The Quantum Mirror Archives — Recovered Review No. 7
November 22, 1989 | Holiday Film Review
For the first twenty minutes of The Open Sky, it appears that the filmmakers have decided to forget almost everything audiences were told about the future of Star Wars.
There is no Imperial fleet bearing down upon a helpless planet.
No black-armored villain.
No ominous pronouncement about the destiny of the Jedi.
Instead, the Millennium Falcon is attempting to deliver a cargo of agricultural machinery to a frontier settlement, and Han Solo is arguing with a customs official about whether a pair of replacement hyperdrive couplings constitutes contraband.
The official insists that they do.
Han insists that they are part of the ship.
Chewbacca, who has apparently heard this argument before, begins removing the couplings.
The Falcon's lights go out.
And the picture is off and running.
It is an enormously welcome return to the humor and cheerful disorder of the original Star Wars.
But what follows is considerably more imaginative than a reunion tour.
A Republic learning to walk
Several years have passed since the Emperor's death.
The Rebel Alliance has become the New Republic, and Princess Leia Organa is now one of its principal political leaders.
The transition has not been easy.
Hundreds of planetary governments are negotiating their relationships with the new administration. Imperial governors have been replaced, although not always successfully. Old commercial agreements are being reopened. Regional disputes, long suppressed by Imperial military power, have begun resurfacing.
Yet the prevailing mood is optimistic.
Markets are reopening. Families are returning to worlds they fled during the war. Former enemies are trading with one another.
The Empire's defeat has not produced paradise.
It has created possibilities.
Leia finds herself working harder than ever, attempting to establish institutions that will not depend upon extraordinary individuals to survive.
Han, meanwhile, has discovered that he is much better at winning a rebellion than attending the celebrations that follow it.
Luke Skywalker has begun searching for the surviving records and traditions of the Jedi, although his efforts have produced more contradictory accounts than useful instruction.
The filmmakers wisely allow the characters to have grown without making them entirely different people.
The ships that should not exist
The adventure begins when a battered convoy of civilian vessels emerges from a supposedly impassable region of space.
The ships are ancient, mismatched, and in some cases visibly assembled from parts belonging to different generations of spacecraft.
Their crews identify themselves as citizens of worlds beyond the established galactic navigation routes.
According to Republic records, those worlds either do not exist or were abandoned centuries ago.
One of the vessels is carrying thousands of passengers, most of them refugees fleeing a conflict that the New Republic knows nothing about.
They have been traveling along a network of hyperspace passages that nobody in the Republic believes to be navigable.
Their arrival creates excitement, fear, and considerable bureaucratic confusion.
Is this an invasion?
An elaborate smuggling operation?
The remnants of some forgotten Imperial program?
Or proof that the Republic's maps are wrong?
The answer appears to lie with a young navigator named Kera Venn.
Kera is an appealing addition to the series: quick-witted, technically accomplished, occasionally arrogant, and entirely unimpressed by the legendary heroes of the Rebellion.
When introduced to Han Solo, she informs him that his ship is poorly maintained.
Han is offended.
Chewbacca agrees with her.
Into the uncharted passages
Kera explains that her people navigate a series of narrow, unstable hyperspace routes known as the Crossings.
These passages have existed for generations, but were never included in the Republic's official navigation records.
Their existence depends upon local observations, changing gravitational conditions and the accumulated experience of independent pilots.
Unlike established hyperspace corridors, the Crossings cannot be navigated reliably from a single fixed chart.
A route may be perfectly safe one month and dangerously unpredictable the next.
The extraordinary achievement of Kera's people is not a miraculous technology.
It is an elaborate tradition of navigation, cooperation and practical knowledge passed between communities.
Some of the routes have recently become unstable.
Ships have disappeared.
Entire settlements have been cut off.
And someone is deliberately attacking the vessels attempting to reach established Republic territory.
Han agrees to help investigate after learning that several ships carrying badly needed supplies have gone missing.
Leia authorizes a small reconnaissance mission.
Luke insists on accompanying them.
