Blockbuster Month: Star Wars (Dir George Lucas, 2h 1m, 1977)

I want you to imagine something for me. It's 1976 or early 1977, and you're sitting in a cinema somewhere in in the US, waiting for a film to start. Perhaps it's Bugsy Mallone, or Rocky or even the so-so remake of King Kong, or even the seminal Taxi Driver. Before it, of course, come the trailers. And between trailers for such fare as Close Encounters, the triumphant return of Steven Spielberg to the multiplexes he packed in 1975, and the surprisingly decent The Spy Who Loved Me...is a starfield, and a booming voice, that announces, in that iconic and famously sampled introduction:

 Somewhere in Space, This May All Be Happening Right Now

 A title begins to rush towards us. A capsule detaches and flies from camera, two spaceships fly towards it, as the narration continues, and for the first time, audiences across America hear the two words that will arguably, above all others, change cinema forever. A cut, a young woman and a strange colossal furred monster in a cockpit, another fighter swings overhead, space-Stuka roar as it opens fire on the back of a bulkier ship. As the sequence unfurls, we are thrust into a space battle, between these screaming fighters, and a group of humans aboard the bigger ship, as we are introduced to our blonde hero. This, our narrator, (the late Malachi Throne), intones is the story of a boy, a girl, and a universe unlike any other.

A menacing thing of black metal hovers towards the camera, we get a reaction shot of the girl, and a figure in black armour suddenly turns, towering over the audience. Gunfights follow, we are introduced to robots, to swordfights, as our dramatis personae of heroes (the boy, the girl, the furred monster, the robots, and a man dressed like a wild west gunfighter),villains, (the towering knight in black), and aliens (a panoply of strange and outlandish figures, as sequences, from ululating desert tribesmen to patrons of odd bars, to white clad soldiers, play out. We are watching a film, so Throne intones, a billion years in the making.

This film is Star Wars.

And it's about to change cinema forever, launch perhaps the single most important cultural franchise in history, float a business empire that, after buyouts and mergers, and the rude mechanics of business now forms the vanguard of the most powerful single company in the world, spawn millions of imitators, homages and references, not to mention several religions of various seriousness, and become the bedrock of billions of childhoods around the world. It will make its central trio of Hamill, Fisher and Ford, and their characters household names, two of them never really escaping the gravitational pull of the cultural phenomenon they helped birth, and it will make George Lucas not only fantastically wealthy, but perhaps the single most divisive director in popular cinema as his late 1970s and early 1980s imperial phase gives way to the 1990s, the cinematic albatross of the prequels and butchered revisionist remasters of the original trilogy, before finally selling the family silver to Walt Disney in the mid 2010s

But, let's go back another five years from our imagined 1976, back to before a Galaxy Far Far Away was even an idea. All stories need a beginning. The year is 1971, and a young film-maker is crestfallen. His first film, a science fiction dystopia that owes much to the non-narrative avant-garde has opened to essentially the critical equivalent of a shrug, and worse, his dream project, an adaption of the 1930s science fictional serial, Flash Gordon, co-masterminded by Francis Ford Coppola, has been blocked by film producer, Dino De Laurentiis, with Federico Fellini to direct. This, of course, is George Lucas, who decides to write his own science fiction adventure, learning from the failure of the grim and dystopian THX 1138 to make this a far more optimistic picture. Unfortunately, nobody is interested.

So George Lucas makes American Graffiti. Made for barely three-quarters of a million dollars, it's an impressively compact coming of age film, using Lucas's own experiences of the early 60s of the car-based cruising culture and rock and roll to tell the story of four high-school graduates over a single evening, with Richard Dreyfuss taking the lead as Curt, and a slice of up and coming Hollywood talent filling out the rest of the cast, including an actor called Harrison Ford, who plays the street-racing foil to one of the quartet. Released just months after the US pull out of Vietnam, it's a perfectly served slice of nostalgia, marking the end of an era for not just its protagonists, but in American culture itself, and it makes a cool $177 million. It single-handedly launches a rekindled interest in 1950s and 1960s culture, Lucas is nominated for Best Director and for his screenplay, and crucially it makes Lucas not only a millionaire, but a hot property as a director.

