not at all shallow

Rating: Null/10 (9 December 1998)

As pure entertainment it hasn't been surpassed, not by Jaws, not by Indiana Jones, nor by any other movie made in the twenty-one years since its release. As a "serious, profound" movie, many dismiss it. I think it has a little more redeeming value than that. It isn't a Bergman movie, which means it doesn't meditate on the issues that fuel it. But it does weave together a number of archetypal elements: the lightsaber (Excalibur), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Merlin), a prince (Arthur), a princess (Rapunzel/Snow White/Sleeping Beauty), and two quarrelling droids (Frick and Frack, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Odd Couple). Even the father-redeemed-by-the child trope is basic. The Force derives from a number of Asian concepts, especially the non-duality of yin/yang, although Lucas makes the slight mistake of giving the Force a moral quality, which only the Force's wielders, and not the Force itself, should have. All these create a mythology for the twentieth century, something which no other movie has managed. For better or worse, Star Wars is our re-version of the Illiad and the Odyssey.