitation that means it must be repeated every single time; the focus of each story is on the hero, it is about them. It is always the hero who must go on a journey and grow as a character, no matter how many times they have done so before.

It might, theoretically, be possible to have a hero -like Ellen Ripley- find reserves of steely strength in one film and learn to be a mother again in another, but his is hard (see Ripley learning to, err... appreciate the Alien's point of view? in cubed and Resurrection), it requires radically different circumstances for each story that you cannot just impose on pre-existing canon worlds.

So, instead, back we go each time to enjoy the ride again. Reset. Reset. Reset.

Servants of the People, All Out War, and Fall Out

Servants of the People is Andrew Rawnsley's account of the first term of Tony Blair's government. All Out War and Fall Out are Tim Shipman's accounts of the Brexit campaign and it's aftermath up to the end of 2017. Both authors are journalists experienced at wringing narrative from messy real world situations and all three books are excellent reads. Tim Shipman's two books in particular read like thrillers.

Rawnsley constructs his book as a series of anecdotes, mostly morality tales where New Labour's belief that it can spin it's way out of trouble winds up dumping it in more, or (at least twice) Peter Mandleson's failure to come clean to his friends means they cannot help him, or (often) Gordon and Tony's failure to communicate exacerbates a situation beyond all reasonable bounds. His overriding narrative is of Tony Blair's fear of ending up yet another single term Labour prime minister, thus all the individual battles add up into one story culminating in the 2001 election victory.

If there is a problem with this technique it is that, by focusing on the problems of New Labour, there is no explanation as to why they deserve a second term. Rawnsley occasionally has to point out that, however much an amusing basket-case Labour were, the Tories at the time were even worse.

Shipman on the other hand is much more focused on the overall arc of first the campaign and then the lead up to and play out of the 2017 election.

In the first book he has two stories to balance, one for each side. The Leave side is a tale of insurgency: the underdog with a lot of guile and a lot of luck unseating the favourite. The Remain side is a tale of hubris: Cameron and team's failure to ever really believe they might lose meant they were fighting with their eyes not on victory but on what happens after. Consequently they refused to risk either Britain's diplomatic relations or the future harmony of the conservative party by, for example, making a pronouncement on Turkey or making personal attacks on Boris Johnson.

The hubris continues in Fall Out as, similarly, failure to realise that the election might result in less than a landslide ends up in failure to fight it properly. In this book the mechanics of disfunction are dissected across a large cast of characters from cabinet ministers to political aids, and in particular Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, the chief villains of the piece. With no conclusion available Shipman ends on the final agreement of 'Sufficient Progress' in December 2017, which May somehow achieves despite trouble from within her cabinet and from the DUP. It gives, at least, a sense of things moving on.

What I find really interesting though, is how both narratives have changed in the context of subsequent events.

Things did not move on, and now, almost over a year later, what looked then like an untenable situation has largely remained unchanged. "Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus". The Tim Shipman books read, in this context, less an account of great events than of ridiculous accidents and dumb incompetence. All the heat and noise and manoeuvring leading to absolutely nothing. The UK still in the EU and Theresa May still Prime Minister. However events resolve themselves from now on it seems very unlikely that this will ever feel (even to sympathetic readers) like the account of a great step in the journey of a nation.

The further back we go the more context corrupts the narrative. Boris Johnson's hopeless leadership campaign now looks like it might be just a blip in his inevitable idiotic rise. A tactical victory for the Remain side during the campaign, bouncing the Leave side into admitting the UK would leave the Single Market, now looks like a strategical blunder for remainers. David Cameron's attempt to renegotiate the UK's membership now looks less like a half-arsed PR exercise and more like a fundamental misunderstanding of what the EU is.

In servants of the People the elephant in the room, Iraq, can be felt on every page; in every bumbling PR disaster, in every spat between ministers, in every bad news story, it all feels so small compared to what was to come. Worse though is the lead up to the invasion of Kosovo, which Rawnsley uses as something of a key character event and heart of the book. The reader is invited to admire Blair's tenacity and zeal when faced with a true moral choice, his certainty, his belief in doing the right thing. But the reader cannot. The reader can only remember the bloodshed to come and shudder.

Arrival

One of the interesting things about Arrival is that it uses your own literacy of the medium to trick you.

