My Favorite Movies: The Original Star Wars Trilogy (1977-1983)

It is nearly impossible to see this as one picture, and given the clatter over what has come in its wake, it sometimes helps to pull it back down to basics. So, here we are.

This may be the most personal of all. The original Star Wars trilogy was my grand introduction to film. The first movie came out when I was six years old and it has taken up space in my imagination ever since.

George Lucas created, for my generation, a modern mythology. He was a man with a grand vision to take all of the battered and cliched films of his youth – the western, the science fiction quickie, the Arthurian-style fantasies and place them in a context in which they were taken seriously. He created an entire universe populated with fantasy characters that seemed real (notice how everybody in the first film is either making a living or looking for work) and authored the “used future,” a notion of creating futuristic spaceships that somehow seem to have been cobbled together from bolts and screws and spare parts.

The three films, which are inseparable in my mind, are not identical. The first is a grand exercise in world building. The second a deeper examination of the mythology. And the third balances out what has been introduced in the first two. They fit nicely together while still being separate and distinct, a narrative that is more involving than most science fiction that is more interested in spectacle.

The effect of Star Wars has been hotly debated. Yes, it helped to end the auteur era of the early 70s and ushered in the dominating era of big-budget special effects pictures – which is odd since this series was, itself, an auteur’s vision. But its impact, for better or worse, can never be denied. And it certainly had a massive impact on me as a movie lover.