Star Wars, written and directed by George Lucas, is about an interstellar row that happened "a long time ago" but is technically far in advance of the H bomb. It is soothing to find a funny film imagining something a great deal worse than South Africa's possessing nuclear weapons. When the film opens, we are in a galaxy inhabited by tiny, chattering, evil beings and Tenniel creatures of high individuality: a caricaturist's dream in the form of a henna-dyed wolf man who is an accomplished space navigator snakes with the look of higher mathematicians. There is a rebel princess called Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), with apple cheeks and Tyrolean plaits around her ears, who possesses the secret plans of a sinister moon-shaped spaceship designed to destroy hostile planets by sending out beams of colossal energy that create lethal Fourth of July fireworks. There is a venal-seeming sophisticate (Harrison Ford) who turns out well in the end, and a good man (Mark Hamill) in storm-trooper disguise who is said unkindly to be very short for the role he is pretending to. And there are a huge number of strange spacecraft, shaped like opened grape scissors, or silver platters, or crossed fish forks, that hurtle through the galaxy at speeds rivalling the speed of light. Above all, there is Alec Guinness as an ancient sage, looking like a monk who has walked a long way; dressed in a brown habit, he seems to have come to us from the Bible. In the end, he dies that we should live. He knows the power of the Force, which is the film's word for what is sometimes called "the life force." When the power is used for moral ends, it seems to be the power of belief and devoutness in the face of unbelief and evil. The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep.

No sci-fi film—not even a sci-fi film set long ago—being complete without a robot and a computer, there is a gold-plated robot who walks as if his feet hurt, like a primal woman shopper, and an overweight computer who is a mixture of bald pate, traffic lights, and mailbox, and who transmits rapid information in a language that evokes Eskimo. The computer is the robot's dearest and most irritating companion. They trudge together across a desert that is actually Tunisian, arguing like man and wife. The robot is intimately rude to the computer, and calls him "you great gob of grease." To others, he talks like a valet; nothing is too much trouble, in spite of his obvious bunions. Alec Guinness speaks in the phrases of a non-denominational Jesus. "May the Force be with you," he says.

—New Yorker (June 13, 1977)

Star Wars, written and directed by George Lucas, is about an interstellar row that happened "a long time ago" but is technically far in advance of the H bomb. It is soothing to find a funny film imagining something a great deal worse than South Africa's possessing nuclear weapons. When the film opens, we are in a galaxy inhabited by tiny, chattering, evil beings and Tenniel creatures of high individuality: a caricaturist's dream in the form of a henna-dyed wolf man who is an accomplished space navigator snakes with the look of higher mathematicians. There is a rebel princess called Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), with apple cheeks and Tyrolean plaits around her ears, who possesses the secret plans of a sinister moon-shaped spaceship designed to destroy hostile planets by sending out beams of colossal energy that create lethal Fourth of July fireworks. There is a venal-seeming sophisticate (Harrison Ford) who turns out well in the end, and a good man (Mark Hamill) in storm-trooper disguise who is said unkindly to be very short for the role he is pretending to. And there are a huge number of strange spacecraft, shaped like opened grape scissors, or silver platters, or crossed fish forks, that hurtle through the galaxy at speeds rivalling the speed of light. Above all, there is Alec Guinness as an ancient sage, looking like a monk who has walked a long way; dressed in a brown habit, he seems to have come to us from the Bible. In the end, he dies that we should live. He knows the power of the Force, which is the film's word for what is sometimes called "the life force." When the power is used for moral ends, it seems to be the power of belief and devoutness in the face of unbelief and evil. The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep.

No sci-fi film—not even a sci-fi film set long ago—being complete without a robot and a computer, there is a gold-plated robot who walks as if his feet hurt, like a primal woman shopper, and an overweight computer who is a mixture of bald pate, traffic lights, and mailbox, and who transmits rapid information in a language that evokes Eskimo. The computer is the robot's dearest and most irritating companion. They trudge together across a desert that is actually Tunisian, arguing like man and wife. The robot is intimately rude to the computer, and calls him "you great gob of grease." To others, he talks like a valet; nothing is too much trouble, in spite of his obvious bunions. Alec Guinness speaks in the phrases of a non-denominational Jesus. "May the Force be with you," he says.

—New Yorker (June 13, 1977)

Star Wars, written and directed by George Lucas, is about an interstellar row that happened "a long time ago" but is technically far in advance of the H bomb. It is soothing to find a funny film imagining something a great deal worse than South Africa's possessing nuclear weapons. When the film opens, we are in a galaxy inhabited by tiny, chattering, evil beings and Tenniel creatures of high individuality: a caricaturist's dream in the form of a henna-dyed wolf man who is an accomplished space navigator snakes with the look of higher mathematicians. There is a rebel princess called Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), with apple cheeks and Tyrolean plaits around her ears, who possesses the secret plans of a sinister moon-shaped spaceship designed to destroy hostile planets by sending out beams of colossal energy that create lethal Fourth of July fireworks. There is a venal-seeming sophisticate (Harrison Ford) who turns out well in the end, and a good man (Mark Hamill) in storm-trooper disguise who is said unkindly to be very short for the role he is pretending to. And there are a huge number of strange spacecraft, shaped like opened grape scissors, or silver platters, or crossed fish forks, that hurtle through the galaxy at speeds rivalling the speed of light. Above all, there is Alec Guinness as an ancient sage, looking like a monk who has walked a long way; dressed in a brown habit, he seems to have come to us from the Bible. In the end, he dies that we should live. He knows the power of the Force, which is the film's word for what is sometimes called "the life force." When the power is used for moral ends, it seems to be the power of belief and devoutness in the face of unbelief and evil. The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep.

No sci-fi film—not even a sci-fi film set long ago—being complete without a robot and a computer, there is a gold-plated robot who walks as if his feet hurt, like a primal woman shopper, and an overweight computer who is a mixture of bald pate, traffic lights, and mailbox, and who transmits rapid information in a language that evokes Eskimo. The computer is the robot's dearest and most irritating companion. They trudge together across a desert that is actually Tunisian, arguing like man and wife. The robot is intimately rude to the computer, and calls him "you great gob of grease." To others, he talks like a valet; nothing is too much trouble, in spite of his obvious bunions. Alec Guinness speaks in the phrases of a non-denominational Jesus. "May the Force be with you," he says.

—New Yorker (June 13, 1977)