So he goes back to his space movie, a process of full-time writing, invention of odd names, and arrives at the conclusion that his tale of Jedi Bendu and Mace Windy, is, well, a little silly and overly complex, and decides to simplify things, taking the Vietnam War, the upcoming re-election of Richard Nixon and the politics of the era as an influence, together with, in polite terms, a liberal influence from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, an effortless mix of comic, action/adventure and drama to tell the tale of a princess (Leia) and a general(Obi Wan) being escorted across a warzone by two peasants (the robots C-3PO and R2-D2). Armed with this concept, this more optimistic and, dare one say it, nostalgically tinted, story of adventure and daring do, Lucas sets to work on a thirteen-page synopsis for The Star Wars.

Here, though, Lucas runs back into the same problem as he takes The Star Wars from studio to studio. No-one is interested in science-fiction, and what is there is a far cry from what even the embryonic The Star Wars is shaping up to be, hard nosed and often darker-edged work like Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running, laughably bad or creaky work like Zardoz, or singularly strange or unique work like Fantastic Planet or Sun-Ra starring, Space Is the Place. It's the preserve of downbeat explorations of other worlds, not an openly optimistic tale of heroes and princesses that has more to do with childhood fantasy than current science fiction.

He pitches it, together with Gary Kurtz, to United Artists who distributed and bankrolled American Graffiti, to Universal, to Paramount (with Coppola in tow), and, ironically enough, to Disney, a move that would come back to bite the latter up till they bought 20th Century Fox in March of 2019. Despite all of this, The Star Wars as an idea has its fans, and Lucas turns his plans to 20th Century Fox, and finally, Alan Ladd Jr, the head of Fox, agrees, giving Lucas a budget of $5 (later increased to $8.25) million and a salary of $150,000, to make the film.

Here, Star Wars' writing becomes the thing of quasi-mythology, much of it retrospectively added, with Lucas evolving the characters into slowly recognisable forms, and allegedly turning to the work of American professor Joseph Campbell, including his 1949 work, Hero with a Thousand Faces. It's here that perhaps the greatest apocrypha of Star Wars rolls into existence-that the series was always planned. This, perhaps, is the greatest white lie of mainstream cinema; the subtitle of A New Hope and its curious subtitle of Episode IV aren't added till 1981, after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, and many drafts of the first film are subtitled Episode I. Yet, by August 1975, as Jaws was chewing his way through box offices, a recognisable version of Star Wars was taking shape, and by the time that Brian De Palma sits down and hacks the opening crawl into shape in March 1976, the script is finished.

 

And across Hollywood, a veritable army of special effects, visual effects and model makers are already in action; with Twentieth Century Fox's own team disbanded, Lucas forms Industrial Light and Magic, and they are set to work on creating not only a huge number of astonishingly strange aliens and droids that inhabit the worlds of Star Wars, but also the ships, from tiny models to colossal sets, largely designed by Ralph Quarrie. It's here that Star Wars truly shines, for, compared to the shiny and clean sensibilities of much science fiction, typified by 2001 A Space Odyssey, Star Wars is grubby, used, a down-at-heel series of worlds that feel, for lack of a better word, authentic, with the exception of the cold and clinical interior of the Death Star and the Rebel Blockade Runner.

To populate this world, Lucas turns to two comparatively inexperienced actors for his leads. Mark Hamill, essentially convinced to attend the audition by his friend, Robert Englund (later to play the iconic Freddie Kruger), with casting for Coppola's Apocalypse Now across the hall from Star Wars, brings a sincerity to the dialogue, whilst Carrie Fisher, the daughter of actor Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, brings a no-nonsense sensibility to the character. Against them, Lucas turns, in perhaps the greatest moment of happenstance, to Harrison Ford. Ford, a carpenter by trade between acting jobs, is building a door at American Zoetrope when George Lucas walks in to begin casting, with Lucas deciding to use Ford as his stand-in for casting calls with his other two characters. Eventually won over by Ford's performance, he casts Ford as the smuggler and pilot, Han Solo.

