As the world braces itself for the latest Star Wars Story movie, featuring the origins of everyone’s favourite space-adventuring scoundrel, SFB takes an opportunity to revisit the cinematic releases which have preceded it, in release order, starting with the one that launched the world into a galaxy of adventures far, far away and a long time ago. (For the record, we will be dealing (for better or worse) with the latest versions of all movies, and the ‘Ewok’ Duology and the Star Wars Christmas Special will not be covered. This series is for Skywalker Saga and Anthology entries only.)

When young farmboy Luke Skywalker happens upon a mysterious recording in a second-hand droid, it sets in motion a chain of events that will see his life, and the fate of the galaxy, unalterably changed.

At its basest level, Star Wars is a fairy tale. You can sling all sorts of labels at it – science-fiction, science-fantasy, space-opera and so on – and you can even cite the movies it so clearly draws inspiration from like Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, but when you really get down to brass tacks, this is fairy tale storytelling to its core. You have a feisty young princess in distress, the young idealistic hero who sets out to rescue her, the old and wise mentor who he must both learn from and learn from the loss of, the flamboyant rogue with a heart that may not be of gold, at least is roughly in the right place. Heck, you even have a furry companion and a pair of slightly comedic but ultimately vital and heroic side characters who spend as much time bickering with each other as they do saving the day in their respective ways. The fact that it takes place in the middle of an intergalactic war rather than in a medieval-themed kingdom is really neither here nor there.

What Star Wars understands then, is that the oldest storytelling tropes become tropes for a reason – because they are what we look to find in our stories from an early age. What it also understands is that just because those tropes have an established suit of clothing doesn’t mean that you can’t switch it out for something more modern. It’s a lesson that Lucas took to heart in the worst ways in later years, but that’s another tale for another day – today, let us focus on this groundbreaking establishing chapter in arguably the world’s most successful and well-known franchise.

Firstly, let’s talk about that opening shot following the striking bold yellow type opening crawl of text, backed by John Williams’ instantly recognisable score. A star field, panning to a view of a planet, then a starship quickly goes past us, lasers chasing it, followed by a structure that passes over the camera and just keeps going and going. It’s an iconic shot, and one that ended up repeated several times throughout the saga, and it sets us up well for what will follow. Whatever else one takes away from a viewing of A New Hope (whichever version), the abiding impression is of a director who knows how to put a visual landscape together in a way that will catch the eye and drop the jaw. The Star Destroyer opening, the Jawa Sandcrawler on the dunes, the iconic shot of Luke framed by twin setting suns. Lucas knows good visual storytelling.

The first spoken lines of the movie are voiced by Anthony Daniels’ prissy protocol droid, C-3PO. For the first (and certainly not the last) time, he proclaims that ‘we’re doomed’ as the ship is locked into the Star Destroyer and the crew prepare to be boarded. Lucas gets a lot of stick for his dialogue (and that’s another subject we will revisit later on) but the way in which this character is used here is actually precise and economical. With just a few short lines, 3PO sets the scene for us – the generators have been disabled, they’re in trouble, and the princess isn’t going to be able to escape this time. That last line is important – in one line of dialogue we establish that there is a Princess on board, that she’s on the run, that she’s escaped before and that this is basically part of how her life is lived. We further establish that this droid, and probably his diminutive counterpart, have been with her through those adventures. One line, sixseconds of screen time, so much information.

That economy carries on as we meet in turn Darth Vader, a hulking monstrosity of a villain in a terrifying garb and sinister face mask, and the Princess herself, Leia Organa of Alderaan. Not at any point does the movie stop to hold the viewer’s hand or reel off an info dump of information about where we are, who the bad guys are or anything of the sort. Instead, the movie grabs you by the hand and runs, dragging you in an adventure which is all the more exciting because you aren’t quite sure where you are or what’s going on. When Leia declares, full of defiance, that ‘The Imperial Senate will not stand for this’, the movie could waste time on explaining who the senate are, what their relationship is to her and her captors and what exactly it is that they won’t stand for and why, but it wisely doesn’t. Backing up the economy of words is that visual storytelling flair again – the bad guys are in black and grey, (their lackey-soldiers dressed in white in a visual metaphor which may or may not be deliberately referencing their role as passive enforcers of a monstrous regime who are simply following orders, and lord knows there’s a whole other discussion about that for another time) and the good guy – in this case the good girl – is in white. That, and Carrie Fisher’s instantly iconic take on the character, are all that you need.

