A battered spaceship, a farm boy who wanted to be anywhere else, a princess who was rather more competent than the men trying to rescue her, and a villain who could make a corridor uncomfortable simply by breathing. There is still something remarkable about the economy of the original Star Wars. Long before everything became a universe, it was an adventure that knew how to make the unfamiliar feel as though it had existed for years.
I remember Star Wars less as one pristine cinema experience than as a presence that escaped into everyday life. Growing up in the Philippines around the tail end of the analogue era, films survived through television broadcasts, VHS tapes, illustrated magazines, books, comics and the occasional questionable reproduction. Sometimes you knew a spaceship or an action figure long before you understood where it belonged in the story. The images stayed with you regardless.
As someone interested in drawing and design, I was taken by how quickly the objects explained themselves. An X-wing, a TIE fighter, the Millennium Falcon and Darth Vader’s helmet have such distinctive silhouettes that they need very little introduction. Several decades and a few model kits later, that appeal has not diminished. Neither, unfortunately, has the problem of finding somewhere to display them.
Nine principal films came to form the Skywalker saga: the originals from 1977 to 1983, George Lucas’s prequels from 1999 to 2005, and the Disney-era sequels from 2015 to 2019. They share a family, a mythology, certain musical themes and a disturbing tendency towards building very large superweapons. Yet they were made under profoundly different conditions and seldom agree about what makes Star Wars work. The original trilogy remains the strongest complete story for me; the prequels become more interesting when read as a political tragedy; and the sequels often have memorable filmmaking without a correspondingly convincing long-term direction.
Before there was a galaxy, there were serials and samurai
George Lucas drew freely from the adventure serials of the 1930s and 1940s, the work of Akira Kurosawa, Westerns, war films, folk tales and the language of mythology. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and The Hidden Fortress are useful reference points, but Star Wars was not a simple remake of any one of them. Its achievement lay in making older forms feel remarkably fresh through a new mixture of character, design, editing and sound.
That is something I find particularly interesting from a design perspective. Originality is not always a matter of inventing every ingredient. It can involve knowing which recognisable elements to combine, and, more importantly, which to leave out. The original films have a remarkable confidence about that selection. Their successors sometimes mistake additional explanation for additional depth.
1977: A New Hope and the beauty of the used universe
The opening is still masterful. A small Rebel ship flashes overhead, followed by an Imperial Star Destroyer that seems to go on forever. In a single composition the film explains the imbalance of power, and then Vader walks through a smoke-filled corridor. The audience has met the Empire before learning anything about its history, and the Empire is already frightening.
The production was a mixture of practical ingenuity and technical risk. Industrial Light & Magic was established to develop the effects Lucas needed; miniatures, matte paintings, motion-control photography, physical sets and location footage were combined into a surprisingly coherent universe. The quality of the craft is impressive, but what convinces me is the decision to let the place look used. The Millennium Falcon is scuffed and mechanically unreliable; Rebel equipment appears repaired and maintained; even the droids carry scratches.
Luke is restless and young, Han is chiefly interested in avoiding trouble unless money is involved, and Leia behaves as though she has been placed in charge of a rescue party full of idiots. Carrie Fisher makes that combination of authority and irritation essential to the film’s humour. R2-D2 and C-3PO supply their own domestic argument, with R2’s ingenuity constantly forcing the anxious Threepio into circumstances he would much rather avoid.
The cantina is still an extraordinary piece of world-building because it declines to explain every creature and costume. The final trench run succeeds for the opposite reason: its objective, geography and stakes are made exceptionally clear. We know what Luke must do, why conventional targeting has failed and exactly how little time remains. The politics are uncomplicated, and a planet’s destruction receives remarkably little consideration beyond demonstrating Imperial cruelty, but the film understands the kind of adventure it is telling.
1980: The Empire Strikes Back discovers disappointment
Irvin Kershner’s film changes the emotional temperature. It begins with the Rebels under attack on Hoth and ends with almost everybody worse off than when they started. The AT-AT walkers are terrifying not simply because of their size, but because of their deliberate, stubborn movement. Small Rebel craft circle machines that seem barely to notice being attacked.
