 Video Review: Turkish Star Wars Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam is Turkish for Turkish Star Wars, we think.
Seanbaby Years before Star Wars was ruined by Ewoks, ruined again by Episode One, and then pissed all over by Episode Two, Turkey had already done it. Turkey was light years ahead of George Lucas when they invented Star Wars-ruining technology as early as 1979. That's the year Turkish filmmakers, using Turkish production values, remade Star Wars. They called it Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam. This is not a fabrication; this movie is real and probably worse than I will be able to convey. Turkish Star Wars begins with a narrator talking over a series of short clips stolen from the original Star Wars mixed in with vintage footage of NASA rockets taking off. This narration goes on about five times longer than the amount of footage they have, so the sequence of clips is repeated over and over while he talks. I should let you know now that this film is not subtitled, and I speak no Turkish. However, using the video clips as my guide, here is a translation of what the narrator is saying: "Here's that ship that blew up in Star Wars. And here's another one! BAM! This is a shot of a regular non-make-believe rocket, and oh - here's the hangar from Star Wars. And here's the shot of that first ship blowing up again! KAPOW!"
The two of them are wearing motorcycle helmets and walkman headphones and sitting in front of TVs playing Star Wars footage. This would have almost looked like two men inside spaceships if they could have kept the clips behind them from rapidly cutting to scenes from Star Wars that were not of space. I'm sure it's tough for even Eastern European moviegoers to suspend their disbelief when the scenery behind the pilots suddenly transforms from a laser-filled starscape to a shot of people pressing buttons. It gets confusing, but eventually the amount of explosion footage increases and the theme music to Indiana Jones starts playing, so I think they're supposed to be winning. I soon found out that they actually weren't winning. One of the many exploding ships on the screen behind them must have been their's, because the camera suddenly zooms in on a painting of a red planet, then cuts to a smoke grenade going off outside a cave. I may not speak Turkish, but the film's effects crew speaks the international language of retard, and this was their way of saying that Luke and Han have crash landed into Tatooine. As Luke and Han dig themselves out of the crash site, the narrator comes on to describe the desert planet of Tatooine. While he's doing so, it cuts to fuzzy shots of Earth's Sphinx, the pyramids, and various objects covered in hieroglyphics. Hopefully, the narrator at one point apologizes for how instead of creating an alien planet set, they just stole some documentary's footage of ancient Egyptian dishes.
My next best guess is that they're hit by lasers since they both fall down when a man in armor shows up. Turkish special effects are not what you'd call an exact art, and here the picture is severely scratched up, which I think indicates a failed attempt at scratching a laser-like beam onto the film itself. They're captured and taken to a cruel gladiator arena where Darth Vader's water cooler robot proves its evilness by swinging a screaming child around by its neck. Luke and Han watch for what seriously has to be three solid minutes of noisy kid dangling before they start another karate fight. Darth Vader comes out of a cave, and as soon as he does, most of the rest of the scene is viewed through the eyeholes of his helmet, including shots of Darth Vader himself. This could have been another massively insane mistake by the Turkish production crew, but I like to think it was a profound metaphor about how karate fights make Darth Vader take a careful look at himself, through the evil-shaped helmet eyeholes in his mind. They're cut up and captured by Darth Vader, and immediately escape to a cave with Princess Leia and 40 or 50 children. Now, judging by the romantic dialogue in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, it's clear that George Lucas has never even heard of anyone who knows a woman. The makers of Star Wars: Dunyayi Kurturan Adam avoid that kind of embarrassment by eliminating all dialogue from their romance. Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia's relationship is reduced to 40 awkward seconds of the two of them giving each other shy smiles three feet away.
TRAINING!!!
They're taken aboard a spaceship, given painfully stupid clothes (Han is dressed like Robin Hood and Luke gets a silky blue shirt with dish-sized yellow spots on his nipples) and taken before Darth Vader. He shows them his cool stick that transforms through a magical awkward camera cut into a brain inside a box. Somehow Luke and Han find themselves in a karate fight back at the Star Wars bar set against giant red cookies monsters. Four minutes later, they're captured again. Darth Vader submits them to horrific space torture: two cookie monsters putting heavy rocks on their faces and pushing down. Then the two are buried alive under a couple inches of dirt, and after Darth Vader and his men leave, they climb out. Why did Darth Vader leave when he was so close to ending these two men's series of insignificant karate fights against local monsters? He had to scream at his wife. I'm getting good at deciphering their special effects by this point, so I knew immediately from the shot of swirling lights, then a shot of the queen in the space hallway, then a shot of swirling lights, then footage of zombie from a different movie outside a woodshed, and finally a shot of a tarantula in a cave was supposed to show that Darth Vader had lost his temper and turned his wife into a zombie. And after that, he turned her into a tarantula. I rewarded myself for this amazing display of puzzle-solving by letting myself not watch the next 20 minutes of the movie.
This apparently wasn't the real Han since minutes later, Luke fights his way into a separate cave and rescues Han from the Lite-Brite he was loosely tied to with phone cords. The two of them engage in a confusing fight against Darth Vader where people disappear and reappear while red gels are placed and removed from in front of the camera. There was no dialogue at any point during the fight, so I have a feeling Turkish people don't know what's happening here either.