There is no particular reason why the opening montage of Louise Banks having, and then losing, her daughter had to be backstory. It could be a How We Got Here opening (indeed it is) but for the fact that no film which wasn't playing a dirty trick would how-we-got-here from such a gentle bitter-sweet character defining montage. We go in with expectations, this is a big budget Hollywood film after all, if it opens with a lengthy encapsulation of a character's life we assume that it does so in order to introduce the character to us.That is what we are expecting in any case: to be introduced to the characters. We assume it would not introduce the character from where she is at the end of the film, we are here to experience her journey, not appreciate her destination.

Louise Banks' subsequent distracted air, apparently sleepwalking through her life, has been called a Kuleshov Effect, an impression formed in the audience's mind by the juxtaposition of the daughter's death. I do not think this is justified. Banks reacts markedly differently to the alien's arrival than anyone else at the university, and not because of any professional interest at the time. Maybe Amy Adams played the scenes straight and I'm projecting a distracted air onto her, but the fact of her actions in the script betray that the film is playing a trick on us.

Also, what's she doing knocking about in that enormous house by the lake if she had not previously filled it with a family?



Ultimately, the film cannot sustain the trick as long as it wants for the same reason: our understanding of how it works.

From the opening montage on I was wondering where daddy was. At first I assumed he'd died while she was pregnant, but it still seemed odd not to see him at all. Again, this is a big budget Hollywood film, it shares a value system with it's audience. If, say, Banks had been artificially inseminated to have a daughter by herself the film would have needed to address that. If there was a man present at the conception the film would have deemed him important enough to mention, even if he played exactly no part in the story.

A book, which can focus solely on the mind of its protagonist, might have gotten away with this. A film deals in pictures from a third party viewpoint, and in any picture of a mother and daughter there is always going to be a space where the father isn't.

I did not work out the twist till, in a late flash-forward, Banks tells her daughter to ask her father about science questions, so it kept me guessing till very nearly the end. But I always knew there was something to guess. I knew it was playing a trick.

Midnight Special

Midnight Special feels like a much older movie than it is. In fact it feels a lot like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are some obvious structural similarities: that it is a road trip; that it is focused on a single man driven by desires the viewer does not fully understand; that the government is at once both ignorant of what is happening and a sinister antagonist; that the driving emotional pull is of a young child in peril; that geographic coordinates are a critical plot device; that the mysterious other is, in the end, benign; that the finale features a big special effect sequence and raises as many questions as it answers.

There is something else as well. There is a sense of wonder.

A sense of wonder is something that has been missing from films of late. It makes the occasional appearance: in Gareth Edward's Monsters, the Forest God in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II. The reason is no mystery. For a movie to have a sense of wonder it must be about something wonderful, something that does not exist in the ordinary world, ergo something created by special effects - but SFX are no longer wonderful. With affordable CGI everything becomes possible and so nothing is special. A whole city is levitated in Avengers: Age of Ultron and it is exciting, and supplies a strong sense of peril, but it is never wondrous.

When, in Jurassic Park, Sam Neil fell to knees in awe at seeing real live dinosaurs we were on our knees with him, equally amazed. It was just two years after we'd seen what digital effects were capable of in Terminator 2, just a year since they were considered inherently amazing enough to hang a whole film off in Lawnmower Man. It felt like the start of a new era but it was also the end of one. Three years earlier the creators of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (not the greatest Star Trek) were so impressed by a light show they thought it would make a believable stand-in for God. Two years later in Independence Day nobody dropped to their knees in awe at the alien spaceships arriving, they pranged their cars as if it was giant wonderbra billboards descending through the clouds. Effects weren't magic anymore, at least not to filmmakers, and nobody would be truly amazed by them ever again.

So what makes Midnight Special so different?

It's not the effects. The glowing eyes are nothing that could not have been created with late eighties technology, and while done far better with CGI, the overall effect of the city at the end could have been achieved with matt paintings and miniatures.

The difference is primarily the realism, and also the mystery. Both are present from the get go, two characters barely speaking as they strip cardboard from a motel window and load guns into a bag. It's clear that the film is going to value genuine behaviour over explaining what is going on. The realism really hits though when the ranch is raided, the viewer expects it to be Waco but it is far from it. Everybody cooperates with the FBI. The FBI have to wade through interviews with everybody. It is so realistic it is almost boring.

