Edit: I’m realizing that the first entry took me a lot longer than I thought it would, so I’m going to make this an ongoing piece that I can (hopefully) contribute to regularly until I have a fully fleshed Opinion about Star Wars in its entirety.

So this is a “retrospective” on Star Wars, a film series that I have not the historical, sociological, or otherwise necessary context to comment on. But I’m going to do it anyway because this is America, baby.

This project began when, on a whim, we booted up the original Star Wars (now known as(?) A New Hope) as one of those midnight/1am-ish salves to wind down a weekend night. Originally it was The Bourne Identity, but then everyone who hadn’t seen it before left, so we were like “what if we watched this other thing we’ve seen before, albeit the most recent re-watching of which was a bit longer ago?” You get the gist.

All of that is to say I (notably just me) subsequently decided to embark on a serial re-watching of the original trilogy® and the prequels. How did I have time to do this, you might ask? Living in a Capitol Hill basement apartment trying to distract myself from the $10 my roommate (who I do not know) asked me to loan him. That’s a start.

Anyway. I’m not well-versed enough in the credo of Star Wars fandom to know what the dogmatic approach to this would be, so I’m just going to go in the order in which I watched them which, I assume depending on who you speak to, is the “correct” way to watch them.

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

OK, so the first thing I have to acknowledge, perhaps not for the first and/or last time, is that I was not there when this came out in 1977. By all accounts, it blew the proverbial doors off of what film had done to that point, technologically- and visually-speaking. I can’t vouch for the objective truth of that, but I’m happy to take it at anecdotal face value in this case (I’m also too lazy to do the research necessary to substantiate either the for- or against- side of this claim). Like sure, 2001 was more visually compelling my book, but that’s also a very different movie with very different aims and, not for nothing, didn’t have iconic spaceships (at least exteriorally [sic]) like the Star Destroyers, TIE fighters, etc.

Proviso landed 😎. With that behind me, I have to say that one of my first and, as it turns out, lasting impressions of watching A New Hope at age 25 was how goofy it all was. Not just the content though – I’ve been known to enjoy and even laud my fair share of Good-v-Evil-with-minimal-overlap plots. Sometimes the power of friendship does just come through, you know? So what if the Force, and its latter-day half-assed explanations in the canon of its relationship to Jedi, Sith, etc., is at the end of the day very simplistic and overall not a super interesting device when all is said and done. That is not a complaint. No, what I found to be very silly (though again, maybe not a complaint. I haven’t decided) upon this viewing was the actual carrying out of the film itself. The script could have been – and I say this not necessarily with any negativity – written by George Lucas when he was in his teens and edited very little between then and Star Wars’ theatrical release. I picture George Lucas as having a kind of Fabelmans-esque precocity for weird-looking aliens and desert planets. In my mind, this reinforces and kind of at the same time confuses my evidenceless hypothesis of how Star Wars became such an engine of global entertainment. We’ll get to that.

In addition to the script being a little hilarious, I also found the acting was similarly a bit ham-fisted. With the possible exceptions of Alec Guinness and Carrie Fisher, though maybe not even Harrison Ford, much of the delivery rang to me as almost theater-adjacent. The kind of overish-acting that in my observation predominated over certain periods of film I’ve watched (most evidently the Bogart/Bacall 40s), before people began to realize that film afforded them the resources of its craft that demanded more subtlety from its two-legged counterparts. There’s something very charming about this kind of acting — which these days we might passingly refer to as camp — that almost certainly people are appreciating more acutely in this era of anemoia. Not being as familiar with the zeitgeist or even filmic appreciation values of any time outside of my own, I can’t speak to whether this kind of camp was contemporaneously beloved, but my powers of deduction tell me it was at least beloved enough to launch Star Wars squarely into what would become one of the hallmarks of huge-budget-franchise territory. One of my favorite examples of the no-holds-barred corny camp in A New Hope, just to ground this abstraction for a moment, is at the very end. Right after Luke turns off his targeting computer and essentially blind-fires a torpedo into the Death Star, there’s a bunch of cheering and so forth and then there’s an immediate screen-wipe transition to him and his homies all getting whatever the equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom would be in the Rebellion (side note: seems like for a scattered and constantly-under-barrage Rebellion, they’ve got some sweet digs for their bestowal of war medals). It encapsulates the whole feeling of this being an almost cartoonish movie, is what I’m getting at. And there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. I think the observation only serves to highlight the kind of bubblegum features that may or may not have birthed a whole genre of Really Big Movies.

