Thrill Is Not Gone in New ‘Star Wars’

Not every member of the Star Wars generation has seen all three movies in the trilogy. In explaining what to expect, some young parents sound less like they are talking about a movie and more like they are inculcating a beloved and exalted fairy tale.

“You’ll see Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia and Han Solo. This is the first one that has them all in it,” one mother was overheard telling her young son before the curtain went up.

“Will it have the big sluggy one?” he asked.

“No, he’s in the Empire Strikes Back,” she explained (incorrectly, as it turned out, because the sluggy Jabba the Hutt showed up in a new scene.) “You know Luke Skywalker? His dad is Darth Vadar,” she said knowingly. “And Darth Vadar? His dad is the Evil Emperor.” The boy clapped his hands with anticipation.

But after years of watching the videos at home and their friends’ houses, most of the older kids already knew what to expect--and were thrilled to finally see the planetary action on the big screen.

“The big screen was better. It had better sound effects,” said Ryan Stava, 12, of Orange. He said his grandmother got him all three movies for his birthday two years ago.

He was aware that director George Lucas had remastered the movie with some new special effects--such as adding more architecture and tiny creatures to the dusty town of Mos Eisley.

His little sister Emily said she liked it too. But she said the high-volume sound effects of the outer space dogfights and the exploding planets were a little much for her.

Lucas, reportedly making some concessions to modern sensibilities about violence, added a self-defense context to the shooting of a long-billed green creature in a cantina.

Girls agreed “Star Wars” is geared toward boys, what with all its adrenaline-inducing action, noise, weaponry and Oedipal overtones. But they had Princess Leia--one of the first in a generation of new-style princesses who don’t necessarily appreciate being “rescued” and who can pick up a weapon and defend themselves, thank you very much.

“She’s cool,” said Krystianne Tatum, 13, of Irvine.

Though the movie was made before they were born, the kids said that other than the vaguely faded color and Luke Skywalker’s dopey hairdo and overly dramatic acting, it offered as much if not more excitement than anything made recently--especially in the heart-thumping climax when Luke pilots his spacecraft through a narrow chute in a do-or-die mission.

The only problem, according to one young viewer, is that the revved-up pace and action obscured the gentle fable contained in the original. As the story goes, Luke Skywalker learns from the old Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) that he can defeat the Evil Empire only by concentrating on the universal energy within himself--”The Force.”

“I liked it,” said Adrian Butts, 10, of Mission Viejo, “but I think they messed up the pacing of the movie. You lose interest in the main part of the movie. You’re all stuck on these new scenes and things.”

He preferred seeing the original on video, he said, even if it was on a small screen.

AT ISSUE: Just because a film is rated PG doesn’t always mean its violence is less harmful to young kids than a PG-13 or an R rating. Barbara Wilson, associate professor of communication at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said ratings measure only the amount or graphicness of violence, not the overall message.

In “Star Wars,” for instance, Princess Leia’s home, a planet of millions of people, is obliterated in an instant. “When you make the violence abstract, you don’t show real people suffering,” she said.

Having Han Solo kill only in self-defense sounds good, but it “encourages people to think about using violence to solve a problem.”

“I’m struck with how seldom we see the perpetrators of violence in the entertainment media showing regret or remorse for what they’ve done. That’s unfortunate.”