In fact, for the first half of the movie it is only the mystery that keeps you hooked. What is special about the boy? What is the relationship between the father and his friend? Where are they heading? What happens if they are caught? By the time these start being answered you are hooked on the characters, which have been revealed slowly, and are doubly strong because of that.

Notice too how the main antagonists come to some sort of a sticky end, either arrested or perhaps even shot, but we never see it. The film is relentlessly focused on Alton and the people looking after him. It doesn't care about bad guys getting their comeuppance, this is a fantastic story but it is firmly set in the real world and you nobody gets that sort of neat satisfying end.

Consequently, by the finale the viewer is right there with characters wanting to know the answers, and equally as amazed when they are revealed. It is the mystery we came for but the realism that sold it. An invisible city covering the Gulf Coast would be no big deal in Avengers, but in a movie where everybody has looked and acted like a real person for two hours, it's huge.

And because of this the film can't tell us everything, can't wrap it up pat, or the spell would be broken. You're led to the possibility that the Alton is an angel but the reveal of the city, less heavenly towers than sci-fi brutalism, like a radical concept sketch for the South Bank Centre, muddies even that water.

In the end you're left standing there right with Alton's mother, wondering what just happened.

Hell Or High Water

Hell Or High Water is an excellent film about the problems of funding long term care through equity release schemes.

It's an super little movie; the performances are great and the dialogue is natural and often hilarious. Jeff Bridges at first appears to be going a little hard for a tobacco-chewing caricature of a Texas Ranger but he ends up a much more complex character than that. His reaction to his partners death, and then when he gets his subsequent revenge, is astonishingly good.

Similarly Ben Foster's Tanner is exceptionally well drawn. At first sight a familiar thuggish good ol' boy with a rakish charm, a tendency to sudden violence, and poor impulse control - he lends the movie the same sort of nervous energy that Joe Pesci gave Goodfellas; but Tanner is not the cartoonish villain that Tommy DeVito was: he understands his own failings and understands he is martyring himself for his brother. He is motivated and determined throughout; in the end it is Tanner's superior grasp of the situation, and superior commitment to his brother's plan, which sees that plan through.

Chris Pine's Toby I have some issues with, but I will come to that. What I want to talk about is how it achieves a sense of place.


Achieving a sense of place is interesting. I remember reading an interview with Nick Hornby where he proclaimed himself baffled at readers complementing him on evoking North London so well in High Fidelity when he only ever named it, never actually described it. I haven't actually read it but I'm willing to believe Nick never mentions halal butchers, or hasidic jews, or the particular aroma I remember nineties North London acquiring on hot days; but I'll bet all his characters go everywhere by tube, and live in flats converted from pre-war housing, and think nothing of having a takeaway and off-license at the bottom of the street. If you know a place you describe it without trying to. As Borges said:

...if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, [the] absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work

There is no doubt that Hell And High Water is about Texas, not just set there. Indeed the writer says as much in an interview. And despite apparently not a scene being shot there, it evokes an idea of Texas very strongly. There are three reasons why:

Firstly, it's in the photography. I've never set foot in West Texas but everything I expect is there: the flat grassland, featureless as far as the eye can see; the brooding skies; the hot empty streets of small towns; the long empty roads; the hard quality to the light.

Secondly, and more importantly, the location is vital to the plot. The motivating factor for the brothers is the age-old trope of a rancher striking oil, albeit with the modern hitch of a reverse mortgage to overcome. The brother's plan relies on a surfeit of small, near empty towns, each with one small bank branch. The stumbling block at the start of the third act only exists because of the great distances between those towns. In the finale the brothers are initially being chased not be the police but by armed citizens.

If there is a weakness in the story it is that it hangs off the simplistic notion of banks are bad, mmm'kay, but this plays into the idea of Texas too. At no point does the movie question why the Howard's mother had to go to the equity release market to fund her care. Set anywhere else it would be a film about the failings of the state rather than the rapaciousness of banks, but on the old American frontier that question never seems relevant.

Thirdly it is about the characters. The bit parts, from the sassy waitress to the other even sassier waitress, to the old boys in the diner, to everyone in the banks, stand out not just for their many, many great lines of dialogue, but because they are all, to a man and woman, fiercely strong willed and independent minded. Maybe this is a caricature but it is a relevant caricature, one that plays in to the sense of place and the overall theme of the film.