Then the story moves on to our second (and as far as I am concerned, less important) hero: Luke Skywalker. When we meet Luke, he’s the same character we’ve seen in a thousand other similar stories. He lives on a farm with his aunt and uncle who seem to have adopted him, dreaming of going out and becoming a hero. His head is in the stars, even as his uncle needs his attention on the ground, taking care of their moisture farm. He clashes with the parent-figures he obviously loves, chafing against the humdrum life of a farm hand, wanting to go and hang out with his friends at a bar and impatient to join the Imperial academy and become a pilot. He’s the classic hero-in-waiting template, and when he accidentally happens upon a recording of Leia begging someone for help, it’s the well-worn beginning of that tale. Except then, Lucas flips it.

It’s easy to forget, but Luke doesn’t instantly jump into action. For all that he has a head full of adventure, his will is grounded in far more mundane matters. When R2 refuses to show any more of the video, Luke leaves 3PO to look while he goes to sit down for dinner with his aunt and uncle. He mentions the weird claims of the droid, to have been owned by a General Kenobi, but readily accepts his uncle’s insistence that he drop the matter. Then he moves onto trying to persuade his uncle to let him leave the farm a season early so he can join the academy, all thoughts of a princess and a mysterious General forgotten. Luke doesn’t choose to take that first step on his adventure, he’s forced to by circumstance, and that’s a pattern that repeats a lot as the movie goes on.

Forced to try to find the runaway R2, he runs into trouble with the Sand People and is almost killed but for the intervention of Old Ben Kenobi the hermit. Alec Guinness may have come to loathe the fact that Star Wars became his most enduring legacy, but there’s no denying his twinkle-eyed, slightly mischievous take on the old wise mentor figure was an excellent one. As he slowly feeds bits of information to Luke about his role in the Clone Wars, his friendship with Luke’s father, he could be anyone’s old grandpa or uncle, doling out old war stories. The ‘lived-in’ look of the visuals of the Star Wars universe are often commented upon, but it’s this earthiness to the characters themselves that helps to sell that reality to the viewer. Luke is wowed by the fancy laser sword, but unimpressed by Ben’s plea for help – he can’t go off to save the galaxy from the Empire, he has to get back home to his Aunt and Uncle and get the droids working in the moisture fields. It’s not as if I like the Empire, he whines, (though he still wants to join the Academy) but it’s all so far away and there’s nothing he can do.

This leads to the second big push, as he and Ben discover the murdered Jawas in their destroyed Sandcrawler on the way, and Luke’s train on thought, guided by Ben, leads to him rushing home to find the remains of his murdered guardians. Finally, with nothing left to keep him on the planet, our ‘hero’ agrees to accompany the crazy old man on an adventure to rescue the princess. At this point, a sort of nihilism enters Luke’s life. He sells his speeder because ‘he won’t need it anymore’ and he happily wanders into Mos Eisley (‘a wretched hive of scum and villainy’ whose reputation he must be aware of) with Ben to find a pilot. Even witnessing a Jedi mind trick for the first time does little to get him out of his funk, and he wanders off to get into trouble with some of the cantina’s less salubrious denizens as Ben goes off to meet the other main lead in our film.

Han is an interesting character all by himself. In this first film, he’s a lot more hard-edged than he grows to be as the saga unfolds. Mercenary to a fault, he’s happy to charge what he knows to be a ludicrous sum of money to ship a couple of guys and their droids to a fairly innocuous place. And then there’s the encounter with Greedo. Let’s just settle this now – Han shot first. It is one of the few times when I will sit here and say that Lucas, with his endless tinkering, got a change in later versions wrong. Han doesn’t wait for Greedo to fire (or even attempt to), he shoots while he knows he has the chance because that’s the world in which he operates. The subsequent ‘restored’ scene with Han and Jabba that follows is another mistake – the scene was filmed when Jabba was still envisioned as a human (albeit a fairly rotund one) and the use of CGI to overlay the character with the Jabba we know and loathe is clumsy – not least when Han is edited to ‘step on his tail’ as the original shot had him walking around the other character. Worse, the additional scene simply repeats what we already know from the Greedo exchange – Han is in trouble with Jabba for dropping cargo, he owes him money, and he killed Greedo when the latter came to threaten him. It’s a pointless scene that should have stayed on the editing room floor.

Still, as the Falcon breaks out of dock, with stormtroopers firing away, Han proves he’s a cool customer and in the subsequent journey, again showcases that he’s not a nice guy. He openly mocks Luke and Ben for their belief in the Force (though in the case of Luke it’s understandable – the kid is young and starry-eyed and clearly looks like he’d buy into anything). He tells R2 and 3PO to let Chewie win the game they’re playing lest they find themselves missing limbs and the whole time he makes sure everyone knows he’s just in it for the money. Again, it’s a portrayal that steps outside traditional fairy tale confines, without spoiling the overall narrative.

