Star Wars felt big even before it was

Rating: 9/10 (28 November 2013)

In the early 1990s when I was about 8 or 10, I had a VHS copy of "Star Wars: A New Hope" that I watched repeatedly. It was a recording from a television broadcast and was missing the first few minutes, so the opening shots were of C-3PO and R2-D2 walking over the dunes of Tatooine. That planet is not, of course, named in the movie; strange as it is to think, there must have been a brief span of time when I knew the movie pretty well but didn't know the colossal amount of trivial information that I permanently internalized during my teen years. For a while I had no idea there were sequels. But the details and backstories that books and games and movies and TV shows have filled in over the decades were in a way already present, at least implicitly, at the outset. It is well-known that George Lucas was inspired by old sci- fi/adventure serials, and that he tried to give this "episode" of Star Wars the feel of belonging to a far grander saga whose beginning and end were far off. It was an audacious, brilliant move, and it worked on my younger self exactly as intended. I was able to conjure images of Luke's heroic father, supposedly killed in the off-handedly mentioned Clone Wars, and I was able to get a sense of what those conflicts were like from the way that Alec Guinness looked and sounded when he talked about the past. I could feel the long history of Obi-Wan and Vader's relationship in the way they appraised each other during their showdown. I could imagine, vaguely, the previous ups and downs of the rebel alliance and the off-screen machinations of Imperial Senate. That these things were planted in my imagination made the movie feel big and epic, though it is probably the "smallest" installment in the Star Wars franchise in terms of the size and number of sets, the number of characters with speaking roles, and other metrics. The series has not always benefited from trying to depict on-screen the people and events that were at first only evocative allusions. I sometimes wish I could forget everything I've learned from the ever-expanding Star Wars universe (and that, believe me, is a lot) in order to feel again the way I felt when all I had to go on was "A New Hope," and it was more than enough.