Here is where I have an issue with the character of Toby. This is a movie about masculinity (how could it be a movie about Texas and not be about masculinity), and to an extent that justifies the lack of women, but we are asked to believe that Toby has spent the last year or so tending to his dying mother, a profoundly feminine role. Do macho young Texas men put up with wiping their mother's backsides? I guess -like everybody- they do if they have to, but it's working against type.

More problematically, his plan at the end was entirely about his estranged wife and kids. The closing scene finds him doing up the ranch with seemingly no ambition whatsoever for himself. He is not attempting to get back together with his wife. As far as we know he is not even attempting to be part of his sons lives again. He is so selfless as to be nihilistic. He is such a well drawn and well played character during the movie, that the unlikelihood of his life before it starts and after it ends jars hard.

This was not unsolvable either. A much more likely backstory was that the reverse mortgage funded a Mexican nurse to help look after his mother. Toby and her could have fallen in love (not an unknown story). He could be planning a calm, homely, quiet life with her when everything was over.

This would not mean a happy ending of course, or what would he have sacrificed? Ultimately you would still have to keep the hint of a final, later, suicide-by-cop in order to revenge his brother. He is not a man who could let that go. But it would become a tragedy rather than nihilism.

I guess a happy ending just wouldn't be Texas.

Get Out

Allegories are tricksy beasts. They do their work, not on the page, but in the head of the reader, and they go on working long after the writer has stopped. At the time of it's publication Lord Of The Rings was consistently read as being an allegory for the second world war but these days is far more likely to be read as being about the unthinking destruction of the environment by forces of industrialism. Neither interpretation was what Tolkien intended. He was adamant it was just a story about hobbits and nothing more, but nobody cares what he thought.

There is no doubt that Get Out is intended as an allegory for racism (indeed the director states it is "less allegory and more straight up about what it is"), but the way in which the film guides the audience toward the message without beating them around the head with it is impressive. It is at once subtle and incredibly sharp.

It brilliantly skewers a kind of white liberal middle-class racism, the kind that would never dream of expecting any advantage over blacks, and would die of shame if caught uttering a racial slur, but still voted for Trump. The kind that doesn't feel it has anything to apologise for, that refuses to recognise any difference between the white and black experience. None of the whites in the movie, even the cop who needlessly asks for his ID, are ever rude or unpleasant to Chris, but they objectify him as a black man. Indeed they envy him for his "superior DNA," squeeze his biceps, giggle and ask his girlfriend if it is better. The movie stays relentlessly with Chris, forcing the viewer to experience this polite othering from his perspective, emphasising it when the one other black man at the party turns out to be whiter than the whites.

The subtlest and sharpest moment comes when Chris finally asks: why black people, and gets the answer: I don't know. That's them. Don't put that on me, from the man who is about to benefit the most from the racism he is disavowing. The audience has to guess the answer for itself: because black people won't be searched for too hard by the authorities; because the Armitages view black people as nothing more than bodies, not people in their own right; because, even though they don't admit it themselves, the Armitages could never bring themselves to do this thing to whites.

Clever too is the choices it makes to ensure it is read the way its creators intend. The most obvious of these is backing away from the horror at the climax. Although we get a bit of surgery seen, artfully, reflected in the surgeon's glasses, the gore is minimal. More to the point, no writer who didn't have their mind set on another goal would allow Chris to escape before he was actually under the scalpel, let alone before he was even in the room. Hell! A young Peter Jackson would have had him running about for the last fifteen minutes with the top of his skull flapping loose. Instead, as soon as the full horror of what the Armitages are up to is established, the film advances straight to Chris' fight to escape, avoiding turning off any more squeamish viewers or distracting from the message.

It avoids other possible readings too. In Britain, for instance, race is not as live an issue as it is in America (we do not have the tick-tock of police regularly killing black men, and we have not recently put a white supremacist at the top levels of government) but a conflict between the generations is (the housing crisis is essentially young renters funding the increasing wealth of older property owners, and the Brexit vote is, I'm told, seen widely among schoolchildren as the older generation robbing them of their futures as Europeans). Miss the opening dialogue between Chris and Kate while buying popcorn, go for a wee during a couple of the more critical moments, take the character who denies racism at his word, and the film could nearly be read as being about the old stealing youth from the young.

