The State’s review of the original ‘Star Wars’ movie from 1977

Editor’s note: This review of “Star Wars” originally was printed in The State newspaper June 26, 1977.

“Star Wars” – Science fiction-fantasy extravaganza starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels and oodles of special effects. Rated PG. At Spring Valley Theatre I. From 20th Century-Fox.

“Star Wars” is the movie that lets you be a kid again – unabashedly. It’s a movie made for kids and for the kid in all of us, a science fiction-fantasy extravaganza that washes over you in waves of special effects, adventures and overwhelming reinforcement of the innocent’s belief in the triumph of good over evil.

As one young man perceptively commented leaving the movie, “It’s kind of nostalgic, like all those old movies where everything worked out right.”

Judging from repeated laughs, applause and whistles from the audience when things were going well for the good guys in the flick, and from an overflow crowd for a Monday night preview showing before the movie officially opened, this kind of return to pure escapism entertainment with the built-in moral of good succeeding is exactly what audiences crave today.

The film is a comic-book-come-to-life on the big screen with generous rip-offs of the best of “Star Trek” special effects and situations, and dialogue and scenes familiar from differing types of movies of the past.

The plot, simplistic, deals with the wicked Empire which has overthrown an earlier regime, and the surviving princess of that regime who enlists the aid of an aged rebel and his young recruit.

The fantasy tone is set by a familiar fairy tale opening, with “Once upon a time in a land far away” replaced by “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” and if you’re ready to buy that, you can get immersed right away.

The introduction to the characters and the attempt to involve the audience in their troubles takes a bit long for my taste, but once the action gets going, it really gets going.

The special effects of starships flying, of fazer-blaster guns shooting beams of colored lights, and the sparks and clouds of smoke from the destroyed objects are among the items almost certain to assure this flick of an Oscar nomination for special effects. Not only are most of them spectacular, they also are accomplished in a very realistic manner that never obtrudes. Special effects credits belong to John Dykstra for photographic, John Stears for mechanical and Ben Burtt for sound.

The two big names in the cast are Alec Guinness as the aged rebel who leaves his reclusive life in the desert to respond to the plea for help from Princess Leia (played by Carrie Fisher in a hell-bent-for-liberation manner), and Peter Cushing as a villainous Empire general.

Though his role is brief, Cushing is a chilling villain. Guinness is an adorable wise man who takes under his wing the son of a former rebel follower of his and teaches him about “the force.”

You can expect your kids, your spouse and your co-workers to take up the movie’s catchphrase, “May the force be with you,” and, just as “Jaws” two summers ago spawned children’s re-enactment of the script as a game, you can count on youngsters vying for who will play Luke Skywalker, who will play Han Solo and who will play Obi-Wan Kenobi. There are also bound to be competitions over who gets to be See Threepio (a gold-plated Tinman with a faint British accent and the sentiments of Dr. Smith from “Lost in Space”) and his sidekick Artoo-Deetoo, a short, fat bullet-shaped robot.

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, the former farm boy introduced to the force and involved in the thick of the battle against evil and the savaging of the damsel in distress, is freshly charming and the identification figure for the youngster in the audience.

Carrie Fisher as the Princess strikes real blows for women’s liberation, able to think fast on her feet and shoot a bazooka equivalent with the best of them.

My favorite is the Peck’s bad boy type, Harrison Ford as spaceship pilot Han Solo, who has a shady smuggler’s past, a mercenary outlook, and a cynic wit under pressure. Watch for the scene in the control room when he masquerades as one of the storm troopers. Although he has an amusingly mobile face, it’s also a handsome one.

I must confess as well a certain affection for See Threepio (C3PO), played by Anthony Daniels. As the human-like android, he has a lot of human emotions and lines that are amusing.

Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca, a sort of giant ape who is co-pilot of the spaceship, doesn’t have any lines but gets his share of comic moments, and the kids dig him, too.

It’s a film that can be taken absolutely at face value or it can be taken as a vast put-on of the entire science fiction genre or as a combination of the two.

Although the film is consistently violent, it’s all violence of the removed variety, fantasy in itself and non-gory except for a single brief shot of a severed arm. There’s no nudity, no sex, no rough language, so the PG rating is frankly puzzling to me. I’d take any youngster to see it, and feel confident he’d lap it up with a soupspoon.

Everyone will have his favorite moments from this film, but some of the fun things to watch for include a group of Munchkin-like monk-garbed desert scavengers, a pub scene with the most inventive and far-out space creatures ever dreamed up (they would appear to have come from the mind of Fellini with a hangover), subtitles used with the gibberish spoken by a green-skinned guard, a room used as a trash heap in which the walls (like those of Poe’s recurrent nightmare) close in for a trash compacter effect, the swashbuckling style of the crossing over an abyss where the mechanical bridge refuses to move into place, and the exciting fencing of Guinness and a black-clad baddie with swords made of light beams.

This story was originally published December 27, 2016 at 3:04 PM with the headline "The State’s review of the original ‘Star Wars’ movie from 1977."