Beyond knowing how to make wonky science acceptable to an audience, George Lucas displays some serious skill as a storyteller in A New Hope, and tapped into a major vein of talent with his cast. While his dialogue can be quite dubious in places, Lucas, Mark Hammil, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Anthony Daniels, James Earl Jones, Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness create a cast drawn from archetypes and then proceed to flesh them out and render them extremely lovable.
His moments of whininess aside, Luke Skywalker comes across as a deeply decent, likable young man struggling first with a stifling environment and then a rather overwhelming destiny. Darth Vader is terrifying, competent, brutal evil personified. Princess Leia is a leader with a low tolerance for fools who has to live with watching most everyone she loves annihilated. Han Solo is a charming, dashing rogue trying and failing to not be a good person. The list goes on.
There is a reason these characters are as iconic and well-loved as they are, and that is that they tap into earlier iconic archetypes in a way that allows for development beyond simply “the heroic youth” or “the vicious, mysterious villain” and “the wacky, but lovable sidekick.” From a story-telling standpoint, Lucas lets his love of 1930s adventure serials shine through.
Suspense builds masterfully, from the introduction of Darth Vader striding through a corridor of corpses to Luke accidentally discovering the damaged recording of Princess Leia to the destruction of Alderaan and on. There are several moments where the action could abruptly stop and a narrator could declare something along the lines of “Will 3P0 and R2 be able to save Luke, Han, Leia and Chewbacca from the garbage compactor? Or will they be jettisoned into space along with last week’s banana creme pie? Will Obi-Wan succeed in shutting down the tractor beam? And what is the connection between the Jedi Master and Darth Vader, the agent of evil? Find out next week, on Star Wars!” and it would work perfectly.
To watch A New Hope and its sequels is to experience the joy of adventurous storytelling and science fiction as fantasy. It is the best kind of blockbuster, a well-told tale that resonates with both the audience’s desire for the fantastic and their need for quality filmmaking.
While the currently available edited cuts have their share of frustrations, with redundant scenes, badly integrated CGI and debatably needed ADR, Star Wars is a national treasure, one that is worth experiencing at least once.