STAR WARS (A NEW HOPE)

The Data Points

• Year Released: 1977

• Runtime: 121 Minutes

• Directed: George Lucas

• Produced: Gary Kurtz, Alan Ladd Jr.

• Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, James Earl Jones, Peter Cushing

• Oscars:

  • Won: Best Art Direction, Costume Design, Editing, Original Score, Sound, Score

  • Nominated: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Guinness), Best Original Screenplay

• IMDb Plot Summary: Luke Skywalker joins forces with a Jedi Knight, a cocky pilot, a Wookiee and two droids to save the galaxy from the Empire's world-destroying battle station while also attempting to rescue Princess Leia from the mysterious Darth Vader.

Why Star Wars is Great

The Recipe. While Star Wars is an original stew in that it’s not based off any pre-existing material, it is comprised of pre-existing cinematic and thematic ingredients that, when identified, further enhance the achievement. Thematically, it is well known that Lucas borrowed Luke’s character arc from the works of Professor Joseph Campbell and his ideas about “the hero’s journey” that color the stories that humans have been telling for millennia. Essentially, a hero leaves his very common home and enters a world of extraordinary circumstances and then defeats the ultimate evil – along the way, they encounter a mentor figure who dies after they’ve passed on what they know as well as a damsel in distress. Sound familiar? The simplicity of this story is the foundation that Lucas builds his cinematic vision on, and if you look at fellow filmmakers Cameron and Spielberg, their most iconic films are a result of simple storytelling combined with unique visual chops.

Joseph Campbell isn’t the only source of inspiration for Lucas here, though. The order of the Jedi, reliant on their swords and being in touch with “The Force” – achievable through discipline, meditation, and clearing of the mind – feels reminiscent of the samurai in the films of Akira Kurosawa, especially in the timeless Seven Samurai. In that film, one of the many storylines is of a young samurai is seeking the apprenticeship of an older, wizened samurai who takes him under his wing. In the intervening years between Seven Samurai’s release in 1954 and Star Wars’ release in 1977, Kurosawa’s films influenced the visual and thematic language of Westerns (The Magnificent 7 is a remake of Seven Samurai), and Han Solo is a smart-talking gunslinger with a heart of gold flung right out of a Western movie, complete with getting in a saloon shootout in his first scene. To further round out all this, he layers on allusions to WWII and Nazi imagery, and then populates his sets with lived-in sci-fi elements. Despite the disparate nature of these ingredients in his story, they are balanced perfectly.

The Underdog Production. Like the rebels in his story, the odds were stacked against Lucas from the beginning, and this film’s troubled production has only served to increase its legend and my appreciation for the finished product. To begin with, Lucas struggled to find a financial home for his project. Science fiction movies were inherently considered b-grade due to their reliance on unconvincing special effects; having just been nominated for a couple of Oscars for his work on American Graffiti, choosing to enter this genre was difficult for Lucas’ peers and potential partners to understand. After securing his financing, he faced difficult conditions shooting in Tunisia and an uncooperative crew in London. The project eventually ran over-budget and over-schedule, and Lucas’s physical health was in decline from the stress. Lucas’ obstacles weren’t limited to the production of the film. Besides Alec Guinness, he had no recognizable actors anchoring his project, making for a potentially difficult sell at the box office. Additionally, the moral clarity and simplicity of his film stood in contrast to other successful films of the ‘70s, posing a potential threat to its reception. Necessity is the mother of invention, however, and the constraints on Lucas forced him to rely on practical effects for most of the film, and the result was an immersive experience that blew audiences away. I really believe the difficult choices Lucas was forced to make resulted in the best possible version of his movie. As such, I mostly reject the changes and additions he made with the “Special Editions”, including additional creatures and adjusted takes/scenes – the early-2000’s CGI stands out like a sore thumb among the handmade and practical scenes that comprise the rest of the movie.

The Key Collaborators. Just as Lucas succeeds best with constraints, he needs skilled collaborators to fully execute his vision; in this case, the two most significant contributors were John Williams and Marcia Lucas. John Williams, now a household name and arguably the most famous film composer of all time, was fresh off an Oscar win for the Jaws score that also served as his breakout. Here, he evokes the film’s grandiose themes, giving a sense of majesty to the project. In the process, he created several key musical themes and motifs that are not only as iconic as the images in the film, but that became a blueprint in giving different characters and locations individual musical accompaniments. To communicate complicated ideas such as The Force, as well as quickly establish how we ought to feel about each character, give them a tune that boils them down to a simple idea. In comparison, Marcia Lucas’ contributions as an editor are less widely understood by audiences, but the editing in this film is key. It creates the pace of the action, can generate tension when needed, keeps the whole story flowing, and is key to making the special effects-driven sequences coherent and exciting 45 years on. She also edited American Graffiti, creating its unique vignette structure, as well as Taxi Driver, creating a mounting sense of dread and unease; it shouldn’t be a surprise that she was a secret hero on this film.

