A cinematic trendsetter

Rating: 10/10 (31 January 2020)

In the annals of moviemaking, no film series has had as much of an impact on me and my love of film as George Lucas' epic sci-fi saga, Star Wars. Much like many other kids of my generation, I grew up thinking, dreaming, watching and playing Star Wars. I watched the original trilogy on repeat and owned so much Star Wars merchandise at one point in my life that it became an obsession. When I was growing up, the first film in the Star Wars saga: A New Hope was never my favorite as I always preferred Return of the Jedi over it but in more recent years after watching the film more times when I even care to count, I began to see the film more for what it was and still is as Star Wars: A New Hope is still to this day a classic thanks to its story, characters, and storytelling motifs. Simply put, Hollywood and the filmmaking landscape would look very different without this film.
The movie opens with a massive Star Destroyer pursuing a Rebel blockade runner as the rebels feel with stolen plans to the Empire's newest weapon. Try as they might, the rebel ship is captured by the Imperials under the command of the Sith Lord, Darth Vader. In a last-ditch effort to save the plans, Princess Leia hides them in the memory banks of the droid R2-D2 before she is captured. R2 and his counterpart C-3PO flee the ship in an escape pod to the desert planet called Tatooine. Upon their landing, the pair separate and are captured by Jawa traders who then sell the droids off to moisture farmers Owen and Beru Lars and their step-nephew Luke Skywalker. While cleaning R2, Luke stumbles across Leia's message to the Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi and tells his aunt and uncle of what he has discovered. They tell him to ignore the message but Luke feels that Owen and Beru are hiding something from him. Upon discovering that R2-D2 has run away to find Obi-Wan, Luke and C-3PO leave the next morning to find him. After being attacked by a band of Tuskan Riders, Luke is saved by Obi-Wan who takes the trio to his hut and tells Luke of his days as a Jedi and gives Luke his father's lightsaber. Upon hearing Leia's message, Obi-Wan tries to convince Luke to join him but Luke refuses, not wanting to disappoint his uncle. Later on, Luke returns home and sees the charred corpses of his aunt and uncle and decides to join Obi-Wan and learn the ways of the Jedi. The four travel to Mos Eisley where they meet smuggler Han Solo who agrees to take them to Alderaan. Meanwhile, The Empire, eager to test the firepower of their new superweapon, destroy the planet. When the Millennium Falcon reaches the location of where Alderaan is supposed to be, the team discovers that the planet has been totally destroyed. Off in the distance, they see what appears to be a small moon but it's not and is in fact The Death Star. The ship attempts to turn around but is caught in the space station's tractor beam and can't escape. Now, the team must find the princess and get the plans to the Rebel Alliance before it's too late.
Now, Star Wars: A New Hope is a glorious, world-spanning heroic blockbuster even though some may see it as a galactic fairy tale or an old samurai story or even an action-adventure film. Even since A New Hope came out in 1977, moviegoers and film critics alike have twisted themselves in all kinds of directions trying to explain the appeal of Star Wars by referencing several different genres of film. There's no one quite as accomplished at doing this than George Lucas, who has compared his space fantasy to a Spaghetti Western, an Arthurian quest, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lawrence of Arabia, Flash Gordon and even the James Bond franchise and even that series had been going on before the first Star Wars was even filmed. Steer through this asteroid field of various elements, and what you have at the very heart of the Star Wars universe is a straightforward, playful subgenre: space fantasy. Space fantasy is to science fiction as what Luke Skywalker is to Darth Vader. Lucas came a lot closer to traditional science fiction with his first film, THX 1133 and soon rejected it for it being too realistic and too depressing. In the realm of science fiction, it's merely a projection of what we think the future might be like. The basis of technology and it's impact on our society is the focus there. Sure, there's some effort to stick to the tangible laws of the universe as it is fiction that just happens to be about science whereas space fantasy is basically a fairy tale in space. Science fiction reflects our world while space fantasy surpasses our world. It's more nostalgic and intimate and more adventurous, taking machinery and using it as a mere starting point as well as casting aside all the rules of physics in favor of fun. Of course, it would be Edgar Rice Burroughs' seminal 1912 pulp comic A Princess of Mars which would, in turn, lay the groundwork for Star Wars to later build upon as it's lead hero, John Carter is often sighted as being the first superhero and a model for the character of Luke Skywalker. Of course, John Carter of Mars isn't the only space fantasy epic to inspire Star Wars as the works of Leigh Brackett, many of the early pulp magazines, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were all massive influences on the film as well as they gave Lucas not only ideas for crafting his space epic from the idea of the lightsaber to the visual identity of the Star Wars saga, but also aided George when he was coming up with the blueprint for the story and characters.
