Star Wars Rewatch Project: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE

7,339 Views | 86 Replies | Last: 4 yr ago by West Point Aggie
TCTTS
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AG
01.19 - Star Wars Rewatch Project: EPISODE I - THE PHANTOM MENACE
02.19 - Star Wars Rewatch Project: EPISODE II - ATTACK OF THE CLONES
03.19 - Star Wars Rewatch Project: EPISODE III - REVENGE OF THE SITH
04.19 - Star Wars Rewatch Project: SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY
05.19 - Star Wars Rewatch Project: ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY

Next up...

Title
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

Release Date
May 25, 1977

Director
George Lucas

Writer
George Lucas






The Collective
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oragator
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People try and disparage for various reasons, but it legitimized an entire genre that is now the core of Hollywood, revolutionized and and mainstreamed special effects that are now central to movies, brought back the cinematic score in a big way, and changed what action adventure movies could be. One of the most successful and influential movies ever made.
Cinco Ranch Aggie
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IB4 someone claims the movie's title is simply "Star Wars"
C@LAg
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Sine poena nulla lex.
Aggie_Journalist
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Rewatched this one recently and it's a simple, classic movie that gave us our first view of that galaxy long, long ago and far, far away. It's amazing to reflect on what it led to.

When I was a kid in the late 80's / early 90's, my family had four movies on VHS. One was The Yellow Submarine (the Beatles movie), the other three were tv recordings of the original Star Wars trilogy, making them easily the most-watched movies of my life. I still sometimes think of late 80's V-8 commercials when when I watch Star Wars .
Thanks and gig'em
The Collective
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Burning homestead is probably my favorite moment in Star Wars. It is a pretty tough thing to communicate such a complex topic in a movie to kids, but I got it even at a young age.
Chipotlemonger
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I go back and forth on which movie between this one and ESB is my favorite Star Wars movie.

Rogue One is my easy 3rd favorite though.
chipotle
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I remember when they "remastered" this and somehow left in some really bad special effects.

#hanShotFirst
#itsJustStarWars
#newHopeGay
Brian Earl Spilner
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The movie is iconic from beginning to end.
YouBet
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Saw it at the drive through for my first movie ever. Has shaped my life ever since.
Cinco Ranch Aggie
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C@LAg said:

Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

IB4 someone claims the movie's title is simply "Star Wars"
It is.

That ANH bull**** was added later after TESB was released.
Why the angry face?

I was 10 when the original came out. I know full well that the movie was simply Star Wars. The subtitle fits in well with all the others.
SoulSlaveAG2005
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Just re watched with my son. Such a fun movie. Only thing that annoys me is that all the versions are the updated ones with extra cgi crap inserted. It is really obvious when it was added and looks horrible.
Cinco Ranch Aggie
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Before Star Wars, movies were just something I watched from time to time. I always enjoyed going to the movies, but really none really made much of an impact on me. To be frank, Star Wars didn't interest me in the slightest. I thought it looked terrible. My only exposure to sci-fi up to that point had been giant monsters like Godzilla or Gamera, or the Planet of the Apes series.

One Saturday my dad asked if I wanted to go see Star Wars. I was pretty much of a "meh" attitude but hey, going to the movies was always fun, and I could get some candy and popcorn. We went to the Palm Twins theater in Sugar Land (was right across Hwy 90 from the old Imperial Sugar plant). I would see many of the movies I like the most in that theater before it was torn down sometime in the mid 80s.

From the opening shot, I was mesmerized. I knew I was watching a great adventure unfold before me. The movie lit my imagination on fire. When C-3P0 waddles up a sand dune with the bones of something that looked like a brontosaurus in the background, I was still fascinated by dinosaurs (many years before anyone had ever heard of Jurassic Park), so this was a really cool scene. The sand people were a bit frightening for a 10-yr-old, the critters in the Cantina were neat - I thought the musicians looked like Martians - and there was good humor in the movie.

What really got me, though, was what I saw as a connection to WWII, particularly airplanes, with the attack on the Death Star. Well before I even knew who George Lucas was, I could see the similarities between his big attack sequence and movies like 633 Squadron. The X-Wings and TIE Fighters were just as cool as Corsairs and Flying Tigers.

When I got home, I scrounged up all the cardboard and tape I could find, and set out to put together a bunch of X-Wings and TIE Fighters. Later, my dad stopped in at a record shop in Bellaire and brought home the 2-LP soundtrack to the movie. I listened to those records religiously over the next several years, and became a fan of film scores.

In the late 70s, being a Star Wars nut as I was could make life difficult. Junior high was not particularly fun. I was known, derisively I think, as "Mr. Star Wars". It has been somewhat amusing to me to see Star Wars become more socially acceptable; anectdotal, but I have never known any of my kids or their friends to report being made fun of in their schools for liking things like Star Wars.

