Originally Posted by
chum43
can someone explain what was so groundbreaking about star wars?... I just don't get it.
Prior to Star Wars, all sci-fi movies were lame, low-budget, and targetted exclusively towards children (which is why Lucas had so much trouble getting it made). There was nothing REAL about them. Everything looked like it had just come out of the box. Characters who had supposedly lived with the technology for their entire lives felt the need to give boring explanations on how each piece of technology worked. Aliens were all either human look-alikes or terrible monsters who ate children. Technology had stupid names and all characters referred to them as their full, proper names, which would be like me seeing an M-16 sitting in my car and say, "Hmm, I wonder why there's a late model .223 caliber Colt M-16 automatic assault rifle placed in the rear seat of my 1999 4-cylinder Saturn LS?" as opposed to "Why the hell is there a gun in my car." Last, but not least, spaceships and their movement didn't look realistic, and space fights were dull to watch.
When Lucas started Star Wars, he tried to make what he called a 'used' universe. Han Solo is constantly doing maintanence on his dirty, old-model starship. The droids are forever getting grimy. Nobody explains why stuff works, it just does. Nobody uses drawn out terms to refer to everyday objects when 'blaster' 'freighter' and 'fighter' will do. There are lots of humans, but even the inhuman aliens can be seen enjoying a quiet drink, performing or listen to music, or just having a conversation. The main characters were people you could relate to. They started out as ordinary guys doing (fairly) ordinary things (we don't all have a hovering car, but just about anybody can relate to 'farmboy'). The story was a common one, taking aspects from many different epics and combining them in a different setting, ensuring that the setting was more of a backdrop to the story than being the story itself, as it should be, so that the alien setting didn't put off the audience.
Then there were the special effects. Ben Burt, the guy who did the sound effects for all 6 Star Wars movies, made what he called an 'organic' soundtrack, that featured almost exclusively things you could find in the real world, rather than what was synthesized. Half of R2-D2's sounds were made by Ben Burt himself, and most of the blaster sounds or a hammer striking a radio tower guide line. This type of stuff made it seem more real. On the visual side, Lucas started up his special effects from scratch, making props from all kinds of things, but the biggest breakthrough was creating the illusion of spaceships moving with full freedom of movement, making space-born dogfights that were every bit as exciting as terrestrial dogfights in a good WWII movie (in fact, the guys that filmed the space battles went through a whole bunch of old WWII movies looking for stuff they could re-create in space).
In the after-effects of Star Wars, their special effects techniques are still used today, the summer blockbusters are made as action movies instead of dramas, and nearly every sci-fi saga goes for the 'used universe' effect. It defied, then changed, the entire industry.
"Lighght"
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