REVIEW: HOW STAR WARS CONQUERED THE UNIVERSE

'Stars Wars was a battle which landed Lucas in hospital and it shows: there’s fight in the picture. Everywhere you looked you saw marvels  —hammer-headed aliens, high-speed dogfights, light sabres and landspeeders twin suns and detonating moons — all filmed by a director who couldn’t wait to get from one end of his freshly-summoned universe to the other, featuring characters who reserved for these marvels the disdain you or I might reserve for our crappy old cars of a Monday morning.   “What a piece of junk!” exclaims Luke. “She may not look like much,” replies Han Solo, “but she’s got it where it counts, kid, I made a few modification to her myself” — an exchange of dialogue that provides such a neat summary of critical opinion on the film that you wonder why critics in 1977 didn’t simply put their feet up and leave the film to review itself. Junk is everything to Star Wars. The Jawas deal in junk. The droids are sold as junk.  Our heroes are delivered as junk into the death star’s trash compactor, the death star being the only new piece of technology on display and therefore sign enough of its nefariousness: the Empire are the only people in the galaxy not to have heard of recycling. Everyone else tinkers and modifies, retrofits, recycles and retools. If the vast, multi-billion dollar franchise that Star Wars spawned can be boiled down to a single insight on Lucas’s part, it is this one: that the exact same feeling of slightly crabby, proprietorial fondness Han Solo nurses for the Millenium Falcon was going to be one people would be feeling a lot more in the years to come. They would feel it for their computers, their Ataris, their Apples, their x-boxes, their iPhones and iPads.  That we even have a relationship with technology was, in 1977, news. Lucas took that feeling and on it he built an empire.' — from my review for the New Statesman