Although setting world records for lack of production values, Turkish Star Wars is a lot more entertaining than Episodes 1 and 2, and not nearly as unexplainably stupid as Jar Jar Binks. It's tough to say why they bothered to make it since it's obviously not an improvement, and with all the stolen video footage and music, the filmmakers are in the same amount of legal trouble they would be in if they were just distributing bootleg copies of the original. Of course, if any of us could understand the motivations behind Turkish Star Wars, we wouldn't be sitting here, we'd be powering flying cars with our minds at some kind of Smartest People Ever convention. |
When
the narration finally ends, the Turkish Darth Vader enters his space
chamber with his evil robot, an upside-down garbage can on top of a
garbage can with a water cooler and a police siren on top of that. I
remind you that this is not made up. He discusses something with Darth
Vader in a slowed-down robotic version of Turkish. Then the action
starts - Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are involved in a massive
intergalactic space dogfight! I think.
Minutes
after pulling themselves out of the ground, storm troopers on horseback
charge. A massive karate fight breaks out, and you can say what you
want about their effects, sets, costumes, acting ability, sound editing
and lack of continuity, but damn, Turkish people can fight. Luke and
Han take out 15 men on horses with flips and kicks in super fast motion
while the Indiana Jones theme plays. Periodically, the music
abruptly stops and they show a half-second clip of a giant-headed
papier-mâché mask somewhere else screaming "YAAAGGHHH!" Please believe
me when I tell you that this was never explained at any point during
the rest of the movie.
Their
romance is cut short by an army of toilet-papered cave mummies and
giant multi-colored cookie monsters. Luke, Han, and Leia fight for a
little bit then grab one child and run away, leaving the rest of the
kids at the mercy of Turkish Chewbacca, a huge armored gorilla with
paper clips dangling on tinsel from its fingertips. And while I was
waiting for Luke and Han to come back and karate it from behind, it
kills the hell out of every last kid. Emphasizing the horrors of space
gorillas, the movie pauses on a slow panning shot of the pile of child
corpses, which is only slightly ruined by Turkish child actors'
inability to sit still when they're pretending to be dead. Soon their
bodies are transformed by Darth Vader into toilet paper mummies through
a ritual so dark and mysterious they don't bother to show it.
So far, this remake of Star Wars
has taken a few liberties with the original's plot and characters.
Every detail of the original Star Wars
cantina bar, however, is faithfully recreated right down to the giant
empty stone room and papier-mâché Satan. You barely notice as it cuts
back and forth from original Star Wars bar footage to Turkish
Star Wars bar footage while Luke and Han share a drink and soon pick a
karate fight. And you know what that means - they're soon captured.
When
I came back, Luke and Leia are running through a rocky area and are
attacked by a team of martial artists with pasta strainers on their
head. I'm not kidding. The choreographer goes trampoline crazy during
this fight, and Luke Skywalker hops and flips over each guy's head nine
to ten times each before he finishes them off. Han is still captured,
and is being held on a table next to two blue light bulbs. While they
show him, the movie cuts to a shot from the original Star Wars
of various switches and lights indicating that the phone cords holding
his chin down are in fact maybe near some kind of super device.
Back
on the planet, Luke finds a huge plywood sword in a cave. Two men in
metallic gold ninja suits leap out to guard it, but they sort of
disappear four seconds into the fight. Luke claims the magic sword and
immediately throws it over his shoulder and grabs all along the blade
to demonstrate how incredibly not sharp it is. Han Solo shows up as an
evil hypnotized Han, takes the sword and attacks. Luke grabs the sword
back, which isn't that hard to do when it's a half-inch thick at its
sharpest edge and you can safely grab any part of it. Strangely, Han
Solo turns into a werewolf and makes threatening growling motions until
Luke decides to stab him. This was a miracle of special effects since
Luke Skywalker, in an empty cave, was fighting a werewolf taken from a
black and white movie standing calmly in front of a pile of sticks.
Instead
of being captured at the end of this fight, Han dies. Heartbroken, Luke
decides to melt down the sword in a flower pot, then dips his hands in
the molten gold to create super gloves with the same incredible powers
possessed by the plywood sword. Here's where the movie goes so far
beyond Earth adjectives that it kicked the ass off my face. Darth Vader
appears on a hill and blasts at Luke with lasers while he jumps from
trampoline to trampoline in the center of a field of yellow smoke
grenades. For two minutes, there is a cloud of zero visibility while
randomly alternating sound clips from Flash Gordon are mixed with
random sections of the Indiana Jones song. It's amazing. When the smoke
clears he's tearing the giant red monsters in half at the waist,
chopping their heads off and kicking his foot through their chests.
There's one part where he headlocks a mummy's head off, throws it at
another mummy and it explodes. Every single monster from earlier in the
movie shows up to get torn into chunks, and the entire time his gloves
are disappearing, reappearing and disappearing while he's wearing a
different shirt.
During the land war between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, which is probably 300 times more than human rad absorption can handle, Darth Vader is also in space issuing commands while they cut to absolutely confusing shots of Star Wars footage. Finally, Luke wades through the army of muppets to face Vader himself. Their showdown is everything the buildup was and more. Darth puts his hands at his side and Luke rams his palm against his face like five million times. Then he trampoline-jumps straight up to bring down a karate chop that splits him completely in half. A few frames of a black and white water geyser is thrown here to give a subliminal impression of squirting blood, then it cuts to the two halves of Darth's body. This is one of the more tricky visuals from the Turkish effects wizards: he is filmed while one half of his body is in shadows, then they go to a shot of him with the other half of his body in shadows. It seems impossible, but both halves of him ended up with his whole nose. And then that's it. That's the end.