The Cast. While Star Wars isn’t necessarily the place to go to see the world’s greatest acting performances, it takes a committed cast to bring Lucas’ characters to convincing and engaging life. Translating this material into heartfelt performance is no easy task, but this cast succeeds. Mark Hamill makes for a perfect farm boy-turned-hero with a plucky sense of confidence colored with insecurity. Luke’s growth over the course of the film is one of the key arcs, and he also serves as an avatar for the audience by being positioned in contrast to Obi-Wan and Han; he learns from the former and has a very clear morality compared to the latter. Carrie Fisher’s Leia has a similarly clear morality but is more of the beating heart of the rebellion and has the range to verbally spar with her costars and be a capable warrior in her own right. I was surprised to learn that Alec Guinness was Oscar-nominated for his turn as Obi-Wan, but it is the perfect part for his acting style. His character feels as aged by regret as by time, and when mixed with his superior attitude makes for a combo that doesn’t feel like he’s ever onscreen long enough. It’s Harrison Ford in his breakout role who gives my favorite performance and crafts my favorite character though. Han Solo sells every line he delivers, whether it’s exposition by way of bragging and swagger, humor in the face of suspense, or a shallow reluctance to care about anyone besides himself. Because of Ford’s performance throughout, his return to help Luke destroy the Death Star is no surprise to be sure, but it is nonetheless welcome.

John’s Highlight Reel

• Opening. My dad continues to cite this movie’s opening as one of the signature in-theater moments of his moviegoing life, and I must admit I’m a little jealous I didn’t experience it that way. Regardless, the iconic crawl followed by a “pan” through “space” when suddenly a starship battle/pursuit rages into frame is one of the best shotgun-blast openings a movie can have. Some fun trivia: Brian De Palma helped Lucas hone his opening crawl, since the first version was long, unfocused, and too much of an exposition dump about the galaxy’s history. The way that the entire movie deals with exposition stands in contrast to today’s tentpole storytelling; here, we’re given just enough as to be relevant to the motivations of our characters, but little else.

• A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy. Mos Eisley spaceport was always my favorite part of this movie. This little town that has a limited screentime is bustling with enough life and visual worldbuilding to inspire a saga’s worth of imagination on its own, and it doesn’t get any more iconic than the cantina scene. All the patrons – especially the guy that looks like Satan – are presented as unsavory types yet all I want to do is learn more about them. It’s to this movie’s credit that I don’t. The magic starts with the sets that Lucas and his team designed, is complemented by the costumes/prosthetics/makeup/puppets they use to create a bar full of creatures, and then is perfected with the footage Lucas shoots, edited by his wife, and scored by the untouchable Cantina Theme; you know the one.

• Freeing the Princess. The interior Death Star sets are just immaculate, and Lucas captures both them and the gunfights that break out in them in thrilling fashion; whether this is due to the actors’ commitment to their parts, the fact that he couldn’t rely on special effects, or his camera choices is unclear, but my gut tells me that it’s a mix of all three. The “damsel in distress” motif is flipped upon Leia’s rescue when she assumes leadership of the ragtag group in the heat of battle, which is a fun wrinkle to the “Hero’s Journey” that was the source text for Lucas, and where Princess Leia gets to really shine as a character with her own agency.

• Defending the Falcon. This scene isn’t amongst the most iconic in this whole movie, which is an unfair statement since every second is basically iconic, but it’s a great preview of the spacebound dogfight that will essentially close out the movie. It also contains my favorite bit of music and one of my favorite lines, “don’t get cocky.”

• Attack on the Death Star. This entire 10-minute sequence, from when the pilots all radio in and lock their S-foils in attack position until the Death Star is destroyed is a masterclass in editing and “movie magic”. While this sequence was revolutionary at the time for its use of special effects, it could never be fully reliant on them due to technological limitations. If you break this down shot by shot, you’ll realize that it’s essentially just an amazing pattern of images to tell a story, which is what editing is all about. All praise is due to Marcia Lucas for digging through all the footage that Lucas shot to arrange them into not just a coherent sequence, but one that still thrills and steals the audience’s breath to this day.

The Galaxy Far, Far Away 45 Years Later

It’s late May 2022, 45 years after this film premiered and changed everything. We eventually got 12 theatrically released Star Wars films, with what we can call varying degrees of success. However, it’s not like there’s been a deluge of other original blockbusters to offset a franchise that’s become so afraid of taking risks it’s backed away from making movies entirely, and now relying on producing Disney+ shows to attract and retain subscribers. Suffice it to say, today’s landscape is different, and doesn’t exactly have the space for the next version of Star Wars - that is, an original, generation-defining and culturally-resetting movie - to get made.

When I think of the most recent analogue for what Star Wars must have been in its day, the answer I come up with is James Cameron’s Avatar. Everyone saw it, most people more than once, resulting in it becoming the highest-grossing film of all time. It wasn’t based on any pre-existing material, and there was a sense that it was going to technically achieve things that no other film had, and so seeing it was an event. However, James Cameron had been making movies since 1982 (though he hadn’t since the previous definitive event film, Titanic, in 1997) and so studios were far more likely to trust him with his vision and give him the necessary financing. In 1975, when Lucas earnestly began production on Star Wars, he had only directed two theatrical releases, and it was the success of American Graffiti that afforded him any of the necessary cache to get his space opera made. Nowadays, no matter how great a filmmaker’s first two films are, they do not have the freedom to make their epoch-defining blockbusters. Instead, promising indie directors are often poached by Disney to shepherd the studio’s vision for their next franchise film. Paradoxically, Star Wars has gone from being the plucky underdog rebel in culture to being a part of the Empire that dominates at the box office and snuffs out any original competition.

This hasn’t made me love this franchise any less, however, since I have a season ticket for whatever Star Wars wants to do next. All I ask, not that anyone is listening, is that the franchise takes some narrative risks again. I would especially love for this to come from a young, talented filmmaker making a story that’s untethered to any pre-existing material, so audiences can be swept anew into this galaxy far, far away. It doesn’t even have to cost more than $100 million; this underdog production was financed for the equivalent of $60 million in today’s money, and necessity is the mother of invention – something this franchise desperately needs.