The resulting adventure is easily the most entertaining Star Wars picture since 1977.
The great escape at Kestrel's Gate
The film's centerpiece takes place at an enormous abandoned navigation station built into a fragmented asteroid.
The station once directed traffic through an important hyperspace junction.
Now it is occupied by scavengers, smugglers and a private armed force charging extraordinary passage fees.
The place looks like a cross between a shipyard, a frontier mining town and a badly managed railway terminal.
Han attempts to negotiate passage.
Kera attempts to bypass the station's computers.
Luke investigates a mysterious signal that seems to originate somewhere inside the asteroid.
Chewbacca discovers that the station's maintenance crews are being held against their will.
Naturally, everything goes wrong.
Han is arrested.
Kera triggers the station's security system.
Luke discovers that the mysterious signal is merely an ancient automated emergency beacon.
Chewbacca starts a labor uprising.
Within minutes, ships are colliding in the docking galleries, explosive charges are being hastily removed from the wrong locations, and the Falcon is attempting to escape through a maintenance passage barely wider than itself.
It is a wonderfully constructed sequence, with considerable humor and an almost reckless sense of physical movement.
And its eventual conclusion matters to the story.
The station's navigation equipment contains information suggesting that the Crossings once formed part of a much larger transportation network.
Someone has been suppressing that information.
The danger of doing the right thing
Back in the New Republic, the discoveries have created a political problem.
Uncharted hyperspace routes could be exploited by pirates, smugglers, and Imperial military units still hiding beyond Republic territory.
Several representatives propose emergency regulation of all interstellar navigation.
Ships would be required to register their routes. Unauthorized passages would be restricted until the government could guarantee their safety.
Leia understands the argument.
After all, the Empire used secret military routes to move fleets and conceal operations.
But she is uneasy about placing the entire galaxy's ability to travel under one authority.
In a particularly effective scene, she returns to her office to find that the proposed legislation has been given a reassuring name: the Galactic Navigation Protection Act.
She reads it.
Then asks an aide who proposed the title.
The aide explains that it was chosen because polling showed nearly everyone supported protection.
Leia remarks that she would like to meet someone opposed to it.
The scene gets a considerable laugh.
The unexpected ending
Han and Kera uncover evidence that the attacks on the refugee convoys were organized by a consortium seeking control of the old navigation infrastructure.
Their intention is simple: acquire the abandoned stations, monopolize passage through the Crossings, and sell access to the highest bidders.
The villains are defeated in an exhilarating series of chases through the station's industrial machinery.
But the larger mystery remains.
Kera reveals that her people have been maintaining fragments of the old network for generations.
They never believed they were part of the Republic.
They believed the Republic had forgotten them.
When Leia offers assistance, Kera asks whether the New Republic intends to help the isolated worlds or simply add them to its territory.
Leia answers that she hopes the two are not the same thing.
Kera replies that her people would like to find out.
In the film's final sequence, the Falcon emerges from a narrow hyperspace passage into a brilliant region of stars previously absent from Republic charts.
Numerous inhabited worlds are visible.
Han studies the navigation display.
He asks Kera how many more systems might be out there.
She smiles.
"How much fuel have you got?"
The Falcon turns toward the nearest world.
John Williams's familiar theme rises.
And for the first time in many years, Star Wars ends not with a victory celebration or a funeral, but with the beginning of an adventure.
Our verdict
The Open Sky succeeds because it understands that the galaxy has become more interesting following the Empire's defeat, not less.
Its characters are older and occasionally wiser, but no less entertaining.
The new worlds feel genuinely unfamiliar. The action sequences are inventive. The humor is affectionate without becoming self-conscious.
Most importantly, the film refuses to replace the Emperor with another enormous menace.
Instead, it gives the heroes something they have seldom possessed.
A future that has not already been decided.
Next Christmas: The Broken Map — A discovery that could make the New Republic more powerful than the Empire ever was.
Editor's note: This is a fictional film review recovered from the imagined Quantum Mirror timeline. The film described here does not exist in our historical record.