Against this all-American trio, Lucas casts largely British actors. Hammer Horror legend, Peter Cushing, plays Tarkin, the commander of the Death Star, with a large number of British character actors filling out the ranks of the Empire. British stage actors Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew, and comedian Kenny Baker, whilst barely seen on screen as themselves, play the Wookie, Chewbacca, and the droids on which . Beating out iconic Japanese actor, Toshiro Mifune, (ironic, given Mifune's starring role in The Hidden Fortress), Alec Guinness, whilst dismissive of the project in general, acts as a driving force behind the quality of the performances, and his lucrative deal with Lucas, of 2.25% of Lucas's 20% cut of film's takings soon makes him wealthy as Star Wars takes off. The final piece of the puzzle, the towering figure of Darth Vader, is a transatlantic affair, English bit-part actor and strongman David Prowse performing Vader physically, whilst an African American stage actor, James Earl Jones provides the deep, commanding (and by Jones' request, uncredited) voice of the Sith Lord, after Orson Welles turns Lucas down.

Production, in short, does not go smoothly-much has been made of how Martha Lucas saved Star Wars in the edit, which, on its own could make an article, as she rebuilt Star Wars from "American Graffiti in space" or a quasi-documentary feel to a taut, excellently made Space Western, essentially entirely re-editing the film from floor to ceiling, not through a major reconstruction of the narrative, but in the way it is told. In a risky move, Martha places the droids, the robotic translation of The Hidden Fortress's two peasants, front and centre for practically the first thirty minutes of the film, a bickering comic duo of long term friends and allies that escape the Blockade Runner, make their way across the desert planet of Tattoine, and eventually meet up with the farm boy Luke, setting out together with him on an adventure.

But the problems didn't end there; just as crucially, the special effects are running out of money, infamously blowing half of their effects budget on just four shots that are, in a word, unusable. Reluctantly, following a cobbled together screening (with World War II film footage acting as substitute for the space battles) for Spielberg's friends and several of Fox's board, that bemuses the former and stuns the latter into tears of joy, George crucially gets a few dozen thousand dollars to finish the film, including Jones' voice work as Vader, the rest of the special effects work, exterior pick up shots and additional sequences in Tunisia and Guatemala (standing in for the rebel base on the moon of Yavin IV), and the film wraps. With the film missing its pencilled in date of December 1976, and with Fox concerned that a summer release would see Star Wars disappear beneath a deluge of films such as, er, Smokey and the Bandit, Star Wars is set for release on 25th May 1977, with Fox strong-arming cinemas into showing the film in return for the anticipated adaption of 1973 thriller The Other Side of Midnight.

And what greets cinema going audiences on opening day, Wednesday 25th May 1977, following the Fox fanfare is this:

A pause, as this prologue fades to black. For a fraction of a second, Star Wars teeters on the brink, between cinema before it, and cinema after it.

And then John Williams' Main Theme erupts out of the silence. It's hard to explain exactly how important, how impactful the main theme for Star Wars is without inevitably leading back to the nigh Pavolian response to it that now exists. The closest I can compare it to is this. It's December 2015, and I'm in my local cinema, to see The Force Awakens at midnight on opening night. The lights go down, the audience quietens. Gone is the 20th Century Fox motif, but, as those ten words appear on screen, there's an audible intake of breath. And then, simultaneously, John Williams kicks in, the logo appears, and the place explodes in cheering. I've never seen anything like it since, and it only compounds the power of that single piece of music, this triumphant storm of horns and thundering percussion.

In three simple paragraphs, hammered into shape by Brian De Palma, and perhaps the most obvious homage to Flash Gordon that appears in the film, we are introduced to the events we are about to be thrown into. Our heroes are the Rebels, our villains the Galactic Empire, armed with the terrifying might of the Death Star, and at least one of our heroes is the Princess Leia, with the Empire now pursuing her across the galaxy to claim back plans for this fearsome weapon. The crawl disappears off into the stars, Williams' score quietens, the camera pans down and a vista of a desert planet and its two moons swims into view. A blast of horns, and a spaceship under fire flies past camera-the model work is impressive, the laser blasts from the pursuing vessel green against the red of the defensive fire. And then the pursuing ship flies into frame.

And keeps flying. It takes nearly ten seconds for the ship to enter frame entire. The arrival of the Star Destroyer, lumbering overhead, is the first shot ILM completed for the movie, with a metre long model, and it is the moment that Star Wars not only perfectly illustrates the utter mismatch of the Empire, their battleships and their white-clad Stormtroopers against the plucky rebels, but cements itself as a story of good against evil. The Rebel ship is soon captured, and we're aboard with the desperate defenders of the ship, and the odd couple of humanoid droid, C-3PO (Daniels) and cylindrical droid, R2-D2. The secret plans are soon stowed onto R2, as the Empire finally board the ship, commanded by the black-suited and utterly ruthless Darth Vader capture Princess Leia, as the droids make their escape to the planet below.

