Star Wars

After a long hiatus with a couple of odd reviews here and there, I have finally found the current direction I want to take with my reviews for the time being, and that is fantasy films. I'm a big fan of fantasy, and I got this idea both from recently watching the premiere of The Rings of Power and from a YouTuber called Sean Chandler, who did a ranking of these same movies in something called 31 on 31, so without further ado, let's get this started!

The story behind the film follows a farm boy named Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill, who comes into the possession of two droids that end up holding the plans to stop the Death Star, a deadly weapon created by the evil galactic empire that is capable of destroying planets. Along the way, he is helped by a mysterious old man named Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness, who is a Jedi Knight, so basically a wizard with a lightsaber, a cocky smuggler named Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, and his Wookiee co-pilot Chewbacca, and Leia Organa, played by Carrie Fisher, the princess of the planet Alderaan and the one who gave the droids the plans in the first place. They are opposed by Darth Vader, voiced by James Earl Jones, a menacing masked man who has some sort of connection to Obi-Wan, and to Luke's seemingly deceased father.

This movie, first and foremost, is fun. When it was first released in 1977, audiences were blown away by the effects, the action, the scale, and the space battles, and today, all of that holds up brilliantly. While a lot of the dialogue is pretty standard fantasy and sci-fi fare, there are a couple of lines that really flesh out the characters and show there is more to them all than meets the eye.

Even on a technical standpoint, the fact that this movie came out in the late 70s is amazing to think about. They put so much work into the set design, the visual effects, the ships, and they even made the space battles work in a time before CGI was even considered for special effects. The absolute best achievement in terms of special effects is the entire trench run through the Death Star at the very end of the film, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.

Overall, as a fantasy film, the elements that I would say make up your typical fantasy film are a bit lighter than most of the rest of the later films, and it does lean more towards the space battles than it does the mysticism of the Force and the Jedi, but it's still a well done film. If you haven't seen this film for whatever reason, do yourself a favor and watch it. You will not be disappointed.

Next time, we continue the story of Luke Skywalker and his friends with a story that gets darker, more intense, and a whole lot more complex. Look out for when I review The Empire Strikes Back.

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