“Elstree 1976” is an amazing experience. I’m shocked that a documentary revisiting the making of “Star Wars” could be this boring.
The movie, which consists almost entirely of recent interviews with bit-part actors, extras and Dave Prowse, who (sort of) played Darth Vader, contains maybe 10 minutes of information about the filming of “Star Wars.” There are a few cute anecdotes — one guy, not recognizing the director, asked George Lucas to fetch him a coffee — but the rest is dull stuff about the small-time actors’ small lives before and after. (Did you know Prowse was once involved in a child-safety campaign? Did you care?) There’s at least as much chatter about what it’s like to work a fan-boy convention (“I have roughly about 20 to 25 pens”) as there is about the filming.
The movie (named for the London studio where it was shot) simply shouldn’t have been made without “Star Wars” owner Disney’s blessing; as it is, containing only those choice few anecdotes, a couple of stills from the set and maybe 30 seconds of footage from the sci-fi blockbuster in which we glimpse the actors as they once were, it’s like a box of Raisin Bran that contains three raisins.