The film divides into two complementary journeys. Han, Leia, Chewbacca and Threepio move from one failure to the next aboard the Falcon, while Luke travels to Dagobah to learn from Yoda. Frank Oz’s puppet could have been ridiculous, but his voice, gestures and apparent physical frailty make Yoda a genuinely persuasive teacher. Luke grows more capable without growing sufficiently patient, and his encounter with his own face inside Vader’s mask exposes what he most fears becoming.
Cloud City supplies the sequel’s other great reversal. Lando is charming and compromised; Han discovers that charm is a poor substitute for trust; and Vader’s revelation that he is Luke’s father turns the villain from an external enemy into a piece of the hero’s own identity. The decision not to resolve these disasters neatly is one of the film’s strengths. Han is frozen, Luke has lost a hand, the Rebels are scattered and the characters must carry on anyway.
For me, this remains the strongest Star Wars film because the adventure has matured without becoming a history lesson. The sets and models are magnificent, but they never obscure the main point: the relationships are changing, and the characters cannot go back to being the people they were in the first film.
1983: Return of the Jedi and the man inside the machine
Return of the Jedi has an awkward balancing act. It needs to rescue Han, conclude Luke’s training, resolve the fate of Vader and the Emperor, and provide a satisfying end to the war. The opening at Jabba’s palace is gloriously overstuffed with creatures, costumes, puppetry and an uneasy sense of humour. Luke arrives in black and behaves with a confidence very different from that of the farm boy we first met.
The Ewoks can feel suspiciously convenient, and a second Death Star is a disappointing repetition of the first. Even so, the idea that an apparently primitive community might embarrass an industrial military power belongs comfortably within the series’ sympathies. Lando also receives a more satisfying role in the Rebel offensive, and the tremendous miniature work of the final space battle remains worth revisiting.
But the real conclusion takes place in the Emperor’s throne room. Palpatine wants Luke to kill Vader in anger and inherit the machinery of evil. Luke comes close, then refuses. Vader sacrifices himself to save his son, recovering something human beneath the mechanical mask. I do not think one act erases his crimes, but that is not quite what the film asks us to believe. He makes one final choice different from those that ruined his life.
The ending has the warmth of a fairy tale, and after three films I think it earns it. It is not perfect, but the central arc is complete. That is a fact later instalments would find difficult to accommodate.
1999: The Phantom Menace and a Republic still pretending everything is fine
Lucas returned sixteen years later with a film that refuses to recreate the battered world audiences already knew. Naboo’s buildings, polished starfighters and elaborate royal clothing suggest a civilisation wealthy enough to make its tools beautiful. Doug Chiang’s design work and the ceremonial wardrobe of Queen Amidala are among the strongest elements. This is a Republic that can afford elegance, although its institutions are already failing.
Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn is a welcome figure because he questions the inflexible behaviour of the Jedi Council. Ewan McGregor’s younger Obi-Wan is more rule-bound, establishing an interesting tension that becomes important later. Jake Lloyd’s Anakin is written as an innocent child with exceptional gifts, but the film frequently struggles to make its elaborate political mechanisms feel emotionally immediate.
The podrace is an excellent sequence: mechanical variety, speed and sound combine into something genuinely exhilarating. Jar Jar Binks is a considerable technical achievement, but the broad comedy rarely sits comfortably beside the film’s attempts at political intrigue. The hostility directed towards the character and performer, however, went far beyond reasonable criticism.
Darth Maul has very little dialogue and less development than his striking appearance deserves. Yet the duel against Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan is terrific, given almost operatic weight by John Williams’s Duel of the Fates. The film contains fascinating ideas about institutions and manipulation, even if it regularly stops to explain them when it ought to be letting its characters live.
2002: Attack of the Clones and a republic purchasing its own downfall
Attack of the Clones is probably the most uneven film in the saga. Obi-Wan’s investigation into a mysterious army takes him to Kamino, a cold, immaculate world where a vast number of human beings are being manufactured for war. It is excellent science-fiction world-building, and the casual acceptance of the clone army says rather a lot about the Republic’s failures.