Nearly, but not quite. If it was about generational conflict then Rose would have had to choose Chris over her family at the end, maybe only when it was too late for her, but at some point. It would have been an easy decision for the filmmakers to take. Rose's betrayal of Chris is hard on the audience after we have been with her for so long (was everything she said just lies? We can't know), and leaving the film with no good white characters might lay it open to idiotic accusations of being racist itself, but they did not take it.

It is always easy to read meanings into a movie that are not there. Indeed it is fun to go through this Get Out listicle and work out which of the "secrets" are deliberate details inserted by the filmmakers and which are the fevered imagination of symbol literate internet sleuths. And it is often hard for a movie to carry a message without either feeling like a lecture or being so willfully obscure it ends up just baffling and infuriating. Horror has always done this better than other genres for the simple reason that what we are frightened of tells us something about ourselves, whether that is something visceral and eternal like childbirth, or something cerebral and cultural like the mass society. What is impressive about Get Out is that it keeps the message front and centre, but is never overwhelmed by it.

Star Wars And Star-Warsiness

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is an objectively bad film: the dialogue is risible, the characters one-dimensional, the acting patchy at best, the effects -though they have dated well- have dated. The only undeniably great thing about it is the production design.

And yet I love it.

And not just love it like I love other movies. I was genuinely angry at the prequels. They felt like a boot in the face of my childhood. In contrast I was sanguine when I saw Crystal Skull. I love the first three Indiana Jones movies in the same sense that I love chocolate biscuits. I love Star Wars in the same sense that I love my mum.

Similarly, while I have issues with both Force Awakens and Rogue One, the latter is a muddle, the former astonishingly derivative, I had such a blast in the cinema that I don't care. They felt like Star Wars in the way the prequels never did.

I am, of course, not alone in any of this. Star Wars is roundly loved (if mostly in a chocolate biscuit sense) and the prequels roundly hated. But why - if it is objectively bad? And given that, what is so much worse about the prequels? Is there some mysterious property that makes it enjoyable even when it's not very good? Something that Force Awakens achieved but Phantom Menace did not?

I think there is. I am going to call it Star-Warsiness n the quality of being Star wars.

"Don’t get cocky."

I don't want to be too hard on George Lucas here, but I don't buy the idea he's any kind of master storyteller who lost his mojo when he got rich. It was something we invented when we were students and reappraising our childhood (I'm reappraising that reappraisal now if you can't tell). Star Wars was enduring, and fun, and we loved it, so it also had to be artistically worthwhile. We seized on the wipe-transitions and the bits ripped off Kurosawa as evidence, but these only demonstrate a familiarity with samurai movies and some panache in the editing suite.

Consider the ways in which New Hope is not a well constructed story: Luke and Vader never meet face to face. Peter Cushing, so evil he blew up a planet, does not get a death scene. The empire has an emperor (he's mentioned once) but we never see him. The film makes a huge deal of light-sabers, introducing them early and stressing their importance (and they were presumably a big lump off the effects budget) and then drops them entirely. They do not appear again after Kenobi dies.

You might say that Lucas was planning ahead for the sequels but I don't think that excuses it. The script famously went through hundreds of drafts and if you've ever read one of the early ones you'll know it changed a lot, but for all that work it does not look at all well honed. The impression is not of a master filmmaker laying the foundations for a trilogy, the impression is of an overactive imagination throwing ideas against the wall until enough of them stuck.

In any case: Howard The Duck (the prosecution rests m'lud).

"I find your lack of faith disturbing."

Lets get this bit over with quick. Phantom Menace is crap (and it's the high point of the prequels in my opinion), but it would still be just as wrong if it was better. Why do you hate Jar Jar Binks? Because he's annoying? Useless? Based on an offensive stereotype? All these complaints describe C-3PO equally well. You can argue the charm of Anthony Daniels' performance (on set in a suit) makes up for a lot, while a talking CGI frog compounds the injury, and you'd be right, but you would have conceded the point that we are only discussing degrees of crapness. All of it is crap. Phantom Menace is both crap and wrong.

"She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts."

