Star Wars - A New Hope: How Flawed is it?

Nobody ever goes to a Star at any point in the movies, so the biggest flaw is in the name

Dang. Letting the bitch Fest spill into a spinoff thread.

Popkerns

It's the best one.

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It's the best one.

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No one thinks that. Clearly Empire is.

But a New Hope is pretty darn good.

"A film having flaws" is not the same as being a "flawed film"

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I thought it was a bit of a stretch that luke, a farm boy with very little experience, was able to get into an x-wing and dominate over other experienced fighters .

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Don't know about that ... his father had only raced shitty pods ... and was able to get in a highly advanced fighter and buffoon his way to victory in a full-blown space battle. I highly doubt that young Ani could even see what the frick was going on.

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I thought it was a bit of a stretch that luke, a farm boy with very little experience, was able to get into an x-wing and dominate over other experienced fighters .

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Good assessment.

The movie's answer is two fold:
1) The Force
2) The Lineage

Luke was just better because it was in his blood to pilot a ship. Pure talent only gets you so far, but the Force then can help.

The Force is a little contrived for the purpose, it works, maybe not well enough. And it's surely convenient.

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My Uncle once told me he walked out of Star Wars saying something negative about the movie having a teddy bear

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As good a reason as any I guess.

But certainly not a flaw.

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so I guess with so much of the film being alien in nature, that might limit it's accessibility.

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But Star Wars is legitimately the most accessible fantasy/sci-fi (*grumble*) property to ever exist. The only thing that comes close is Star Trek (outside of modern Comic Book movies).

I haven't seen A New Hope all the way through in a long time, so my memory will have to serve me well (and I don't think it will):

A New Hope is a relatively slow, meandering film with bad acting from much of the core cast. It's director is timid behind the camera, as I recall, with nothing to really make you think much was going on with the visual telling of the story other than to set up a scene so the actors can deliver lines. Instead, the director largely relies on visual effects to blow away the audience. In such a fashion, Lucas is more an engineer than a director. And then, for a film that was so dramatically advanced in terms of its visual effects, it has not aged nearly as well as other relatively contemporaneous sci-fi films (e.g. Blade Runner). As far as story goes, it had holes in it. One of them was how the shite Luke was a master X-Wing pilot as mentioned earlier. But there were others, I'm sure, that I do not remember.

Those are its flaws as I can remember. I remember being rather bored as a kid when watching it. It is something like how the Fellowship of the Ring is a bit of a bore in parts. The difference is that the Fellowship of the Ring is far better in every aspect (though no doubt thanks, in large part, to A New Hope's advancement in the area of visual effects).

All that said, it is not a flawed film. It works. And it does what so many films fail to do: set up a new universe that no one had any background in and weave elements of mythology, religion, action, adventure, comedy, romance, and all the other wonderful things it has in it. Despite its flaws, it is a marvel in filmmaking.

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It's the best one.

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Empire

I'm told that I saw Star Wars at a drive-in theater ... (I would have only been 2 at the time.)

One part that I always laugh at .... is when Vader strikes down Ben Kenobi ... and then kicks at his robes on the ground with his foot.




One question that has never been answered ... than I am aware of: How do you get "Ben" from "Obi Wan" ?