SF: Millennium Falcon

TRX
February 10, 2012
138:
> Star Wars to me feels like a fantasy
> story dressed up like space opera.

I saw it on the big screen when it came out, with me being a teenage hotrodder gearhead as well as an SF fan. I didn't care that the characters were cardboard cutouts, that the plot didn't hold up if you examined it closely, or that there was no real backstory.

What made the entire movie for me was the Millennium Falcon. It was a hotrod, we were told, with engines from a bigger ship grafted into it. And when they first ran up to it we saw that there was a big ring of dirt around the ramp button, and oil is drooling down the landing legs, and the inside had panels open and wires hanging out, and there's litter on the floor.

This was a major, major thing. Before, all cinema starships were like the C57- D, the Jupiter 2, or the Enterprise - shining white and chrome, spotless altars of technology. The Falcon, on the other hand, was a flying garbage can. And it though it was very fast and heavily armed, it wasn't particularly reliable.

1977 was a long time ago, but I still remember how impressed I was with the Millennium Falcon. It was something new. The rest of the movie was just more drama, ho-hum, you could get that anywhere.