Fresh Star Wars films began to roll out in 2015. After releasing a divisive trio of prequels around the turn of the millennium, in 2012 Lucas sold his franchise to Disney, Hollywood’s chief recycler of old stories. Inevitably, Star Wars itself succumbed to that fate. Lucas’s original vision famously inspired an era of big-budget blockbuster movies whose creators, just as famously, eventually ran out of new ideas and came to rely on sequels and spin-offs. Right now, Star Wars is at a turning point. Star Wars immerses you in the awesome knowledge that peripheral things-the neighbors you don’t understand, the buildings you don’t notice-have their own sagas.įrom the March 1979 issue: The man who made ‘Star Wars’ Viewers come to feel a humanistic, or even animistic, connection. A supernatural “Force” hums throughout the interstellar menagerie. Silly-looking critters and robots carry themselves with dignity and purpose. Debris-strewn sets convey that exotic planets have history and commerce.
As Luke Skywalker rises from backwater farmhand to galactic savior over the course of the first three films, audiences gain a visceral sense of why the galaxy he lives in is worth saving. The Star Wars franchise offers action and escapism, but re-enchanting our own world was always its greatest trick. Today, I’m still susceptible to that lovely illusion. As a kid, I believed that Earth was just another planet in Lucas’s universe. In the director’s 1977 space fantasy, wizards lived in what appeared to be crumbling stucco huts, and moon-size superweapons had onboard trash compactors. Rooftop bouquets of dirty satellite dishes, jumbled architectural styles united by peeling paint, variously shaped (and largely face-masked) life-forms jostling on the sidewalk-each sign of shabby modernity feels like something I glimpsed in childhood while hypnotized by George Lucas. W hen I look out my window, a few floors up in New York City, I see Star Wars. This article was published online on June 21, 2021.
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