I said that the production design was the only undeniably great aspect of New Hope but I do not think they just lucked out with some good designers, in fact it falls out from the story.

One of the remarkable things about Star Wars is how resolutely blue-collar it is. From Luke eating unappetising mush on a remote farmstead, to Han forever trying to keep one step ahead of his creditors, to Ben Kenobi eking out an existence in a cave (selling moonshine to Sandpeople no doubt), to the over-crowded Rebel situation room (not like the conference rooms on the Death Star or the vast flight decks of Star Destroyers), to Yoda in his swamp, to Lando only just getting by in Cloud City, to Rey scavenging for junk, to Han and Chewie hauling monsters about the universe in a glorified cattle truck, to Jyn Erso rotting on a grim prison planet. These are all, with the exception of the retired Jedi, characters who work for a living. Even Princess Leia does her bit for the rebellion.

The design feeds right into this: the spaceships look like they drip oil, and they rattle and complain when they are pushed too hard. They are maintained by the people who fly them, often as they are flying them. While Tie-Fighters look mass produced (they even come out of a Tie-Fighter dispenser in Force Awakens), you know that Luke's X-Wing is Luke's X-Wing and he wouldn't let anyone else fly it. It breaks Han's heart to let Lando fly the Millennium Falcon. The Lars' farm is little more than a hole in the ground (but clean and always with food on the table). Mos Eisley looks like a bunch of temporary buildings that never got replaced. The rebel base on Yavin is occupying an abandoned stone temple. The Rebel Base on Hoth is carved from the ice. Rey's dwelling at Niima Outpost is tiny but cosy and obviously loved, packed full of worthless treasures she has collected.

Contrast all this with the prequels. While Princess Leia only wears a plain white dress and some simple jewellery on prize day, Queen Amidala can barely move she is so laden with finery. The Jedi Temple on Couruscant is huge and luxurious with commanding views over the city, and the Jedi just seem to laze about in it all day. Jar Jar Binks, unlike a protocol droid, is a bum living in a forest. The filmmakers achieve the correct look and sound for the spaceships but it does not work because the characters do not have the same relationship with their machines. The beautiful sleek Naboo Spacecraft in Phantom Menace is flown by a professional pilot, paid to fly it. You know that Obi-Wan's and Anakin's fighters in the second and third movies have come from a Jedi spaceship pool where they are maintained by a team of mechanics employed by the Jedi temple's administrative department. If one broke down they'd just requisition a new one.

Even the Pod Racers, which recapture the muscle-car aesthetics of X-Wings and Luke's speeder, have no value. Anakin builds that fastest one ever out of scrap parts in his evenings off from being a slave, and then never bats an eyelid when Qui-Gon sells it without asking. You might point out that being a slave is about as working class an existence as is possible, but Anakin is lifted out of this just a couple days after meeting Qui-Gon and we don't see his mum again till the next movie (talking of which, why didn't he go back and get her? He was best mates with a queen, surely she could have lent him the money).

How important is all this? Maybe not very, but it adds to a sense of ordinary people fighting against an oppressive power. The heroes of the prequels were not persecuted and fighting for their freedom, they were pampered and stupid, blind to what was happening in front of them.

"Never tell me the odds."

A lot of stuff gets shoved under the science fiction label, but you could, if you wanted, rank it on a scale between Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov at the one end, speculative fiction based on current cutting edge science, and space-sheriffs walking into space-bars and drinking space-beers at the other.

Star Wars is very firmly at the latter end of the scale. Luke was going to Toshi station to pick up some power converters. What are power converters? Who cares! Certainly not the audience. How does a hyperdrive work? How does a lightsaber work? What is Uncle Owen farming in the desert? Why can only some droids speak? Why is there only ever one or two of each type of alien on any given planet. None of this matters a jot.

Where the first trilogy is basically just space nazis vs space samurai with little attempt to explain either, the prequels takes ages constructing a creditable republic, with a senate and a constitution and votes and politics. It is trying, badly, to be Foundation.

How do you dissolve the last remnants of the old republic? Who cares! How do you transform a republic into an empire? Well you first propose a motion in the senate granting emergency powers to the chancellor, and then...

"Aren't you a little short to be a stormtrooper."