Anakin’s romance with Padmé is far less persuasive. Hayden Christensen is required to portray somebody both desperate for affection and dangerously unstable, while Natalie Portman’s character must find his behaviour romantic rather than alarming. Their dialogue frequently sounds like romantic emotion translated into a language neither person is fluent in. The confession that Anakin slaughtered an entire Tusken village should have far deeper consequences for their relationship.
Count Dooku, played by Christopher Lee, offers a promising alternative perspective on the collapsing Republic, but the screenplay rarely gives his political grievances enough room. On Geonosis, the film expands into enormous digital battles. These were achieved with a mixture of digital filmmaking and substantial physical models and sets, though the sense of weight is inconsistent.
The most compelling story is not the love affair but the way respectable institutions rationalise troubling decisions under pressure. The Jedi suspect the clone army is the answer to a question nobody properly asked, then proceed to use it because the Republic has run out of acceptable alternatives.
2005: Revenge of the Sith and the collapse of a civilisation
Revenge of the Sith finally delivers the tragedy the prequels have been assembling. Ian McDiarmid’s Palpatine is the trilogy’s most effective manipulator, presenting himself as the only person who understands Anakin’s fear. The opera-house conversation about Darth Plagueis is unusually good because it depends almost entirely on insinuation. Palpatine does not need to shout; he simply introduces an intolerable possibility and lets Anakin carry it home.
The fall of the Republic is a sequence of compromises masquerading as emergency responses. Palpatine creates enemies, accumulates authority and gives frightened people reasons to surrender their judgement. Order 66 makes the result horrifyingly concrete, with Jedi leaders suddenly attacked by the soldiers beside whom they have been fighting.
McGregor carries Obi-Wan’s grief convincingly, and Christensen has stronger material as Anakin’s anxiety hardens into paranoia. But his final transformation remains too compressed. The killing at the Jedi Temple is meant to be devastating, yet the film leans heavily on our foreknowledge to make so extreme a change believable. Padmé, once a capable political figure, becomes increasingly defined by the men around her, and her death is disappointingly vague.
The Mustafar duel is technically extravagant and emotionally punishing. It ends with Anakin burned, Obi-Wan devastated and the remains of a human being sealed inside Vader’s armour. The closing movement, with Luke and Leia delivered to separate futures, briefly brings the visual worlds of the two trilogies together. The dialogue is still uneven, but the political tragedy has grown more resonant with time.
2015: The Force Awakens and the comforts of coming home
The Force Awakens arrived carrying enormous expectations. J. J. Abrams restores the texture of the originals: sand, scuffed metal, practical creatures, the Falcon and stormtroopers. Daisy Ridley’s Rey is introduced surviving among the wreckage of a previous war, a clever image of a young person literally living inside the abandoned hardware of older Star Wars.
John Boyega’s Finn is perhaps the most promising new character, a stormtrooper who recognises the cruelty of the organisation that raised him and runs. Oscar Isaac gives Poe an enjoyable pilot’s swagger, BB-8 is a wonderful piece of character design, and Adam Driver makes Kylo Ren a fascinatingly unstable successor to Vader. Kylo is not terrifying because he has mastered himself; he is terrifying because he plainly has not.
The return of Han works because Harrison Ford does not pretend the older smuggler has turned into a wise elder. His family is fractured and he is still improvising. His murder by Ben Solo is a genuinely painful moment. Yet the film also repeats the original with a desert orphan, an important droid, an elderly mentor’s death and another enormous superweapon. Starkiller Base may be bigger than the Death Star, but bigger is not automatically more interesting.
The final glimpse of Luke on Ahch-To is stirring. It also passes the next film the awkward responsibility of deciding why this legendary hero has withdrawn from the galaxy and whether the old generation’s failures should define the new one.
