Lando the free
The first time one of the neighborhood kids called me an asshole, I didn't know what it meant, but I thought it must be something like that big monster in the asteroid from "The Empire Strikes Back." I was too young to see the movies during their original theatrical release. My childhood coincided more with the second "Star Wars" wave. I watched the "Ewoks" and "Droids" Saturday-morning cartoons and had the second Ewoks movie, "Battle for Endor," taped off TV (the one with Wilford Brimley, where Cindel's whole family dies in the first scene).

I was a junior in high school when the original trilogy was re-released in theaters and sparked a new round of "Star Wars" fever. I would describe myself as a casually avid fan. I had seen the movies dozens of times, but I didn't own copies of them. I owned a life-size cutout of Princess Leia, but someone had to correct my pronunciation of "Han Solo" (I was saying it "Hans Solo"). But it wasn't just me. A vintage Lando Calrissian action figure was the unofficial school newspaper mascot that year. It was as much about identifying with a cultural phenomenon as it was about the movies.

When I first heard that "The Phantom Menace" was the subtitle for Episode I, I thought it was so incredibly lame that it couldn't be true. But it was. Still, I saw it the day it opened and it was as bland as I had expected it to be. I had much higher hopes for the second movie. Hoping that the second trilogy would mirror the first, I was looking forward to a dark and challenging second chapter. I wanted another "Empire." In my vision of Episode II, Anakin Skywalker would become Darth Vader by the end, leaving the final installment to chronicle the collapse of a whole interplanetary civilization. My disappointment in the second film broke my spirit. It was 143 minutes of gaudy visual effects, George Lucas' infamously god-awful dialogue, and pathetically limp love scenes between Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen. By the end, I was wincing everytime someone opened his or her mouth.

I'll pay my $10.50 to see "Revenge of the Sith" in a theater, more out of nostalgia than anything else. I don't think "Revenge of the Sith" will overcome the suckiness of Episodes I and II, but hidden away survives a lingering hope that I'll be wrong.

-- Robin Lisle

For kids and geeks only
I'm touched by your loyalty, "Star Wars" fans. Really I am. No, I'm totally lying. Mystified and a little horrified might be more like it. The Lucas fantasy franchise never lost me because it never had me, even for a second.

I was in the 10th grade when I saw the original "Star Wars" film -- I'm sorry, but I refuse to call it "Episode XVIIV: Return of the Attack of the Snood," or whatever it's now supposed to be called -- at the UC Theater in Berkeley, Calif. Even at the time, I went out of a sense of professional duty. I wrote about movies and rock music for the high school paper, and my buddy Craig Barron, like me a fan of classic horror and sci-fi, was all excited about it. (Craig wound up working for George Lucas on later movies in the series. He now runs a visual-effects shop called Matte World Digital and has credits on close to a hundred films.)

Craig explained to me what a special-effects achievement this movie was, and of course it was made by a local guy who had shot the underground sci-fi classic "THX 1138" -- the title refers to a Berkeley phone number, and much of the movie was shot in the tunnel between Oakland and Alameda. I got all that, but what I saw on the screen was a dopey, minor attempt to rejuvenate the "Flash Gordon" space operas that kids of the '40s and '50s had grown up watching. There was no subtlety, not nearly enough creepy darkness, and a lot of lame humor, along with a girl whose hair looked like cinnamon buns and some big guy in a rented Sasquatch costume. OK, it was kind of campy -- but not nearly campy enough.

I probably went over to another friend's house that night, drank some imported beer his ex-communist dad bought for us, played albums by Patti Smith and Television, and declaimed about how this overly hyped piece of crap wasn't half as good as "The Hidden Fortress," the Kurosawa film it was supposedly based on, let alone the difficult art films we had recently gotten into, like Ingmar Bergman's "Serpent's Egg" (released the same year as "Star Wars") or Luis Buñuel's "Belle de Jour."

Was I a completely obnoxious little cappuccino-swilling snob, raised in a bubble of pseudo-bohemian sophistication? You bet your ass. I've grown and matured a lot since then (for one thing, I now understand that "The Serpent's Egg" is one of Bergman's worst films). But let me tell you what I wasn't -- I wasn't a little kid. And as far as I can tell, the only two categories of people with a good excuse for liking "Star Wars" are Cinefantastique-reading geeks like my friend Craig, who can appreciate the movie as the end product of an impressive technological process, and little kids.

I mean, when I was 6 or 8 or 10 years old, I loved all kinds of dumb kid culture too. I thought "Doctor Strange" was a profound comic book. I couldn't imagine anything better than Sean Connery in "Diamonds Are Forever," or the later "Planet of the Apes" sequels. I still have a fondness for those movies, crappy as they are, because some part of me was shaped by James Bond's bogus suavity, and by the portentous social analogies of those "Apes" movies. (I'm too scared to ever rewatch a movie I once proclaimed my all-time favorite, a 1972 crime caper flick called "Snow Job," starring Olympic skiing champion Jean-Claude Killy.)

So for those of you who expended third-grade recess in earnest arguments about the "Star Wars" characters -- could the horrible rumor about Luke's hidden relationship to Lord Vader possibly be true? -- I may not get it, but I'm in no position to judge. Look, I'm exaggerating my position to make a point here; I've seen all the "Star Wars" films and was able to sustain some vague interest through the first three. But I'm sorry, there's no there there, and there never was.

Lucas probably thinks his crypto-fascist mythology, not just ripped off from Tolkien, Wagner and countless comic-book authors but then boiled down to its stupidest essence, is in some way liberal or optimistic. (We keep hearing about how the new movie is some kind of anti-Bush parable. Wake me when the furor fades.) Forget it. Lucas drove Hollywood moviemaking down the path toward ever bigger, ever emptier spectacle. His inflation of childish myth to blimped-out proportions embodies the refusal to grow up -- the refusal to face the darkness in our history, the emptiness of our rhetoric -- that marks America at its worst.

-- Andrew O'Hehir

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