But this leads me to Ursula Le Guin and her marvelous essay From Elfland To Poughkeepsie. In it she plays a self confessed 'dirty trick' and transforms a piece of fantasy dialogue between a duke and a warrior-magician into modern day Capitol Hill politicking by changing just four words, and then makes the point that the trick would not work on true fantasy, on Tolkien or Dunsany.

OBI-WAN : Yes, Master...how do you think the trade viceroy will deal with the chancellor's demands?
QUI-GON : These Federation types are cowards. The negotiations will be short.

You'd only have to change one!

Many people complain of the long winded trade discussions in Phantom Menace. I don't actually think they take up much screen time (I'm not bloody watching it again) but the way in which they are discussed robs the characters of heroism.

I may as well just quote Le Guin:

And greatness of soul shows when a man speaks... In life we expect lapses. In naturalistic fiction, too, we expect lapses, and laugh at an “overheroic” hero. But in fantasy... we need not compromise.

Heroes don't prejudge people as cowards. Heroes don't worry how long the negotiations are going take like they have plans to play golf at the weekend! Heroes run away from their uncle's farm to save the princess.

When, in Force Awakens, Han says: "Okay, How do we blow it up? There's always a way to do that," he may be committing the most egregious act of plot fast-forwarding since John Wyndham died, but he's definitely speaking like a hero.

Lucas knew all this when he wrote the first movies. He understood that he was creating a fantasy, a fairy-tale, where a farm-boy who is secretly the son of the evil king is given a magic sword and rescues a princess. He comes unstuck in the prequels. His hero is his villain and he can't make it work anymore. In fact he doesn't want to. You can imagine how he could structured them so that Anakin's becoming Vader was a final act of self-sacrifice to save others, a cursed king being transformed into a beast, but he's too interested in galactic politics to bother with any of that.

"A lot of simple tricks and nonsense."

And this is why midichlorians grate so bad. Star Wars is fantasy, not sci-fi, so technobabble has little place (Rogue One just about gets away with Kyber Crystals because they're no more than a plot MacGuffin, they don't really tell us anything about light-sabers or death-stars), and definitely not for the Force. The Force is not just magic, it is a moral magic. Giving it an explanation robs it of its morality.

The Force is like nothing so much as Kung-Fu in classic Kung-Fu movies. Young pupils learn it from wise masters, it takes discipline and strength of will, it is as much a state of mind achieved through meditation as a practiced skill. And like Kung-Fu, using it for evil robs you of something of yourself. The good Shaolin Master always defeats the evil Tiger Style Master not because he happens to be better, but because his spiritual purity gives him a strength his opponent will always lack.

This concept is fragile. Like Tolkien's wizards it is something other than the world. Like Kung-Fu it is something that comes from within the individual. A blaster is as much fantasy to us as the Force is, but not to Han Solo. To Han the blaster is just a tool but the Force is a hokey magic. A Jedi might wield it but he cannot make more of it. He cannot control it, but lets it controls him. Make the Force the effect of some mechanism within the world and it is ruined. Midichlorians reduce the Force to just another blaster.

"You can’t win, Darth."

So Star Wars is high fantasy, not sci-fi, and it's fantasy elements must be accepted, not explained; its heroes are fantasy heroes, and must be heroic; it is a tale of ordinary folk and, like hobbits, it is in their ordinariness that their strength lies; and it is a tale of good triumphing over evil, and good must triumph because it is good, not because it happens to be stronger on the day.

Could you make a checklist of these items, apply them to a script, and become a toy licensing billionaire like George? I doubt it. There is always something more.

Lucas may be a miserable dialogue stylist but in his day he was a genius at the tone of a film, and the characters that achieve that tone, Just read the famous story conference devising Raiders Of The Lost Ark.  Indiana Jones is not an easy character to get right and neither was the tone of that movie, a delicate balance of humour and genuine threat. Watch the 1985 King Solomon's Mines, a blatant attempt to ape Raiders' success, to see how easily it can go wrong. There was a lot of work by a lot of very talented people to make that film what it was.

Neither was Star Wars an easy note to hit (somewhere between Buck Rogers and Where Eagles Dare) yet they get it bang on. The tone, from Luke mournfully watching two suns set over the desert, to the thrillingly kinetic space battles, is perfect. This all comes out of the characters. Luke is sad at that point in the film because he's a boy with big ambitions trapped on his uncle's farm, and he is nearly as excited during the space battles -screaming "I got one! I got one!" when he bags a tie-fighter- as eight year old me was watching them.