2017: The Last Jedi, and the legend becomes a burden
Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi is the most argumentative film in the sequel trilogy, and I rather admire it for that. Mark Hamill’s Luke is bitter, exhausted and ashamed of his failure with Ben Solo. I can understand why viewers found this version difficult to accept; the compassionate young man who refused to kill Vader now seems capable of briefly contemplating violence against his nephew. The film needs more room to make that transition convincing, but the underlying idea of a hero damaged by his own legend is worthwhile.
Rey and Kylo’s Force conversations are among the film’s strongest inventions. Each imagines the other can be persuaded to cross over. Their joint battle against Snoke’s guards is exhilarating because it seems ready to abandon a familiar narrative pattern, but Kylo ultimately wants power more than reconciliation. Rey’s identity is also allowed to become something larger than an important surname.
The hyperspace collision is a spectacular use of contrast and silence, while the red ground emerging beneath the white salt of Crait is one of the saga’s most compelling visual ideas. Less successful are the Canto Bight detour and the conflict between Poe and Holdo, which depends heavily on withheld information. Finn and Rose have worthwhile ethical questions to explore, but their journey feels increasingly detached from the main film.
Luke’s final appearance on Crait brings the argument together. He saves the surviving Resistance through an act of self-sacrifice rather than a display of murderous superiority. The boy using the Force to retrieve a broom in the closing scene suggests a galaxy whose future need not remain trapped inside a single family. I wish the next film had believed more strongly in that possibility.
2019: The Rise of Skywalker and the return of unfinished business
Abrams returned to direct the last instalment, which attempts to conclude the sequels and the entire nine-film saga at once. It does this by adding more plot: Sith mysteries, navigational artefacts, secret fleets and another deadline. The action rarely stops, but urgency becomes difficult to sustain when the story keeps discovering fresh reasons to move everybody somewhere else.
Palpatine’s return is the biggest problem. Ian McDiarmid remains entertaining, yet resurrecting the original villain weakens the conclusion of Return of the Jedi and the importance of Anakin’s final sacrifice. Rey’s newly revealed Palpatine ancestry also reverses much of the previous film’s suggestion that her value does not depend on a distinguished bloodline.
There are impressive individual moments. Rey and Kylo fight among the waves on the Death Star wreckage; Adam Driver finds a quieter humanity in Ben Solo; and Harrison Ford briefly returns for an unexpectedly moving scene. Carrie Fisher’s Leia was assembled partly from unused footage after her death, an understandable decision that nonetheless limits the performance’s dramatic possibilities.
Finn’s story is the greatest missed opportunity. A former stormtrooper ought to have offered an entirely new perspective on duty, indoctrination and the possibility of other defectors, but the films never develop that thread fully. The final battle supplies countless ships without the clean geography of the original trench run. Rey taking the Skywalker name expresses a worthwhile idea about chosen family, yet by then the story has become so tangled in ancestry that the gesture struggles to land.
A galaxy designed by people who understood objects
Across all nine films, I often find the production design more consistent than the writing. Ralph McQuarrie’s paintings, Joe Johnston’s visual work, John Mollo’s costumes and ILM’s miniature photography helped build a world whose shapes explain their function. An Imperial Star Destroyer is a commanding wedge; the TIE fighter is a spherical cockpit between two tall panels; the Falcon resembles a machine that has been bought, repaired and modified repeatedly.
The prequels deliberately offer a richer visual language. Naboo’s starfighters, ceremonial clothing and polished architecture belong to a civilisation that has not yet been reduced to Imperial greys. The change is narratively useful. The Republic should look different from the world its collapse creates. Contrary to a persistent misconception, the prequels also used significant practical model-making and physical sets alongside ambitious digital effects.
The sequels recover many of those tactile qualities, but their fidelity to the old designs sometimes limits their own imagination. The First Order feels immediately recognisable because everything resembles an upgraded version of Imperial equipment. That makes sense within the story, yet recognition can begin to substitute for invention. I remain particularly drawn to the smaller details: landing gear, cockpit instruments, panels, joints and scratches that imply an object’s history beyond the frame.
