I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched Star Wars: A New Hope, and the thing that still gets me isn’t the Death Star or the lightsabers, it’s a bored kid on a farm who wants to be literally anywhere else. Everything else is built on top of that. Luke Skywalker whining about power converters at the dinner table is the most relatable thing in the whole saga, and I say that as somebody who was once a teenager convinced the real stuff was happening somewhere far away without me. So this rewatch, like every rewatch, was really about him, and about how quickly a nobody from the back end of the galaxy gets pulled into something enormous.
And it’s so fast. A Star Destroyer rumbling overhead for what feels like a full minute, Vader walking through the smoke on the Tantive IV, Leia slipping the plans into a droid, and then we’re in the desert with two robots bickering like an old married couple. By the time the Jawas have sold them to Uncle Owen the film has already told me who the bad guys are, what they want, and that this little R2 unit is carrying the whole plot around in its head. I love that it never stops to explain itself. You just get dropped in and trusted to keep up.
The farm boy and the twin suns
The moment that’s stayed with me longest is Luke walking out of the homestead after another argument with Owen about leaving for the Academy, and just standing there watching the twin suns go down while that music swells. Nothing happens. He doesn’t say anything. But I knew exactly what he was feeling the first time I saw it and I still do, that ache of being stuck somewhere small with a life that’s already been decided for you. It’s the same restless-kid-on-a-desert-planet feeling I got watching Paul on Arrakis in Dune: Part One, except Paul’s being dragged towards a destiny he doesn’t want and Luke would give anything for one.
Then the film takes everything away from him in about ten minutes. Obi-Wan shows him his father’s lightsaber and a garbled message from a princess, Luke says no, he can’t go to Alderaan, he’s got work to do, and when he races home the farm is burning and Owen and Beru are dead in the doorway. That’s a brutal turn for what a lot of people remember as a light adventure movie. And it’s what makes his choice land, because he isn’t running off for fun anymore. There’s nothing left here for me now. It’s a sad little line and it’s the whole start of the hero he becomes, the same Luke I watched stare out over a very different ocean decades later in The Last Jedi.
Scoundrels, princesses and an old man in a robe
Mos Eisley is where the film opens right up, and honestly the cantina is still one of my favourite places in all of sci-fi, a dive bar full of weird aliens and a band that only knows one song. That’s where we meet Han Solo, who is exactly the kind of character I wanted to be as a kid: fast talking, cocky, a bit of a crook, with a walking carpet for a best friend and a ship that looks like junk but made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. He’s only in this for the money. He says so, loudly and often. Every smart-mouthed space rogue since, Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy included, owes him a drink.
What I appreciate more on every rewatch is Leia, because she doesn’t need rescuing nearly as much as the boys think she does. She stands up to Tarkin while he blows up her entire planet in front of her, which is horrifying when you actually stop and sit with it, and then when Luke and Han bust into her cell block with no plan at all she grabs a blaster and gets everyone out through the garbage chute herself. Obi-Wan, meanwhile, goes off quietly on his own to switch off the tractor beam and then walks into Vader. I didn’t get that duel as a kid. I thought it was slow. Now I watch Obi-Wan look over at Luke, smile, and lift his lightsaber away, and it’s easily the saddest choice anyone makes in the film, an old man deciding he’s more use to this boy as a voice in his head than as a teacher standing next to him.
Stay on target
The last half hour is pure joy for me, even though I know every line of it. The briefing where one pilot says the shot is impossible and Luke shrugs and says he used to bullseye womp rats back home. Red squadron peeling off one after another. Wedge limping out, Biggs getting hit, Vader closing in behind with that awful calm voice, and Obi-Wan telling Luke to use the Force and trust himself instead of the targeting computer. And then, just when there’s nowhere left to go, the Falcon comes screaming out of the sun and knocks Vader spinning off into space. Yahoo! You’re all clear, kid.
That’s Han’s whole arc in one move. The guy who took his reward money and flew off because he wasn’t going to die for somebody else’s cause comes back anyway, and he doesn’t make a speech about it. He just shows up. It’s such a small change on paper and it’s the one that sold me on these people as friends rather than a bunch of strangers thrown together, which is also why the medal ceremony gets me every time, Chewie roaring, Han winking at Leia, R2 all polished up, and Luke finally somewhere that isn’t Tatooine.
The one that started it all for me
It’s hard to explain to anyone younger how big this film was for me and everyone I grew up with, because for a whole generation of fans Star Wars didn’t just join a genre, it birthed one. Before it, space on screen mostly meant grey spaceships and serious men talking about science. After it, space was farm boys and princesses and smugglers, dogfights between starfighters, a galactic empire straight out of the Foundation books but with actual villains you could hiss at. The whole modern sci-fi blockbuster, all of space opera as I’ve known and loved it, kicked off right here, and you can see its fingerprints on everything that came after, down to the ragtag fleet running from an overwhelming enemy in Battlestar Galactica.
Which is probably why I still get giddy about it all these years on, the same giddiness I was gushing about when Star Wars was coming back to cinemas at Christmas. Some of the effects are dated now and some of the dialogue is pure cheese, and I don’t care in the slightest, because the minute that yellow text crawls up the screen I’m a kid again, sitting there waiting for the kid on the farm to look up at the two suns.