When he was adapting THX 1138, George Lucas had the word "Force" echoing in his head and while he would cut the idea from THX: 1138, the idea still hung around in his mind, crying out to be developed as an idea for a future movie. George's goal here wasn't to add a new religious belief but to merely broil other spiritual beliefs down to their purest essence. In A New Hope, the idea of the Force is so fundamental a concept as to be globally enticing: a faith for the nonspiritual age simply because it's so lacking in detail. Anyone can add their own layer of meaning to it. In one scene in Star Wars: A New Hope, Obi-Wan explains the concept of the Force to Luke Skywalker in just a few well-picked words and in this sentence, the Force is summed up as a binding, mystical energy field created by all living beings. Besides what Kenobi tells us, the Force is still largely a riddle. The viewer learns throughout the film that it has a powerful grip on those who are weak-minded and that there is also a Dark Side of the Force that consumed Darth Vader and that Vader feels that the Force is far more powerful than any kind of technology and that he uses it to choke people. Luke is trained to let go of his understand and reach out with his feelings and that the Force will always be with him while Han Solo sees the Force as a corny religion and not a good replacement for a nice blaster, but later wishes for the Force to be with Luke. Obi-Wan vanishes once Vader's lightsaber kills him, prompting moviegoers to assume that it had something to do with the Force, but this was never explained in the next five films in the saga. Luke is able to destroy the Death Star because he turns off his targeting computer and uses the Force to win the battle and that's pretty much all George wrote for the first Star Wars film in terms of explaining the Force and what it is. Sure, this was expanded upon in Empire Strikes Back by Yoda but again, we aren't told very much about the Force and while later attempts to build upon that always felt out of keeping with the film's space fantasy origins. The instant Lucas decided to add any kind of logical or accurate explanation to the knowledge of the Force in the form of the outrageous minichlorians into The Phantom Menace caused many a Star Wars fan to revolt even though if one digs a bit deeper, they would discover that Lucas had been talking about minichlorians as early as 1977 but to me, the Force is better left as a mystery rather than having an explanation dumped on me. If one wants to see the Force in reality, one only has to look at religion and art rather than science. The Force can be seen as a Navajo prayer, a Buddhist meditation chat or a Christian hymn yet it is all of these things and none of them as anyone can see what they wish to see in it. I personally see the Force as a mystical binding energy field that flows through every living thing even if the Force may not exist in the world.
As George Lucas prepared to outline plans for his space fantasy epic, he wasn't the only one. At that time, other filmmakers were conjuring up film projects that were similar. Much like THX 1138 wasn't exactly the first post-apocalyptic film in the early 70s', Star Wars: A New Hope was merely one of a bunch of space fairy tale films. The starting point for Star Wars came in the form of Stanly Kubrick's 10 million dollar science-fiction game changer 2001: A Space Odyssey that didn't click with moviegoers when it first came out but it did click with many filmmakers like John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg as they began to look for the next science fiction hit, something that would become the next 2001. Lucas's victory in this field was by no means a sure thing as it seemed that in the early 1970s, many science fiction films dealt with post-apocalyptic societies and death and destruction which often resulted in many of these films such as Silent Running often bombing at the box office so, with Star Wars, George set out to make a film that would not only different from many of the other end of the world science fiction films but would also usher in a sense of fun and optimism for space and its' possible future.
Now, one might ask when making a film as iconic and beloved as Star Wars, how you build a film universe from the ground up? George was asking himself that very question when writing the screenplay for A New Hope in 1973 as he had done something more vague with THX 1138 but by doing that film, Lucas wasn't really tel