Enter hypothesis, kind of. A New Hope, in my estimation, is not a very remarkable movie. It’s for sure enjoyable and, even for someone in the 2020s, it carries the kind of degree-removed nostalgia that I’m sure is felt by magnitudes greater as you move backward across generations. But, all things being equal, it doesn’t give you a whole lot more than your boilerplate hero-arc narrative, and has about the emotional and moral complexity of the poles on a magnet. Granted, this is made a bit more complicated throughout the rest of the two trilogies, but sticking with IV for now. What makes it remarkable, perhaps, is how its formula became a Promethean torch for decades following. By creating some likeable if archetypal characters and putting them in a relatively morally unambiguous story with some nicely-paced Acts I-III and supernatural powers/environs/sidekicks (take your pick), you’ve basically got a blockbuster. The modern equivalent (you knew this was coming), Marvel and its Terracotta Army of IP and “competitors,” have taken the ball and run with it, so to speak. They’ve also managed to sand off all the edges (it’s true, too, that George Lucas probably began the process with P100-grit) with some (a lot of) CGI, wisecracks, and these days a sort of pseudo-self-deprecating meta-self-referentialism. The result is a playbook for making Really Big Movies so polished and well-annotated that you basically need little more than a Mad-Libs in the writing room to get one out the door.

To emphasize a point that hopefully doesn’t need emphasis – these are not groundbreaking revelations. I think what puzzles me about my own interpretations on the topic is how different my reactions are to the progenitor of this style v. its current form. By all accounts, if I’m a person who dislikes the modern movie machine, maybe I should denounce Star Wars as the Bastard That Started It All. But, to reiterate, I don’t think I’m unilaterally against movies being simplistic or even narratively/stylistically formulaic. The easy if pretentious explanation would be some notion of Star Wars “at least being the original” or something along those lines. Additionally, I saw Star Wars when I was a kid, so there’s for sure a good amount of real and inherited nostalgia that accompanies my personal appreciation. For the same reasons, you could reasonably point out that maybe that’s why I remember with fondness the original Iron Man, too. What I can come up with now, upon minimal reflection, is that a key component present in IV, and maybe even in Iron Man, is missing in differing degrees from their descendants. Some element of call it rawness (a ridiculous term to use here, but I can’t think of a better one right now). Like, A New Hope is kind of corny, simple, and maybe poorly-written, but at least there was some weird dude at the helm who got his funding and was like “let’s fucking make this thing my guys!” And there it was: Star Wars. Even the title is evocative of some kid playing with model spaceships who got a movie contract and pen shoved under his nose. Sure, that kid is now worth around $5 billion and watching his brainchild fight two or maybe three other brainchildren for ultimate Really Big Movie supremacy, but he was a kid once. One of the key differences is that those brainchildren have been handed off to and raised by a bunch of suit-wearing parent-consultants who focus groupped the entire US population for Best Parenting Techniques™. Exhausted metaphor, I know.

I think the point has been beaten a bit into the ground. I’ll leave it with the appropriately pretentious musing that I wonder how future generations will see these things. It’s possible, for example, that kids who grew up under the childhood thrall of the current MCU look back at it with the same fond nostalgia that I’ve described above. It’s also possible that, coupled with that nostalgia or not, a few future generations removed will see the current MCU and its ilk as some kind of quaint progenitor of whatever it is they’re consuming. Neither outcome would surprise me, and both would (and hopefully will) prove me just as another Guy With Opinions That Are Not That Unique. Like oh, you only like the original versions of stuff you hate the current versions of? Never heard that one before!!