John Williams, Ben Burtt and the music of memory
John Williams’s scores are the emotional continuity of the saga. The main title creates an immediate sense of adventure; the Force theme gives the story longing and mystery; the Imperial March can turn a scene threatening before Vader even arrives. The music shifts familiar motifs as relationships change, most powerfully around Vader’s death.
The prequels give us Duel of the Fates, Across the Stars and Battle of the Heroes, pieces that often express feelings the dialogue cannot. Rey’s Theme, meanwhile, creates a distinctive musical identity for the newer generation even as the narrative direction changes. Ben Burtt’s sound design is equally integral. Lightsabers, blasters, TIE fighters and Vader’s breathing are among the most recognisable sounds in cinema.
Remove the music and the machinery loses some of its soul. Remove the sound design and the galaxy becomes a collection of attractive illustrations. Together, those contributions give these films a coherence that their scripts do not always manage.
VHS tapes, action figures and the problem of owning a childhood
Star Wars became more than a collection of films almost immediately. Action figures, model kits, novels, comics and toys made the objects of its fictional world available for people to handle. Having a few of those things on my own shelves, I understand the appeal perfectly well. A model or figure gives you the chance to study proportions and construction in a way that a fast-moving film cannot. It also creates a storage problem that the merchandise manufacturers have shown no interest in solving.
I am wary of nostalgia when it turns into a demand that every new film reproduce our earliest experience. The original trilogy has weaknesses, but it arrived before its visual language had been endlessly copied. The prequels grew a more appreciative audience among people who encountered them as children, which has allowed their political ideas to be reconsidered without pretending the dialogue is suddenly excellent. The sequels may receive a similar reassessment, although their internal disagreements are harder to overlook.
The alterations made to the original films over the years raise a related question about preservation. Some changes clarify technical details, while others displace the texture of the films audiences originally saw. Expanding a world is not necessarily the same as improving its history, particularly when the earlier version gradually becomes difficult to access.
What the Skywalkers leave behind
All nine films circle around inheritance. Luke discovers that his father is central to the evil he must resist. Anakin tries to prevent loss and becomes the cause of it. Rey searches for a family history that will explain her place in the world, only to learn that ancestry is an unreliable guide to character. These are interesting themes when they remain personal; they become less persuasive when the fate of an entire galaxy appears permanently attached to one family’s problems.
The most moving choice of the original trilogy remains Luke refusing to kill Vader. It is difficult, quiet and transformative. The prequels deepen that moment by showing what Anakin lost, while the sequels contain intriguing suggestions that heroism can belong to people with no special lineage. Unfortunately, the final sequel seems reluctant to allow the galaxy to escape the old struggle.
I still return to the originals most often. They give me an adventure with a beginning, middle and end, and characters who remain recognisably human even when the machinery becomes fantastical. The prequels enlarge their tragedy; the sequels offer moments of superb filmmaking without quite finding an equally satisfying overall direction. For all the debates, the thing I treasure is still relatively simple: a worn spaceship, a good argument between friends, a piece of music and somebody faced with a choice that matters.
Nine films, several generations of characters and an astonishing amount of merchandise later, the moment that lingers is not a planet-destroying weapon or a fleet filling the sky. It is a frightened young man deciding not to strike.
The nine films, rated
| Film | Rating |
|---|---|
| Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) | 4½/5 |
| The Empire Strikes Back (1980) | 5/5 |
| Return of the Jedi (1983) | 4/5 |
| The Phantom Menace (1999) | 3/5 |
| Attack of the Clones (2002) | 2½/5 |
| Revenge of the Sith (2005) | 4/5 |
| The Force Awakens (2015) | 3½/5 |
| The Last Jedi (2017) | 4/5 |
| The Rise of Skywalker (2019) | 2/5 |
Further production background: Lucasfilm’s history of Industrial Light & Magic, StarWars.com behind-the-scenes galleries and the official film listings offer useful starting points. Production photographs and film stills appear here as editorial illustrations; rights remain with their respective owners.
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