Star Wars

Judged on structure. The spine is required and the plot economical: the plans hidden in R2-D2 in the first scene are the object of the whole film and are paid at the briefing; Leia’s message makes Kenobi necessary, Kenobi the cantina, the cantina the Falcon, and the Falcon’s capture brings every party into the Death Star at once. Owen’s bargain over a droid with a bad motivator puts R2 in Luke’s hands, and the burned homestead frees Luke to go. What gives is the middle. The rescue on the Death Star is a run of serial set pieces, the detention block, the trash compactor, the chasm, whose order could be shuffled and whose number cut without loss to the argument, and the cantina is spectacle as much as plot. Much of the middle hour is permitted, not compelled.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What the film brings into the open is thin as a statement and strong as a mood. The statable part holds: an empire is a bureaucracy of machines that believes its machines, and Tarkin’s confidence is undone by the station’s own plans; a rebellion rests on faith, luck and the young; the death of a planet is an administrative decision taken in a meeting room. But these are the given world of a fable, stated rather than uncovered. Luke’s grief for his aunt and uncle passes in a scene, and Alderaan’s millions are mourned in one line. The real disclosure is a feeling, a farm boy’s longing at the twin sunset for a larger life, and a mood ranks below a meaning: that is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve, and below the Universal Minimum.