Take too the Millennium Falcon. My heart leaped when I saw it again in Force Awakens, but why do I love this strange, unsymmetrical, ungainly spaceship so much. The design is cool but not that cool. It is because of the lifestyle it embodies. Zooming around the universe with your best friend the wookie watching your back. Engaging the hyperdrive and shooting off to another planet if things get too hot. Watching the startled faces aboard the big Corellian class Imperial Star Destroyers in your rear-view mirror as you leave them for dust like a street racer in a Bruce Springsteen song. I love the Millennium Falcon because of how I imagined Han Solo's life was before the first film even began. That's good character work.

"You can type this shit, George, but you can't say it."

I actually think the acting is better in the prequels than in the original trilogy, it just seems worse.

In New Hope Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher make a half-decent fist of it. Mark Hamill is limited. Peter Cushing and Alex Guinness phone it in, although both of them are good enough to still make that look impressive (Cushing in particular could play that sort of role in his sleep). What there is universally though is a lightness and a gameness: there's nothing arch about any of the performances, and nothing heavy either. None of them thought they making anything oscar-worthy so pitched it a Flash Gordon level of knockabout-fun and it works.

In the prequels, though, the (very strong) cast seem to try and recite Lucas' appalling tongue twisters like they are Shakespeare and the results are cringe worthy. Too many of the roles seem to have had Comic Relief For The Kids as a character description. The actors would mug and wink at the camera if they weren't just providing voices for CG beasties. Worse, Lucas takes his on-the-nose-so-hard-it-hurts style and applies to to romance. There isn't an actor alive who could do anything worthwhile with the result.

"Now let's blow this thing and go home."

Force Awakes and Rogue One throw off both the shackles of George Lucas' abysmal dialogue and the foolish portentousness he gained in later years. The dialogue is readable and witty in both and there can be little doubt that Disney set out to make movies that were, above everything else, fun. In doing so they took a big first step in the direction of Star-Warsiness.

Force Awakens, I think, gets the rest of the way by cluster bombing the target. It throws so many known factors into the mix: lonely young hero whisked away from desert planet, cute droid with a secret that must be protected, giant world destroying weapon, universe saved by rag-tag band of heroes, Chewbacca; that it would be dragged into Star-Warsiness even if it didn't know where it was going.

I think it does though. It's new characters are strong and dynamic and moral. Rey is skilled and works for a living. We meet her sticking out a shitty situation through a sense of trust and loyalty. We meet Finn in the act of taking a great risk to do what is right. It's best moment, when Kylo Ren kills his father in order to push himself into fully embracing the dark side, is pure fairy-tale.

Rogue One struggles more. It has the advantage of being set contemporaneous with New Hope, so can lift much of the look and feel without needing to adapt it to show the passing of time. It has the disadvantage of being a necessarily darker film. It is no coincidence that it is only in the last forty-five minutes that it really takes off. That is when the rag-tag gang of heroes are finally all moving in the same direction, with the same goal in mind. The good guys have set off against the bad guys and there is no worrying anymore about which side anybody is on.

Reportedly there were extensive reshoots to lighten the tone. I doubt we'll ever get a 'director's cut,' but I guess they were originally aiming for a gritty adventure and only when they got there did they find it was insufficiently Star-Warsy. If Jyn was too reluctant a hero, as was suggested by the trailer, that would not have been Star-Warsy. New Hope only got away with Han Solo because Luke was so naively enthusiastic. Similarly, if Saw Gererra (who seems to have had a whole backstory cut) , and perhaps Cassian, introduced too much moral complexity into the Rebellion that would not be Star-Warsy. Star Wars must be good triumphing over evil. Good must be good.

They are both, I think, objectively good films: the dialogue is sparky and witty and allows the story to tell itself; the characters are believable; the acting is strong (Daisy Ridley feels a little limited at points but always rises to the occasion when it matters); the effects are -of course- state of the art; and the production design is as good as ever, Rogue One in particular benefits from Gareth Edwards' fantastic eye for beauty in a digital effect. But ultimately none of that matters, because they both achieve Star-Warsiness, and that's all a Star Wars film needs to do.