So, on to the movie. It does not owe to Star Wars as much you think it may, judging by the title. This film is not a parody on SW, and although it was supposed to be entertaining, it nonetheless did not scorn Lucas. In terms of a storyline and the imagery, it is a fresh account of Flash Gordon. Nonetheless, SW continuously haunts you in cut-outs. Blessed be the time of the 1980s – “plagiarism” was definitely not in the crew’s vocabulary.The film opens with a scene of setting a rocket off to space somewhere at either Canaveral or Baikonur. The rocket then miraculously and invisibly transforms into the SW spacecrafts, which seem in our film to be treading between the Earth and the Moon in its first quarter…These two trends – hard-graft eye-job and the make-believe – continue for the rest of the film, which I am not going to retell you, lest I ruin the impression when you finally get to watch it. And, believe me, there is so much to see: a spiky Excalibur hidden in an Orthodox church; red and black Muppets getting mutilated and decapitated by our space team; not to mention the outstanding SFX. There will be more action scenes, in comparison to which your Bruce Lee is a pathetic karate-kid. Oh, and also there will be a romance, and then there will be one of the tenderest scenes of a male embrace and compassion in world’s cinema. So, there is a lot to look forward. At the same time, Turkish Star Wars shows no sign of sharing the ethic concerns of European and American film-makers. The latter are plagued with enormous guilt every time they have a child being killed in the film. The makers of our movie had little problem with what we would call “an extreme violence”, including some truly outrageous scenes.
Strangely, 5 years later I’m beginning to think that film-makers behind the feature had an incredibly good sense of humour. They mocked everything about the Hollywood blockbusters that was possible. They said a resounding “no” to any traditional acting method and took suspence and hooray-patriotism ad extremum. Even dialogues now read in an entirely different way. While any “normal” hero would be walking in desert, pondering the fate of mankind, the two protagonists are far more down-to-earth: this seemingly uninhabited planet may be populated by women who are checking the guys out from their hidden habitats. But no later they thought so, they are attacked by a herd of horsemen. ‘Okay‘, the main character says, ‘instead of women skeletons came‘.
Consider that, thank to anorexia and dieting obsessions, some women do look like skeletons, and suddenly the Turkish Star Wars become almost prophetic.
As for me, I have always been puzzled at the music choice. While Flash Gordon and Raiders of the Lost Ark made a good accompaniment to the story that was largely lifted from other movies, the sounds of Bach’s Fugue will leave one wondering, exactly what was the motive for choosing one track or another?