The Second Act, with its infiltration of the Death Star and the escape of our plucky heroes, gives us our first real look at Leia, and cements her as the definite hero in this fairy tale which is rapidly flipping on its head. From her first line to Luke, questioning his stature, to her taking charge of the ‘rescue’ operation and then taking charge again as they escape, Leia is the very opposite of the damsel in distress. She’s not interested in coddling the egos of the two men who have come to her aid, any more than she was impressed by the threats and posturing of Tarkin, or the quiet menace of Vader. Even as full of despair as she must be, having watched her home planet get destroyed before her very eyes, she’s always clear-eyed and focused on the mission, getting the intelligence to the Alliance so that they might stand a chance of stopping the Death Star and scoring a badly needed win against the Empire.

It also gives us the confrontation between Vader and Ben – the first lightsaber duel of the series (if you can call it that) and the genesis of Luke’s real motivation to fight. Up until Ben’s untimely death at the hands of his former pupil, Luke has been a passive actor, blown from one location to the next by circumstance. Even in the immediate aftermath of his mentor’s demise, he slinks off to sulk below decks, and it’s only when the Falcon is under attack that he gets up and shows some fight. The duel itself is short, yet loaded with tension. As the two warily circle and jab at one another with their sabers, loaded dialogue that again provides little detail but wonderful context is exchanged. Vader declares himself to be the master where once he was the pupil, recalling Ben’s earlier revelations to Luke, and Ben replies first in sharp retort, ‘Only a master of Evil’ and then in riddles about becoming more powerful if he is struck down. As a fight, it holds little impact, but as a confrontation of old enemies, it feels loaded with weight.

The Third Act continues the fairytale theme, with the monster (Death Star) coming close to destroying the heroes, and being routed at the last moment by the hero and his faith in himself and his otherworldly capabilities. Narratively, it is the least interesting of the three acts, being a fairly simple recreation of any number of war films that one might name, with plucky pilots fighting against desperate odds to defeat the Nazis (they wear grey uniforms, have stormtroopers and want to rule the galaxy with an iron fist – yes they’re Nazis, albeit in space). Luke’s hearing of Ben’s voice and determination to switch off his targeting computer and eyeball the shot is right out of the ‘the power was in you all along’ trope of fairytale storytelling, and what’s nice is that Lucas takes the time to frame it against the real-world concerns of the actual situation his comrades find themselves in. Watch the look that passes between the controllers back at the base as Luke declares over the comm that he’s alright when questioned as to why he’s turned his targeting computer off – they exchange a look of ‘Is he serious’ that’s so real. The trench run itself plays out like that old Battle of Britain movie it’s trying to be, all pilots going in bravely and dying horribly, and it’s a wonderful example of how Lucas can take a scene with very little narrative meat and tell a visual story. You feel the pain as Red and Gold Squadron lose members, you jump for joy when Han turns up and swats Vader and the TIEs off Luke’s back and you punch the air with glee as the torpedoes sink into the exhaust port and the Death Star explodes around Peter Cushing’s ears.

As an exercise in mythical storytelling then, Star Wars is a complex beast. Lucas’ visual imagination and talent for a shot is matched to an economical dialogue style, and the story plays with the conventions of its template even as it ticks off tropes. Yes, it has a princess, but she isn’t the passive sort who sits around waiting for a man to sweep her off her feet. Yes, it has a young hero from humble origins, but one who is reluctant to step away from the easy life, and has to be practically forced to adopt the reality of the adventurous life he so ardently craves in his idyllic fantasies. Even the wise old mentor doesn’t comply entirely to type, less all-knowing deus ex machina and more mischievous uncle who will take you on an adventure if you promise not to tell your parents, and has war stories that sound almost too tall to be true, even if they are. Lucas borrowed liberally from various storytelling traditions and genre influences, but the cocktail he whipped up from them all is undeniably unique. Forty-one years later, this is a film that still stands up, regardless of whether you watch the latest digitally retouched and enhanced Blu-Ray version or the original 1977 theatrical release. It has drama, heart but most of all it has a fantastic, almost instinctual understanding of the medium in which it is presented, and how best to maximise it to tell its story. Small wonder then, that it was such a success, or that it should breed such devotion in its fans. It is, to paraphrase Old Ben himself, an elegant movie from a more civilised age.