Score: 6.8 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of one warm, grand kind. The opening shot is a summit in the first minute: the Star Destroyer passing overhead and filling the frame for seconds on end. Luke at the twin sunset, with Williams’s theme for the Force rising, is the second and the best. The station seen whole, “That’s no moon”; Kenobi lowering his sabre to Vader and vanishing; the jump to lightspeed; the trench run, the targeting computer pushed away and the station exploding; the long aisle of the throne room under the march. Ben Burtt’s sound, the sabre’s hum, Vader’s breath, the scream of the fighters, carries much of the height. Held at the figure because the elevation thrills more than it deepens: it seldom passes exhilaration into terror or grief, and the losses are let go quickly.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The myth is built, not cited, and it bears the whole load. The structure is the hero’s journey as Joseph Campbell set it out: the orphan on the edge of the world; the call, in a message from a captive princess; the refusal, since he is needed for the harvest; the mentor with the father’s weapon; the threshold at the spaceport; the descent into the belly of the beast; the mentor’s death and the voice that remains; the ordeal, the boon and the crowning. The dark father is planted, Vader as the man who killed Luke’s father by Kenobi’s account, and left for later, and the Force makes an animism of the whole. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate bar is the particular: the farm boy, the rogue, the princess, the old knight and the black knight are types from the start, and gain archetypal weight without first being particular people.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is many-stranded and worn openly: the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials; Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), for its two squabbling peasants and its princess; the western, whose burned homestead recalls The Searchers (1956); the air picture of the Second World War, for the trench run; and Campbell. The turn was against its moment: in a decade of disillusion, an unironic fable of good and evil in space, with a worn and dirty future in place of the clean one of 2001 (1968). The stake was real: a studio uneasy with the project, a budget that ran over, an effects company with no record. Held below the bar because the swerve is largely a return: old forms revived and refitted, a wager on the serial’s proven pleasures, made new by money and craft more than by a turn in what a film could be.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Change the form and what does the film lose? Some things are bound in. It opens in mid-action and from below, and its galaxy at war is first seen at the height of its smallest servants, two droids. The crawl and the wipes make it a chapter of a serial, an episode the viewer joins late, and that frame carries the knowledge that this world existed before the film and goes on after it. The worn surfaces say what no line says, that the Empire’s order is new and the frontier old. Beyond that, the form is the adventure picture’s inherited grammar: cross-cutting between the rescue party and the command, the race against a deadline, the battle intercut with the war room and the clock. Told as a novel, the story would lose its spectacle and much of its pleasure, but little of what it knows: a container well filled more than an instrument.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Evidence across forty-nine years. The film has been returned to more than almost any other, but the yield is of one kind. Much of the return is to its making, the effects and Burtt’s library of sounds, to Campbell’s pattern, and to the franchise the film began. The questions it still opens are few: whether its politics are rebellious or reactionary, a farm boy against an empire or a medal ceremony that has been read as fascist spectacle; whether the Force is an ethic or a power; how far the worn design carries a meaning of its own. It is enjoyed on return more than reread: a viewer who has seen it ten times finds the same pleasures, not a new film. The well is wide and shallow, and much that is written about it concerns its consequence rather than its depth.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 1970s, and here force and reach are unequal. The intrinsic force is real but narrower: the film did not reorganise what a camera, a cut or a narrative could do, but it reorganised what an effects picture could be, with motion control, a worn design and sound built as a world rather than laid in, and it made the sincere popular myth possible again. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Jaws (1975) it turned the American studios toward the summer blockbuster, the franchise and merchandising; Industrial Light and Magic and its descendants made the effects of the next half-century; its sound pushed theatres toward Dolby and multichannel exhibition; and it formed generations of filmmakers. The reach is industrial and popular more than artistic, and the field it redirected moved partly away from the cinema the decade had made, a cost to the art as well as a change in it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over forty-nine years. Presence is as wide as any film’s: continuous exhibition and reissue, television and home video in every format, a place in the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989, and in common speech. The charge falls on form. Since 1997 the theatrical release has been replaced in authorised circulation by altered versions: added and changed shots, new computer-made creatures in Mos Eisley, a restored scene with Jabba, and Greedo made to fire at Han first, which changes the film’s rogue at his introduction. The film of 1977 survives legibly, in prints and in unofficial restorations, and the changes take small shares of its running time; but its circulation as released is suppressed, and that holds the axis below the bar. The fabric, its effects, reads as period and holds.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors the arts share. The making bears weight in many departments: John Williams’s score, leitmotif in the manner of late-Romantic opera, carries character and place; Burtt’s sound is as exact as any film’s; John Barry’s design and Ralph McQuarrie’s paintings give every object a use and an age; Gilbert Taylor photographs the Tunisian desert clean and wide; and the cutting of the final battle holds three spaces and a clock in complete clarity. The charges fall where a film is most exposed. The dialogue is functional at best and often stilted; the playing is uneven, Guinness and Cushing exact, Ford’s ease the best of the young players, Hamill’s farm boy whining in the early reels by design but not to profit; and many dialogue scenes are staged flatly, in two-shots that wait for the next set piece.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: C-3PO and R2-D2 bickering in the desert, a vaudeville pair, and the smoking remains of Owen and Beru outside the burned homestead. One law governs both: in this galaxy the small and the overlooked carry the fate of the large, and comedy and cruelty alike are the serial’s, quick, bright and not dwelt on. The droids carry the plans, the farm boy carries the Force, and the smuggler comes back. The design keeps one physics: the Empire clean and grey, the frontier and the Rebellion worn and patched. The range runs from slapstick to the death of a planet, and it holds because the film never asks that death to weigh more than an adventure can bear. That is also its limit, coherence won by keeping grief light, and the solemn pageant of the throne room sits in a different key from the film’s ironies.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The orders are present: the state, in an Empire whose Emperor has dissolved the Senate, a governor and a war; the sacred, in the Force and the fallen order of its knights; the family, in a lost father, an uncle and aunt and an inherited sword; labour, in the moisture farm, the harvest and the Jawas’ scrap trade; technology as power; and consciousness, in Luke’s longing. The plot integrates them: the father’s sword, the farm’s loss and the Rebellion’s need converge on one boy. What holds the axis low is that each order is a sign rather than a world: the state is a meeting room and a line about the Senate, the sacred a creed stated by an old man, labour a few minutes on a farm, the family two people seen in three scenes. A galaxy is shown, and little of it is entered.

Score: 7.0 / 10