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Movies To Watch Before
The Force Awakens
So you’ve watched the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer a couple of hundred times and you’ve soiled yourself a couple of dozen. You throw your anticipation-juice stained underthings in the washing machine and crumple to the floor in a weeping heap when you realize you have to wait eight more months to see Han and Chewy return home.
After the first teaser dropped you rewatched the original trilogy over and over again until you had to stop because in a Star Wars induced fugue state you trespassed on a farmer's land, cut open one of his sheep, climbed inside its belly and fell asleep; then went to a bar and chopped off a dude’s arm, and when the cops came to arrest you you waved your hand in front of their faces and said “I’m not the droid you are looking for.”
And you dare not watch the prequels lest you remind yourself how awesome The Phantom Menace trailer was and how betrayed you felt when you finally saw it.
What do you do? How can you go on?
Never fear, we’re here to help. To help you survive the long wait until The Force Awakens premieres in December, we’ve created this Star Wars anticipation survival package. This list consists of films we think come close to capturing the feel of Star Wars, and should make the agonising wait a little less painful…
Star Trek (2009)
This is the film that more than likely landed JJ Abrams the Star Wars gig. He took a franchise that celebrates its fiftieth anniversary next year and stabbed it in the chest with a syringe full of adrenaline. Using an ingenious time travel device he essentially reset the Star Trek universe, creating an alternate timeline where he wasn’t beholden to the tangled continuity of the original series, movies, or spin offs.
Abrams admits that he was never much of a Star Trek fan, but came to love the characters while working on the film. Being a Star Wars geek he brought a healthy dose of that series’ sense of fun and adventure to the Trek universe, and rejuvenated the space opera for a whole new generation. He did what many thought to be impossible, he made Star Trek cool, even sexy, provoking the ire of many Trek purists.
The Trek reboot captured the spirit of Star Wars more successfuly than any of the prequels, and although the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, was something of a disappointment, I’m looking forward to seeing what Star Trek 3, co-written by Simon Pegg, has in store for us next year.
Serenity
It seems inevitable that we’ll see a Joss Whedon directed Star Wars film in the future, considering he directed one of the highest grossing films of all time for Disney Studios (and after the release of Age of Ultron he’ll probably have directed two of the highest grossing films of all time). If you want to get an idea of what a Joss Whedon directed Star Wars film might feel like, look no further than Serenity, the spin-off film of Whedon’s short lived TV series Firefly.
Firefly lasted only one season, but garnered a loyal and passionate cult following. Captain Malcolm Reynolds is a Han Solo type who would most certainly shoot Greedo first, and then empty out his pockets. After only 14 episodes and a movie, we grew to love the crew of the Serenity just as much as we loved Luke, Obi-Wan, Han, Chewy and Leia. And Serenity, the Firefly Class spaceship the crew call home, is one of the top three space ship designs of all time, right alongside the Millennium Falcon and the Enterprise.
There’s rumours going around that one of the stand alone Star Wars films (the first of which, Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One, comes out December 2016) is going to be a Han Solo adventure, and I can think of no better man than Whedon to tackle the rogue smuggler’s early years.
Battlestar Galactica
Now this is a bit of a cheat because it’s a TV series, but since it spawned several stand alone TV movie spin-offs I think it qualifies.
Why the remake and not the original movie/series you ask? Well, because the original Battlestar Galactica was a shameless and cheap knockoff of Star Wars. I know the “classic” Galactica has its fans, but it really doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Star Wars in my opinion, whereas Ron Moore’s reimagining does. Sure, it’s much darker than Star Wars, but it’s just as epic, with great characters and some of the most thrilling space battles you’ll ever see on the small or big screen.
If those shots in the trailer of X Wings skimming across a lake have you teary eyed and longing for some epic space combat, then look no further than Battlestar Galactica for some awesome Viper on Cylon battles (Vipers are basically X-Wing rip-offs, so you can even pretend the dogfights are taking place somewhere in the Star Wars universe).
