SDWAPS #2 - Why Does OG Star Wars Work?

Original Article:
https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/star-wars-new-hope-retrospective/

Partial Transcript:

It’s 2020, and for the time being, Star Wars is dead. We continue to hear of Lucasfilm projects and rumors of Lucasfilm projects, but so far as anyone can tell, the damage has been done. The Rise of Skywalker failed to patch together what little remained in Rian Johnson’s wake, and until the infighting at Disney pans out, there’s not much to look forwards to beyond more Mandalorian episodes on Disney Plus. That said, I’m not really here to give you the big sads any more than necessary. The real question, at least to me, is this; what is it we miss so much about the original movies anyways? Was the writing and presentation really that much better than blockbusters of today, or Lucasfilm's own sequel trilogy? Do the pre-special edition effects really stand up on their own more than four decades later?
I mean, the obvious answer is “yes,” but I’m trying be more specific than that. I’ve got a word count to fill here.
As you may have noticed by reading the title, during the lockdown I managed to rewatch the original Star Wars trilogy (for the purposes of this essay I’ll be focusing on A New Hope), and a few family members even joined me for the trip down memory lane.
As most of you already know, these movies have gone through numerous changes since their release, some even before they left theaters. The most significant changes happened with the Special Editions, but what really tends to get people’s goat is that finding a decent quality version of the theatrical or original laserdisc version in widescreen is almost impossible. Fan editors have spent years piecing trying to piece together the original three films in digital hi-res glory, but the last time anything close to that was released commercially was as part of the 2011 Blu-Ray release. Suffice it to say, I’m familiar with both the Special Edition and Pre-Special Edition versions of the film, and I will mostly be referring to the film as it was when originally set loose on the world, not with the changes from '97 onwards.
In the interests of clarity (and originality) I’ll try not to retread the plot blow-for-blow, instead emphasizing what stands out most to me. Let’s get started.
Firstly, Star Wars has one of the most famous opening shots in cinematic history. Everything from John William’s blasting fanfare, to the ships roaring overhead, and the sprawling planet far below effectively sets the stage.
The second thing that struck me on this viewing was how funny this sequence was. Being introduced to a film like this so young made it easier for jokes to go over my head, while still thinking that I’d absorbed everything there was to see. Looking at it years later, from a writer’s perspective, I got several chuckles out of things like R2 and 3PO slowing crossing a hallway through intense crossfire, or the moment when a blaster bolt cuts 3PO off, forcing him to seek cover with R2 in the escape pod.
Another interesting thing about this sequence is how it introduces us to the setting long before we meet our main protagonist. Sure, Leia and Vader are briefly introduced, but our main point of view characters here are R2 and 3PO, and both have important loads to carry for the audience. C-3PO’s curiosity about R2’s mysterious mission helps ease in the new viewer, while on later rewatches I find myself empathizing more with R2, who knows what cards are in play and is constantly frustrated by 3PO’s skittishness. Yes, I know starting In Medias Res isn’t the most original thing in the world, but it’s how this one develops as we go on that really makes it unique.
As I mentioned before, there’s an unusually long time between our opening and when we meet our protagonist. Most films focus our empathy on the hero as the person who, like the audience, has everything about this strange new universe explained to him. Star Wars survives this transition partially on the merits of it’s spectacular explodey hook, but it’s worth noting that this isn’t simply a matter of it being written that way. Scenes of Luke viewing the space battle through his super space binoculars and sharing the news with his friends were actually shot. I’m rather surprised that they had the guts to cut it—it’s not the sort of thing that a studio boss would let slip off the scriptwriting checklist in 2020, at any rate. As a result of that decision, it takes a full seventeen minutes for Luke to enter the narrative, and we spend at least half of the intervening time with a character that literally cannot speak English (R2-D2).
As a very young kid, I honestly did find the sheer length rather annoying (at least on repeat viewings). However, I’ve grown into it over the years, and it does establish something rather important—Star Wars is an epic with action scenes, not an action movie with epic scenes. I mean, the scenes are epic, but I mean in the old-school sense—it has more in common with The L...