Synopsis: Young farm boy Luke Skywalker is thrust into a galaxy of adventure when he intercepts a distress call from the captive Princess Leia. The event launches him on a daring mission to rescue her from the clutches of Darth Vader and the evil Empire.
As this is my first movie review on this blog, I'll preface that I normally don't split up sections of a movie review nor do I do separate ratings for them, but this is Star Wars and it gets its own system because... it's Star Wars. I have five craft ratings plus an overall rating and then a separate entertainment rating for how much I enjoyed it, which has nothing to do with the craft ratings.
Pacing: 5/5
Soundtrack: 5/5
Characters: 5/5
Chemistry: 5/5
Plot: 5/5
Overall: 5/5
Entertainment: 4/5
To be fair, this is not my first viewing of Star Wars, but it is my first review of it so I may be very biased. I've marathoned the entire Skywalker Saga twice, seen the original trilogy so many times that I broke the VHS tapes by rewinding them constantly, and know the prequels like the back of my hand. I love Star Wars, so my intent is for this review to be less of my feelings on it and more of looking at the franchise from an objective standpoint. I'm starting a new rewatch with friends who have never seen it before, which personally opens me up to looking at the movies more practically and less for their entertainment value.
A New Hope is actually one of my least favorite Star Wars movies. The list goes:
1. The Rise of Skywalker
2. The Force Awakens
3. Revenge of the Sith
3.5 Rogue One
4. Return of the Jedi
5. The Empire Strikes Back
6. Attack of the Clones
6.5 Solo
7. The Last Jedi
8. The Phantom Menace
9. A New Hope
Okay, maybe it's my least favorite. But that list is purely from an entertainment standpoint. How much fun am I having watching it? How much do I enjoy it aesthetically and emotionally? I would say my ranking is probably unpopular, if maybe even controversial (I am very much admittedly a sequels and prequels lover more than an originals lover, despite growing up on the originals only), but it's just on the one factor of "Did I have fun?" For me, A New Hope isn't fun — it just simply isn't. I'm an endings kind of person, and I love watching and reading things coming together rather than seeing them start. You'll notice that my top four include all three of the trilogy ends (The Force Awakens is an outlier and should not be counted because the "fun" I had with that was just being able to see my first Star Wars movie in theaters). The Phantom Menace and A New Hope are at the very bottom because I find beginnings not that entertaining. There's something to be said for them because they set up the trilogy, and there wouldn't be an ending without a beginning. I just like endings more.
But this is about how great A New Hope is objectively. I've already gone off on a tangent and cheated a little, but I'll cheat some more. I don't hate ANH at all, no matter what I may say about if I had fun watching it or not at any given point in my life. It's a solid movie with great production for its time and an undeniable pop culture classic. Having watched the movie while knowing what the rest of the franchise has in store leaves me with a great feeling because I can see where later installments threw in callbacks and homages to the original. While it's not my favorite, there will never be anything quite like the original Star Wars — not in how it changed the world or its characters, pacing, and plot. The exposition never felt too clunky, and Luke being the farm boy who knew nothing about the lore acts as a natural audience-insert for exposition "dumps" (they aren't even really dumps because the execution is very smooth).
The pacing is wonderful — by the hour mark, they've already arrived on the Death Star, the group has been introduced to each other (minus Leia), and there's clear conflict and character motivations. Luke is the good guy, Han is the charming scoundrel, Leia is the feisty princess, and Obi-Wan is the wise, old mentor. Chewbacca, I feel, has always just been there as more of a side character in the franchise since he never really has any solid character motivations or story arc — he's usually just by a main character's side. Either way, the characters are all, at least, on the same set piece now and the plot is moving along very well. This makes sense since ANH closely follows a lot of the traditional storytelling methods (Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces gets mentioned a lot when there's discussion of the original trilogy). It works, and it wouldn't be such a classic around the world if it hadn't worked.
Knowing what I do about later installments in the franchise, there's something they all lack, which is that, craft-wise, something will be off-kilter about the plot, pacing, or characters. ANH isn't perfect by any means, but I think in terms of the franchise as a whole, it got the formula right for how a bigger story starts, and that's what followers like The Phantom Menace and The Force Awakens had trouble with.
As a nostalgia note, I did connect more with ANH this time around (it's probably somewhere vaguely in my twenty-something or thirty-something viewing of this movie) just because, by this point, I've now seen the entire Skywalker Saga, so to come back to the beginning feels really different. Not to mention that those two marathons I mentioned earlier (one was the galaxy premiere for The Force Awakens and the other was the saga marathon for The Rise of Skywalker) began with The Phantom Menace. I respect that the presumed order Lucasfilms/Disney wanted to show the movies in was by episodic order, but I don't agree with that at all. Production/release order, I think, is what works best for Star Wars, due to the sheer number of decades that it has spanned. The prequels have such a jarring difference in CGI and pacing from the originals that watching them before the originals makes the originals not feel... as great, I guess? I personally know that both marathons I was in, I tuned out during parts of the originals because I couldn't stay awake during all of those movies and the action was less "flashy" so it wasn't enough to keep me awake vs. the prequels.
So, yeah, I think that's all I had to say. I do think that list I put above still stays the same after this review, but the thing is that just because I put ANH at the bottom doesn't mean it's bad to me. I love Star Wars and have loved it all my life. It being at the bottom doesn't mean I gave it one star, as evident from my ratings. It's a great movie, well crafted, and a wonderful start to an amazing franchise. Science fiction has been trying for decades to emulate and replicate the success of Star Wars, but a lot of movies that have failed to do that didn't manage to encapsulate what made Star Wars so great. The key component they were missing was the balance (in the Force — haha) of plot, pacing, and character development. It doesn't have to be flashy or have convoluted plot or colorful characters. Luke, Leia, Han, and Obi-Wan aren't overtly dynamic characters — they're summed up in a couple of character traits, but they work because they're simple. All of this works because it's a summation of parts that are simple and concise.
At the end of the day, that's all it takes: a good story.