ANDREW KLAVAN: What The New Star Wars Movie Knows (No Spoilers):

But something did occur to me after watching the movie that has nothing to do with its quality or plot. Films like Star Wars — and any of the super hero films based on comic book characters, as well as most films involving war with an alien invader — seem to capture something about battle that we forget in real life: its rewards.

* * * * * * * *

Some of the fulfillment of fighting was captured in Clint Eastwood’s excellent movie American Sniper, too, but it’s fantasy films that depict it with the most clarity. In fantasy films, the fighter pilot whoops and cheers when he blasts the alien craft to smithereens — and so do we. The watching crowd celebrates when the super-villain is finally defeated by the super hero — and so do we. The hero is honored and elevated and lifted up as an example. The fight is seen as an unfortunate and dangerous necessity, but the fight having come, it’s engaged in without moral dithering and backward glances. Victory is recognized as an absolute good.

In fantasy films like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Captain America and so on, evil is acknowledged as real and physical heroism is recognized as the virtue without which no other virtue is possible.

And from James Lileks in his latest “Bleat,” which I should have linked to as well when I mentioned his new podcast earlier today:

As a piece of moviemaking, it’s the equal to the first. No question. Look, I know: it’s a reboot / remake / sequel, a faithful reimagining. It couldn’t have the surprise of the first movie, the sense of discovering a new world of characters and stories, but it had a different kind of surprise: revisiting the familiar with filmmaking skill that exceeded its precedents. It felt real – probably because it was, in the sense that they weren’t all gesticulating in front of green screens. The acting was better. The dialogue was better. The comic relief was better. The battle scenes weren’t just a screen-full of stuff thrown at you; you could grasp what was happening. The set direction was a labor of love, right down to the little red lights on the walkway at the scene in the shield-generator facility, calling back to Cloud City.

When it was over I wondered what George Lucas must have thought when he saw it, whether he realized he’d had the chance to make something like this, and had failed, three times. He’d told the wrong story. He’d cast the wrong actors. He’d written the wrong words. His prequels look like unreal plastic cartoons now. Someone found what worked in a movie he did almost 40 years ago, and made it live and breathe in a way he could never recapture.

That has to be humiliating.

Lucas set out to tell the story of a man rising up from humble beginnings in the hinterlands to becoming so powerful, he could eliminate all of his enemies, to the point where there was no one left to say no to him, or to point out the flaws in his vision — and the crippling isolation that would ensue, even as he was surrounded by thousands of eager minions.

I don’t think he realized he was filming his autobiography, though.