Hate Follows

flakmaniak:

I meant to write this last fall, when @argumate was reblogging his thoughts about Star Wars 7 from the year prior.

So a few years back, in 2014, I watched most of the Star Wars original trilogy, to write a paper for a sci-fi literature class on them. (I say most of, because the school library’s DVD of Return of the Jedi was fucked up, so I didn’t see all of that one.) Now, of course, it’s cheating to watch fantasy movies for a sci-fi class. But obviously my paper said that Star Wars was fantasy in space; that was my thesis.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. (And yes, I’d seen parts of the original trilogy, and maybe one of the movies in whole, many years prior as a tiny child, but never together and not when I had a clear memory.)

What struck me about A New Hope was one scene in particular, unparalleled in drama and badassery.

Was it Luke attacking the death star? Of course not.

Was it a lightsaber duel of some sort? No; don’t be a pleb.

Was it the trash compactor scene? Nah. Temporally close, but nah.

You see, the best scene was: Old men walking down corridors.

When the various protagonists were aboard the Death Star, interleaved with the wacky action scene starring Luke, Leia, Han, we got all these shots…

Of Obi-Wan and Darth Vader just walking down the corridors.

Looking for one another.

And this has more gravitas than the rest of the film combined. You have all these shots of plebs running around the Death Star, doing various irrelevant things… But the framing makes it abundantly clear that the only important thing is these two. They’re obviously the most powerful beings on the entire station. They’re just walking down the corridors, without a care for anything… Except for finding the other. They’re the only two that matter. They stride through the halls, not even really paying attention, because everything is irrelevant other than finding their counterpart.

THAT is power. Oh, and then they had a lightsaber fight or something. But obviously, the really badass scene came before, when they were just walking down corridors.