Here, they squabble, and eventually split up, before both being captured by the native Jawa, a curious race of wheeler-dealer salesmen, who arrive at the homestead of local farmer Owen Lars. Intercut with this is the film's more cynical elements, Lucas's incitement of the Pax Americana in space, and the Vietnam War, as squabbling factions in the Imperial officers aboard the Death Star vie for power and the control of the very idea of power, whilst Cushing's viciously charming Tarkin and the hulking figure of Vader watch on. Back at the Lars' homestead, we're introduced to our hero, Luke, a dissatisfied dreamer who yearns for more than moisture farming, who soon discovers a message from Leia on R2-D2, instructing the droid be delivered to the mysterious Obi Wan Kenobi, with the droid eventually tricking Luke and escaping. Catching up with R2 with C-3PO's help, Luke is then attacked by the native Sand People, and rescued by local hermit, Ben Kenobi, who reveals himself to be Obi Wan, who tells Luke of the Force and the now extinct order of the Jedi.

From here, the film gathers pace, with the Jawas and Owen and his wife killed off-screen, Luke gifted the lightsaber of his deceased and nigh-legendary father, and the quartet make their way to the down-at-heel space port of Mos Eisley. Here, they meet Captain Han Solo, his First Mate, the colossal furred Wookie, Chewbacca, who agrees to take them to Leia's homeworld of Alderaan, and, following an altercation with a bounty hunter after Solo, and a run-in with stormtroopers, escape via Solo's ship, the Millennium Falcon. Before they can reach Alderaan, though, the planet is destroyed by the Death Star, and before our heroes can respond, they too are captured by the space station, and have to work out their escape, eventually deciding to rescue the Princess, who joins their group.

Following several adventures across the space station, culminating in a duel between Obi Wan, and his former pupil, Vader, in which the former is killed, having already deactivated the systems that keeps the Falcon stuck on the space station, our heroes make their getaway. The Empire, though, has tracked the Falcon back to the Rebel base, setting up a final confrontation between themselves and the Rebels, leading to a pitched space battle, in which, with the last-minute arrival of Han Solo and Chewbacca, Luke is able to fire the missiles, guided by the Force, the Death Star blows up, and our heroes return, having saved the day, to medals and fame.

Above all things, then, Star Wars is a battle of good and evil, and this starts with the very look of our heroes outward; four of our seven heroes (Luke, Leia, Obi Wan, R2-D2) wear/are white or mostly white, against the dark dressed Imperial Officers and the black-clad Vader. This isn't so much subtext-the morally grey Han Solo wears a mixture of black and white, the majority of the Death Star is black or dark grey, the rebel ships are white and red against the black and grey TIE Fighters of the Empire, as it is text. Nowhere is this seen better than in the film's most iconic objects, the lightsabers of Obi Wan and Luke, and of course Vader, which are colour coded blue for our heroes, and red for the dark Satanic mills of the Sith Lord. It's brutally simple language that Lucas, and the directors of the subsequent Star Wars outings build upon, so that by Return of the Jedi, Luke dresses in black and white to reflect his complex relations with the light and dark side of the Force, and by Rian Johnson's tour-de-force of The Last Jedi, the entire Star Wars symbolism book is merrily upended in astonishing visual inversions of Lucas's world.

Another, and perhaps even more obvious symbolism of the good against evil battle that Star Wars begins in media res is that of, undoubtedly, the Second World War. This is a film with an unseen evil Emperor who, barely half an hour in, dissolves the Galactic Senate as Hitler dissolves the German Parliament in 1933 as his grip tightens on power, whose lieutenants and generals dress in outfits that resemble that of Nazi Germany, whose shock troops are, of course, called Stormtroopers, dressed in identical faceless helmets, that bear a strong resemblance to that of a gas-masked soldier of the Wehrmacht. This, of course, is not to mention Lucas's self-admitted cribbing of Second World War movies to inspire the kinetic dogfights between the Rebels and Empire. And nowhere is this more obvious than in Vader, whose horrifying death's head of mechanical mask is helmeted by a mix of World War I Stahlheim and samurai kabuto.