Lord of The Rings
A trilogy that both influenced and was influenced by Star Wars, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies are perhaps the closest any films have come to garnering the same kind of obsessive fandom as Star Wars.
George Lucas may have borrowed heavily from Tolkien’s source material (farm boy goes on an epic adventure aided by a rag tag group of warriors and scoundrels, hero must resist giving into The Dark Side, Wizard/Jedi mentor dies and is resurrected, hero wields a magic glowy blue sword) but Star Wars’ influence can be seen in the Lord of the Rings movies’ humour, tone, pacing, and roller coaster set pieces.
Another thing Jackson and Lucas’ trilogies have in common is that they were later followed by prequel trilogies that were obnoxious, overblown, CGI vomit fests that completely failed to capture the spirit of the originals. If The Force Awakens kicks all our asses like we all hope it will, perhaps Abrams can direct The Silmarillion?
Raiders of The Lost Ark
This is an even further departure from the space opera genre than Lord of the Rings, but with Raiders of the Lost Ark Lucas once again succeeded in capturing that illusive Star Wars feel.
There’s no doubt Raiders was pitched as The Han Solo Adventures, as Henry “Indiana” Jones Jnr is basically a more well rounded evolution of our favourite intergalactic space smuggler.
The Indy movies are as much a comforting staple of our Christmas television schedule as Star Wars, and for good reason. Raiders is a blockbuster masterpiece that has stood the test of time and has captured the imaginations of young and old alike. As with A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, it’s an absolutely flawless piece of crowd pleasing filmmaking that can be rewatched over and over again without losing any of its spellbinding magic. The same can’t be said for its first sequel, The Temple of Doom, which tried to follow the success of The Empire Strikes Back by going dark. Unfortunately, child slavery, Short Round-slapping Indy and a villain that rips hearts out with his bare hands was a little too dark for audiences to handle. Thankfully they managed to recapture some of that lost Raiders magic in the concluding film of the series, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Yes, the concluding film that concluded the series, because there were no other Indiana Jones films. No more I tell you!
Guardians of The Galaxy
Everyone fell in love with Star Wars; men, women and children, young and old, people from all around the world and different walks of life. It wasn’t a film for science fiction geeks; it was a film for everyone.
The most recent film on our list earns its place for being the most unabashedly fun, unpretentious and uncynical blockbuster in years, and for being a film that absolutely everyone that went to see it seems to love. Many people are calling it the new Star Wars, and I can’t say I disagree.
Star Lord, sort of a cross between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, is an instantly iconic hero, thanks in no small part to Chris Pratt’s performance, who can go from charming to goofy to heroic to scoundrel with a twinkle in his eye without missing a beat.
Drax and Rocket are hilarious, but they're much more than comic relief, they have a past and are fully rounded characters in their own right.
But the breakout star has to be Groot. He’s been called the new Chewie, but I’m going to be controversial here and say I love him even more, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Sure, he has an advantage over Chewie in that he can talk, but you can’t express much more with “I Am Groot” and one slight variation than you can with different Wookie growl intonations.
Groot proves that wholey computer rendered characters can capture our hearts, in the same way Jar Jar Binks proved they can rape the anuses of our souls.
There’s no fat on Guardian’s, it’s fast, it’s funny, it’s exciting, and the characters have captured the imaginations of children the same way Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie did all those years ago. I’ve rewatched it five times and it’s lost none of its appeal. Guardians of the Galaxy definitely has some of that Star Wars magic, and I know I’m going to end up watching it at least two or three times a year.
If Star Wars: The Force Awakens manages to be as entertaining as Guardians then it’s going to blow our geek minds and slap our balls off, and go a long way toward mending the many hearts that were left shredded into meaty strips of bacon by the prequel trilogies.
So there you have it, just a few films to keep you guys sane until The Force Awakens in December. Are there any movies you’d add to the list, or anything you’d knock off? Let us know in the talkbacks below.
Written by Richard O Connell |
Written by Richard O Connell |