Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam does not actually means Turkish Star Wars. It actually translates to The Man Who Saves The World, better hinting at this cinematic digestion of history and Hollywood’s love of The Hero’s Journey. Made in 1982, before VHS would take over Europe, Turkish Star Wars is the product of an industrious film industry that didn’t have nearly the budget that Hollywood had. Through the 1970s, the Turkish film industry produced around 250-350 movies annually, including many mash-ups and knock-offs of American cinema, but few had the budget or the time to make a big bolshy space opera.
The Man Who Saves The World uses a breathless 3 minute monologue to set the background for our heroes. With the current translation, the back story is wonderfully earnest and nutty; it’s so nonsensical that any attempts to relay it will just result in hilarity. Just take from it that, in the near future, Earth has unified as a single tribal unit and is being threatened with nuclear weapons by an unknown enemy. This is set to a bunch of Star Wars footage in a blender while the Theme from Superman: The Movie plays in the background.
After a space dogfight, our two heroes crash on a desert planet, where a tribe of humans is being threatened by the unknown enemy, looking like a rejected idea from Flash Gordon (whose driving bass line also appears later in the movie), who makes people fight to death in battle for his amusement so he can use their blood for his eternal youth. I told you it was complicated. On the planet, accompanied by the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, our heroes fight all sorts of enemies – skeletons, mummies, trash can robots, plush thingies – before meeting a mystic who points them in the direction of powerful trinkets that will defeat the bad guy and also restore the voice of his mute daughter. Just for good measure, the mystic throws in bits of Christianity and Muslim faith to round out the film’s spirituality.
By attempting to create its own mythology from so many different sources, The Man Who Saves The World has a proto-remix culture feeling. Like so many amateur pieces of mash-up music, the sound mix frequently hinges on a slider with Flash Gordon on one channel, and Raiders on the other. When the film makes a cut between scenes, the sound mix slams, inelegantly, from one track to the other. Through its recycling, it presages the mash-up editing used by Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen to tell a universal story about a man and a woman.
The Man Who Saves the World is simultaneously an exploitation of and love letter to Hollywood’s Hero Journey. Even if it is risible, low-budget, nonsensical, and even a bit exploitative, it has a lot of heart and a desire to entertain at all costs (except money). Never knowing what’s around the next corner, even if you do know the generic outline, is what keeps The Man Who Saves the World feeling fresh while using an extremely well-worn formula.
Because of its heavy use of copyright material, Turkish Star Wars will probably never be released in an official capacity in America. You can see The Man Who Saves The World on YouTube below.