But at its basest, at its most simplistic, at the point where Lucas' escapist mono-myth for a battered America meets serious academic work like Campbell and veritable stacks of papers written in the intervening four decades is this. Star Wars is a fairytale. An innocent orphaned hero dreams of more before joining an old wizard on an adventure. A princess is kept captive by a dragon, and a wicked man in a fiercely armed castle. A hero unites a group of people to rescue the princess from the dragon, and then, at great cost, storms the castle and slays it, as the castle falls apart. It is mythology and fairytale that Star Wars comes closest to, a tale of sword (albeit a lightsaber) and sorcery (even if it is called the Force). It is the tale of a boy becoming a hero with a sword and with magic.

And it is this hero, and the princess, and the cocky roguish pilot who joins them on their quest that is the true secret weapon of Star Wars. At the centre of it is Hamill. Luke Skywalker is now the thing of childhood fantasies; I challenge anyone who's even seen Star Wars and its many sequels not to have allowed themselves a moment of looking off into the sun, dreaming of space battles and being a hero with a lightsaber. Hamill captures this perfectly, this innocent young man learning more about the world around him; the Binary Sunset sequence, in which Hamill simply stands, as Williams' score surges around him is the most perfect encapsulation of the young hero wishing for something more in cinema in the past fifty years.

But Hamill is more than this. He is not only Lucas's own avatar, a young man from a small city on the centre of California writing a young man from a desert planet in the middle of nowhere-Lucas/Luke-but our own avatar, the stand-in for millions of middle Americans, millions of young boys and girls dreaming of more. Luke, simply put, is vicarious escapism, the sense, before "I am your Father"-ing and the galaxy's most dysfunctional extended family made him the centre of prophecy and portent, that, as Rian Johnson perfectly, effortlessly worked into The Last Jedi, anyone could and can be a hero; Luke is, at least in the original film not born into greatness, but chooses to step up and become heroic.

Against this innocent young man is cast perhaps cinema's greatest anti-hero. I've said this before, and it bears repeating: we learn everything there is to know about Han Solo from the three and a half minutes from him sitting down at the table in the cantina, to the moment he shoots Greedo under the table, gets up and leaves. He's a smart, fast-thinking, morally grey figure; he murders, albeit in defence, an alien by shooting him under the table, he's a smuggler, a world-weary figure who relies on his wits and his blaster. Han Solo, at points, threatens to steal the movie entirely as the older, cooler, tougher and snarkier foil to the green and overly sheltered audience surrogate. Han Solo is the cooler older brother we never (usually) had. And yet, Han is a man redeemed by the slow cracking of that tough anti-hero shell, charging in at the death to save Luke's hide, not for money, but because he's grown fond of the kid, and realises that he, for once, has to do the right thing.

Ford captures this anti-heroic heroism to Han Solo perfectly; at points he swaggers through this film as a modern day cowboy, at other points he's an unexpected comic foil, stammering through conversations to kill time with encroaching Imperial forces, charges down the corridor bellowing like a maniac. At once, Ford acts as supportive quasi-mentor to Luke, (a role further developed in The Force Awakens, when he finally steps into the role of fulltime mentor) and foil, yelling, as the duo take down TIE fighters, "don't get cocky". Ford, more than anything, portrays Han as a loner learning to fight for the greater good, a sarcastic egotistical smuggler learning to care for people, and few characters do this with such panache, such style, such cinematic coolness as Harrison Ford as Han Solo.

Against these two archetypes, Princess Leia feels like a breath of fresh air; whilst, for much of the film she is either imprisoned by the Empire, or commanding from the Rebel base, she is by no means a damsel in distress, and Fisher brings a fiery warmth to her, instantly taking charge of the group who have rescued her, and just as resourceful and cunning a fighter as Luke and Han, almost instantly grabbing a blaster as soon as she's been rescued from her impending execution. Through Fisher's performance, Leia becomes less the princess to be rescued as the prize at the end of an adventure, but an active, and still remarkably modern feeling heroine in her own story of politics, power and rebellion.

