It’s actually been a while since I re-watched the very first Star Wars. Do NOT attempt to tell me that it’s actually called A New Hope and that The Phantom Menace is the first film.
I watched because my nephew and niece have made their way through Harry Potter multiple times (the books, the movies, the Audible versions of the books, etc.) and their parents felt it was time to move on.
My nephew clearly knows the story pretty well despite having never seen it. How could you not at this point? He nearly caused a riot of the elder generation in the room when about halfway through he suggested watching Lego Star Wars instead because it’s better. But I did notice some fairly rapt attention (and a bit of scared retreat out of the room when Darth Vader showed up) until the escape from the Death Star. From that point on both of them were absolutely hooked and were watching very intensely right up to the end. (And the adults suspended any asides or wisecracks accordingly.)
At this point I know everything there is to know about the film, or so it feels. Often that doesn’t diminish what’s on screen at all. Sure, I know that the entire last battle above the Death Star is cribbed from aerial dogfight scenes in earlier cinema. Doesn’t matter, it works incredibly well still. Mostly the vast rest of the saga doesn’t intrude on the film, and here and there it adds new meaning. (Famously, in the case of Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen’s conversation about Luke’s future.) We unfortunately had to watch the Special Edition and my god but the digital additions look just terrible now. Really one of the worst tech demos ever.
I suppose if I could wish for something in the franchise for the future, now that they completely blew it with the sequel trilogy, especially the wet fart pratfall of the last film, is that they dig back to two things that really made this film. No, not the use of every form of screen transition known to 1970s filmmakers—Lucas comes off like someone determined to use every menu item in Adobe Premiere. The one I think everyone kind of agrees with, and that’s the material aesthetic we see on Tatooine: a universe that’s used, inhabited, rough. Only let’s not go back to Tatooine any more, ok? Let’s see that somewhere else. The other is that the original film manages somehow to be more than just a straight-up ripoff of the serials that it was cribbing from. I loved it when some of the more recent material in The Mandalorian did some call outs (say, to the amazing film Sorcerer) but I really hated the extended, dull-witted, slavish reprise of Lawrence of Arabia in the recent Boba Fett series.
I’ve always feared on rewatching Star Wars that it would look like Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon did in 1977. We’re about at the same interval, but I really do think the movie holds up narratively and even visually than Flash Gordon did. But another ten years and maybe I won’t feel that way any more.