{"id":14240,"date":"2015-02-06T17:31:52","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T17:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=14240"},"modified":"2023-01-23T11:45:49","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T19:45:49","slug":"star-wars-a-new-hope-original-bad-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/star-wars-a-new-hope-original-bad-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Scathing Star Wars Review from 1977 Will Make You Laugh and Cry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1977, a little movie called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/hitlist.asp?theme=Star+Wars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em><strong>Star Wars: A New Hope<\/strong><\/em><\/a> was released. No one knew anything about it and no one had any idea how massive it would be. Critics didn&#8217;t know what to expect when they went to see it and despite being the classic film we know today, several critics weren&#8217;t impressed the first time around.<\/p>\n<p>None more so than <em>New York Magazine<\/em> film reviewer <strong>John Simon<\/strong> who wrote a review that absolutely ripped this movie apart. It&#8217;s hilarious to read now but, at the time, it was probably a bit more serious. George Lucas took a risk with this movie, and put a lot on the line.<\/p>\n<p>The whole review can be read on <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=QuQCAAAAMBAJ&amp;pg=PA71&amp;dq=%22george+lucas%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=OO_FVLH3EonyoATh2IG4DA&amp;ved=0CCYQ6AEwAjge#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Books<\/a> but <em>i09<\/em> pulled some of the best bits:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I sincerely hope that science and scientists differ from science fiction and its practitioners. Heaven help us if they don&#8217;t: We may be headed for a very boring world indeed. Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its high-falutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a &#8220;future&#8221; cast to them. Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like, that, in downtown Los Angeles today&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;O dull new world! We are treated to a galactic civil war, assorted heroes and villains, a princely maiden in distress, a splendid old man surviving from an extinct order of knights who possessed a mysterious power called &#8220;the Force,&#8221; and it is all as exciting as last year&#8217;s weather reports&#8230;. Why, even the most exciting fight is an old-fashioned duel, for all that the swords have laser beams for blades&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Here it is all trite characterization and paltry verbiage&#8230; The one exception is Alec Guinness as the grand old man Ben Kenobi (Ben for the Hebrew ben, to make him sound Biblical and good; Kenobi probably from cannibis, i.e., hashish, for reasons you can probably guess.)&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be children or unlucky enough never to have grown up.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Simon didn&#8217;t hold back at all. The <em>Star Wars<\/em> lover in me is a little hurt but mostly I can&#8217;t stop laughing. Lucas and all these characters really showed him, didn&#8217;t they? I&#8217;m curious if he had anything to say after <em>Star Wars<\/em> took off the way it did.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think of the review? Are there any popular movies you had less than great first impressions of? Share your thoughts in the comments!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1977, a little movie called Star Wars: A New Hope was released. No one knew anything about it and no one had any idea how massive it would be. Critics didn&#8217;t know what to expect when they went to see it and despite being the classic film we know today, several critics weren&#8217;t impressed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,108,390,389],"tags":[3145,112,1355,1963,1964,419,1962,1627],"yst_prominent_words":[8617,8723,6475,16510,16508,6413,14998,7008,16512,5885,16507,16511,16509,16513,15926,5780,5779,5825,5781,6101],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14240"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14240"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68737,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14240\/revisions\/68737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14240"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=14240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}