Critics reviews

I was utterly underwhelmed by "A New Hope," impressed solely by the world-making of the script—the delivery of a ready-made but minor mythology—but neither moved nor fascinated nor at all delighted by the filmmaking. Rather, I was shocked—that the director of "American Graffiti" could have constrained himself to create such a turgid, stilted, flat, and textureless movie.

Star Wars is grounded in the short-term rewards of TV watching, where every moment tends to be equal in emotional importance to every other and where the only serious continuity is in a consistency of mild diversion rather than in a persistence of personality. This form of entertainment can only be called lite—constructed out of ersatz familiar materials meant to be admired for their momentary cuteness or for details of their design.

Star Wars breaks with the cinematic mania that in recent years has pushed films beyond any previously conceivable limits, towards extreme violence, hard pornography, disaster movies; the mania for bringing everything into the open in order to provoke a strong emotional response and a bellicose unanimism. In Star Wars a heterogeneity is admissible, all alterities and differences can be present, functioning in perfect narrative harmony, provided that all this takes place in the absence of sex...