 
Darth Vader is on screen for eight minutes, from the moment that he appears, striding through a smoky corridor to torture and strangle rebels to death, to his final appearance, spinning out of control in his star fighter as his wingmen are blown up by Han Solo. In just eight minutes, he becomes an icon. If Jaws is ruthless economy from necessity, Vader is simply ruthless economy, a perfect usage of "less is more". Vader appears exactly when he is needed; to torture information out of Leia, to remind the gathered Imperial officers that the power of the Force is as vital, through its instrument of the black-garbed warrior-a man we see fight once, but who carries a fearsome reputation in the unspoken reverence towards him-to fight his old mentor, and to act as the final obstacle to Luke and his friends on their attack on the Death Star.

And Vader is frightening; this, of course, is not simply down to one single feature of the performance, but a potent mix of the already towering Prowse almost entirely shot from below, the infamous black garb, the economy of movement, of gesture, and the bassy voice of James Earl Jones giving him at once a eloquent sensibility, and a detached coldness, not to mention that we never actually see what Vader actually is, (and indeed wouldn't for another six years, until Return of the Jedi). That he is as much a threat against his own men, infamously strangling one of his one officers after being ridiculed in still believing in the force only compounds just how dangerous and powerful he is, as the duo of Prowse and Jones pour their all into making Vader the thing of nightmare.

Against this, Lucas places a banal form of evil; it's not overly subtle who these men represent, be it the ranking officers of the SS, the suits in the White House, or simply bureaucrats of every stripe. With the possible exception of Tarkin, a wonderfully unlikeable performance from the veteran Peter Cushing, as he portrays the real power behind the wild and dangerous knight that is Vader, they are squabbling power hungry demigogs, utterly irredeemable and part of a faceless, utterly malignant force of evil. There is, at least in the first Star Wars film, no sense of nuance, no greyness. It is an army of faceless minions, led by a faceless thing of horror and power representing the ultimate power in the Galaxy (the Emperor, though mentioned, won't appear in any form till late in Empire Strikes Back, three years later, and won't appear in person for another six), whilst power-hungry suited figures quibble and struggle for power around boardroom tables.

Star Wars, though, makes its scum and villainy work. Even if you strip away the unavoidable and aforementioned fascistic undertones-no mean feat, though Star Wars' none-too-subtle tale of rebels against an evil Empire of fascistically dressed, acting, and speaking human suprematists, under the command of a banal grey suited leader and his pet ubermensch still flies over the heads of thousands of fans a year-one is still left with people who murder aliens and innocents in cold blood to find their stolen plans, blow up an entire planet to make a point, and whose every action is that of an entrenched and unrepentantly evil force of almost entirely faceless, emotionless, merciless soldiers, led by an unrepentantly evil man, even before the cackling Shakespearean villainy of Emperor Palpatine makes its appearance.

That the Empire is a believable threat, though, comes down to something that few reviews, or retrospectives of Star Wars ever truly dwell upon. The film is steeped in moments of continuation; the entire film starts, post the crawl, in media res, we are told barely twenty minutes in of the dissolution of the Senate, and the utter control of the Empire being cemented. As C-3PO wanders through the desert, we see a colossal skeleton of a beast that is never revealled, we see creatures, thanks to the tireless work of ILM, that populate these worlds, matter-of-factly, with some of these taking years, if not decades to receive names and species. Barely an hour in, we're in a world so rich, so dense in history and strange figures, of Kessel Runs and parsecs and lightspeed, that it would be overwhelming, if Lucas's cast and his zippy matter of fact dialogue didn't perfectly hit the landing.

One scene above all, in which Obi Wan begins to reveal his part in the nigh-mythic Clone Wars, and the friendship he had with Luke's father, captures this better than any other single moment, this minutely perfect moment in which Alec Guinness, through Lucas's dialogue, begins to create the myth of Star Wars, begins to provide the escapism that Luke so badly yearns for. We are told of the Jedi Knights, of the piloting prowess of this father that Luke never met, of the "more civilised age" that the Empire swept aside, and of the Jedis' extinction, and of the force. It is, in a single scene that creates this world of Star Wars, of the fall of the Republic, and the Jedi, and the rise of the Empire, with Vader at its centre, that Star Wars becomes more. The series has never more perfectly captured that moment, this meshing of fantasy and history, and spaceships and lightsabers, of the epoch before Luke's childhood, of this lost Golden Age. It is the moment that Star Wars ignites the imagination, in a way that even the prequels could not extinguish, and it burns ever on at the heart of the series.

