Star Wars (1977)

By now Star Wars has been analyzed so thoroughly, quoted so relentlessly and merchandised so exhaustively that it takes real effort to see the actual eighteen reels of film underneath the mythology. So set the empire of Star Wars aside for a moment — the theme parks, the prequels, the decades of debate about who shot first — and just watch what George Lucas actually put on screen in 1977. It's a tight, unpretentious hundred and twenty minutes that moves like a serial from the 1930s, borrows its plot structure so directly from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress that Lucas has never pretended otherwise, and gets from a farm on a desert planet to the destruction of a moon-sized battle station without a single wasted scene. Underneath the space opera trappings, it's an old-fashioned adventure picture, built with an almost mathematical understanding of pace, and that structural discipline is a big part of why it has survived four and a half decades of imitation without feeling like an imitation of itself.

The decision that changed the genre permanently, though, wasn't the story. It was the dirt. Every spaceship in serious American science fiction before 1977 — in Forbidden Planet, in the 2001 that Lucas revered, in the television that had shaped a generation's idea of the future — was clean, symmetrical, freshly painted, designed to look like a vision of tomorrow rather than a tool somebody used yesterday. Lucas and his production designers went the opposite direction on purpose. The Millennium Falcon is a junk-heap that needs to be kicked to start. Stormtrooper armor is scuffed. The Death Star's corridors have exposed conduit and grime in the corners. Lucas called it the "used universe" concept, and it required inventing new technology to pull off convincingly: Industrial Light & Magic, founded specifically for this production because no existing effects house could deliver what Lucas wanted, built a computer-controlled camera rig called the Dykstraflex that could repeat an identical, complex move across multiple passes over static models, making the layered, believable dogfights in the film's final act possible for the first time. That texture — spaceships that look like they've done actual work — is probably the single most imitated design choice in the genre's subsequent history, more influential in the long run than any individual plot beat or character.

None of it would have mattered without the cast, and the cast is a stranger combination than nostalgia usually allows people to remember. Mark Hamill was a nearly unknown television actor playing a whiny farm boy who spends much of the film being told what to do by everyone around him. Alec Guinness, a genuinely great Shakespearean and film actor who had already won an Oscar, reportedly considered the whole project somewhat beneath him and was famously unenthusiastic about being identified with it for the rest of his career, which makes his quiet, unshowy conviction as Obi-Wan Kenobi even more remarkable in retrospect — he sells the mysticism of the Force through sheer stillness rather than incantation. Harrison Ford, cast almost by accident after being brought in to read lines opposite auditioning actors while working a day job as a carpenter on the studio lot, plays Han Solo with a self-interested cynicism that the film needs badly, because without him the story risks tipping into unearned earnestness. And Carrie Fisher, nineteen years old during filming, plays Princess Leia as the only character in the movie who is never rattled, never rescued in any way that actually requires her cooperation, and frequently the smartest person in whatever room she's in — a piece of casting so ahead of its era that it's still cited as a corrective to the "damsel" template the genre had leaned on for decades.

It's worth remembering, too, how little confidence anyone involved had that any of this would work. Crew members reportedly referred to the production privately as the worst movie ever made; 20th Century Fox's own marketing department budgeted for a modest release and was reportedly caught completely flat-footed by the demand once it opened. Lucas, anticipating the film would flop, negotiated to take a reduced director's salary in exchange for keeping merchandising and sequel rights that the studio considered essentially worthless at the time — a decision that, within a few years, made him independently wealthy on a scale most studio executives of the era never approached. That gamble, as much as anything on screen, reshaped how the entire industry thought about franchise filmmaking, ancillary revenue and the value of retaining creative and financial control.

Then there's John Williams's score, which does something the film's visual effects alone couldn't: it tells you, before a single line of the opening crawl finishes scrolling, exactly what emotional register you're in for. Williams had been working mostly in the disaster-movie genre before this; Lucas wanted something old-fashioned, symphonic, closer to Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Golden Age Hollywood adventure scores than to the more minimalist, atmospheric scoring that had become fashionable in 1970s American film. The gamble paid off completely — the double-LP soundtrack became the best-selling orchestral film score in history, and its leitmotifs are now so deeply embedded in the culture that most people who've never seen the film could still hum the main theme. It's easy to forget, watching it now, how radical it was in 1977 to bet an entire summer blockbuster on a full romantic orchestra rather than a rock soundtrack or minimalist electronics, which is what most of the era's science fiction was doing.

Watched today, stripped of everything that came after it, Star Wars holds up not because it predicted a genre but because it's simply a well-made, confidently paced piece of popular filmmaking that trusted its audience to follow a fairly complicated plot without hand-holding, cast four genuinely charismatic and mismatched actors and let them generate real chemistry rather than manufacturing it through dialogue, and built a tactile, lived-in universe instead of a shiny one. Every subsequent space opera exists in conversation with it, whether it's imitating the used-future aesthetic, borrowing the Campbellian structure, or deliberately rebelling against both. Few films in the history of the medium have had that kind of gravitational pull, and vanishingly few of those have actually earned it on craft alone the way this one did before the mythology took over.