Star Wars IV: A New Hope
Star Wars actually ranks fairly high on the list coming in at number thirteen. At first I thought of this as kind of a surprise that Star Wars would really be he thirteenth greatest film of all time but the more I thought about it the more this film has really effected all pop culture in all most every aspect. A few weeks ago ComicCon was held in San Diego and for the first time a ComicCon panel was televised in its entirety. During this panel it was revealed that a “Music of Star Wars” touring concert would start up this fall. It will have a full symphony orchestra playing live music from the movies while scenes play on large monitors. This won’t be happening at concert halls but at full scale arenas and will probably sell out. What other movie could do this? I mean this is a 30 year old movie so ingrained in our society that its orchestral score alone can sell out arenas!
Any ways back to the movie, Star Wars VI: A New Hope (or known at its release only as Star Wars) is the first yet 4th movie in the series. The movie is about Luke Skywalker a boy living on a farm on a desert planet who, by extraordinary circumstances is thrown into greatness. Going over the plot feels redundant because even if you happen to haven’t seen the movie you probably all ready know what happens.
So how does the movie hold up? For being over 30 years old the movie holds up very well. If you happen to watch it on TV today or buy it on DVD you’ll be watching the “special edition” version which has a few extra scenes and cleans up some of the more poorly digitized scenes from the original and gives the sound a boost. This is a plus for the most part except that these moments are not found through out the whole movie so when they happen it is really obvious when you do see a newly done CGI scene compared to the originals. Compared to the prequel movies there are not a lot of the grand battles and major light saber sword play. This isn’t to say there isn’t action in this movie but you really don’t feel cheated by the lack of CGI tech at the time since there are only a few scenes they actually use their light sabers. The story is really immersive and translates well for pretty much any age group. Since this is the “first” movie in the series you don’t need to know anything ahead of time to enjoy it and you won’t get lost in the terminology.
The Bottom Line
Really you have to see this movie regardless about how good it is (which it is) or if you like sci-fi. This movie is too engrossed in our pop culture that with out seeing it hundreds of references to the movie in different aspects of culture won’t make sense to you. I watched it recently and what I suggest if you have only scene it once or have only scene it in parts and not all together is to really watch the whole thing start to finish paying attention full attention. It will save you a lot of misunderstanding later on and with just watching this movie you will probably know enough about Star Wars that you can fake your way through a conversation about it if it comes up.
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