But here's the thing. Save for a trip to nautically themed torrenting websites and their ilk, you cannot see Star Wars as that countless number saw in 1977. You cannot see Star Wars as it once was. You cannot, in its theatrical format, see Star Wars. George Lucas has made sure of that, for, in 1995, the Special Editions arrived in cinemas, and the revisions began. For every 1970s era effect cleaned up and made more convincing, for every rejigged Death Star explosion that turns pop into impressive supernova, there are the needless tinkerings. Enter CGI Jabba, needless Boba Fett cameo, and of course, Greedo. I'm not going to unearth the "Han Shot First" controversy, though the hapless Greedo now squeaking the nonsensical "maclunkey" before being blown away (in increasingly jerky self defence by Han) is hysterically funny in the worst possible way. Han shot, and taking that away, that moment of moral greyness, robs Han of his edge to the film's detriment.

But it asks an uncomfortable question. How should a film of this fame, of this size and power, be approached? It, after all, is worthy of being shown in its original form-it's almost necessary to see it without the march of time updating its effects every five to ten years as technology improves, to understand the power, the hold it must have had on its audiences. One can only hope, as Star Wars' 50th Anniversary slowly begins to loom on the horizon, six years hence, that Lucas (and Disney themselves) will finally, finally, relinquish this quixotic sense that Star Wars will never be completed, and finally let-for it must exist-the original film back out into the light, so that countless more audiences can fall under its spell. For it is a spell, and we have fallen under it, almost all of us, at one point or another.

Star Wars will forever be part of my childhood, of me, and I am just one of millions. I'm writing this next to a LEGO bust of an Imperial Pilot, with a figure of Han Solo nearby that I've had for most of my childhood and all of my adulthood, and Grogu, the star of just the latest Star Wars spinoff, the wildly popular The Mandalorian, sits in the chair next to me, whilst I drink from a Star Wars mug adorned with lightsabers, and John Williams' score plays from my laptop. You cannot escape Star Wars-it hangs, omnipresent, a second, artificial moon above pop-culture, impossible to ignore, devastating in power, and now owned by an organisation as evil in the eyes of some people as the Galactic Empire.

It is impossible, in the same way trying to imagine a world sans the Beatles, or Harry Potter, whose story of a boy against an evil lord owes as much to Lucas as it does to Tolkien, to imagine the cinema of the latter half of the 20th Century without Star Wars. It is impossible. An embattled Marvel pin it all on this little space opera, and thirty years later embark on their own cinematic odyssey, practically the successor to the throne of Star Wars in just how all-encompassing it is. A little American toy maker called Palitoy becomes the vanguard of an armada of action figures, playsets and a hundred thousand pieces of merchandise. A duo of young actors and a part-time carpenter fixes a door and are catapulted to not just stardom but super-stardom. George Lucas arrives back from Hawaii, Steven Spielberg in tow, to find himself close to a conquering Emperor of Rome returning from a successful campaign.

But more than anything, Star Wars changes cinema. The blockbuster has arrived, crushing everything in its wake; enter the franchise, the multi-sequel series, the endless more. In its wake comes, among others, The Matrix and Lord of the Rings, colossally popular, high concept works driven more by effects than performance. Star Wars is nothing short of an earthquake across the cinematic landscape, a vindication of the story of heroes, and villains and black and white battles of good and evil. George Lucas provides America with an escape exit from the every day, and not only did millions take it in 1977, millions still take it every year as the Star Wars machine rolls on. Even if one strips back the layers of additions, of ephemera, of canonized and de-canonized media, and the prequels, sequels, and midiquels, of twenty-five billion dollars worth of more, one is left with this.

Star Wars changed cinema. It is a slicing lightsaber across the timeline of cinema. On one side lies cinema before it, the seventy years that Lucas shamelessly draws upon, from Samurai to Serial to Propaganda, on the other, the astonishingly long shadow of this film, stretching on and on to the present day. To call Star Wars one of my favourite films is by the by, it is one of cinema's favourite films, a fixed point around which cinema flows. It is, in a word, escapism of the highest, most superb, and most-epoch defining, a young man staring off into the setting suns, dreaming of more. Forever.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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