I still love this movie. It has aged well, and while I like Empire better, it is still the second best of all the Star Wars movies.
TCTTS
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C@LAg
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Sine poena nulla lex.
Brian Earl Spilner
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cbr
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Still the best. Ageless. I was a kid trapped in a crap life in a broke ass neighborhood in an endless winter in Minnesota. Star Wars was the greatest escape from all that ever. I must have seen it 20 times in the theater.
Cinco Ranch Aggie
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C@LAg said:

Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

C@LAg said:

Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

IB4 someone claims the movie's title is simply "Star Wars"
It is.

That ANH bull**** was added later after TESB was released.
Why the angry face?

I was 10 when the original came out. I know full well that the movie was simply Star Wars. The subtitle fits in well with all the others.
you were the one that challenged someone to claim the title was just Star Wars.

Challenge accepted.
Let me guess, no one will like you when you're angry.
Maveric
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CJS4715 said:

Burning homestead is probably my favorite moment in Star Wars. It is a pretty tough thing to communicate such a complex topic in a movie to kids, but I got it even at a young age.
I wasn't allowed to see it in the theater when it came out. My older sister had seen it the night before and my mom asked her if it was okay for me to see (I was 4). She said "Some guy got his head cut off" and that was that. As luck would have it, while sis went to go see it again, I watched the Holiday Special on tv.

When I finally saw it, it was on HBO and was pan and scan format. It did not show the burned bodies of Owen and Beru as they were on the extreme edges. It wasn't until I saw it in widescreen in the THX reformat version in the 1990s that I saw the burned skeletons.
double aught
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My favorite Star Wars film. One of my favorite films of all time.

Binary Sunset!
Alec Guinness!
The trash compactor!
That trench run!
"You're all clear kid! Now let's blow this thing and go home!"

What a movie!
MGS
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Han shot first.
Bruce Almighty
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1. Star Wars
2. ROTS
3. Rogue One
4. TPM
5. Solo
6. AOTC
Brian Earl Spilner
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My relationship with this movie (and the OT in general) is a bit weird, in that there was no concrete beginning to it.

As long as I can remember, I've known what Star Wars is.

As a kid, you grew up knowing about it, who the characters were, etc. My parents were never into them, so I guess this happened from talking with friends on the playground.

When The Phantom Menace came out, I remember how excited everyone was, including myself. Seeing that in theaters is what properly kicked off my Star Wars fandom.

I do remember being at a friend's house (I think before TPM came out) and him putting on ROTJ. I don't know if we watched the first two, or even the whole movie, but I specifically remember him jumping to the end to show me Vader's real face, when I told him I'd never seen it before.

Once the OT DVD box set first dropped in 2004, that's when I first bought and owned the movies and could watch them endlessly.
Mac94
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I was eight years old when when Star Wars came out in 1977 .... the perfect age demographic for this. Star Wars was my life. Saw it I don't know how many times in theater, collected the cards, action figures, other toys. My cousins and I played Star Wars constantly and blasted up part of the Oklahoma country side reliving the adventure. While Empire may be a better film in many ways .... the original will always be tops for me because of the impact it had on my childhood, and American culture in general.

Oh, and as has already been mentioned .... HAN SHOT FIRST!
John Matrix
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It's almost pointless to write about a film that literally changed movies forever without repeating what others have said for almost half s century now, but I'll try. Star Wars-A New Hope is a perfect blockbuster; a beautiful near disaster that seems almost impossible when you consider the context of the times in which it was made. Over budget, the studio breathing down his neck, technical problems everywhere, and inexperience plaguing him, George Lucas pulled off a cinematic miracle by doing something he should have done in the prequels- rely on the talents of other people, or more specifically his ex-wife Marcia Lucas, his editor. What this rewatch proves to me is that what really makes this film great is the economy of storytelling which is directly driven by the engine of editing.Simply put, George Lucas had the imagination, Marcia Lucas knew how to control it, and refine it.

The Good:

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that the whole review could fit in this section. There's not a wrong character beat, action sequence, or effect in the whole thing. What really struck me watching it this time is how insane it must have been to see it in 1977 in terms of world building. If you think about it, we watch Star Wars now in 2019 through the lens of almost universal knowledge about Star Wars. Everyone knows Darth Vader is Luke's father, the force, Han Solo, etc. in 1977, that wasn't the case, and yet, due to the economy of the storytelling, all of these things,(minus the Vader reveal), are perfectly illustrated in a film that was originally a shade under two hours long. This entire universe was revealed in a film that was pretty light on exposition, featured several space battles, characters moments, without a dull moment. I know we're in the golden age of TV, and I hear and read that TV is now the superior storytelling medium because it allows long form character development over years- something that film supposedly can't do. Star Wars-A New Hope is direct proof of the contrary. As good as something like Breaking Bad was, you know just as much about Luke as you do about Walter Whitein seven season of Breaking Bad in one film. You see his desire to leave tattooine, his frustration but begrudging respect for his aunt and uncle, his emotional loss for his family and Obi Won, his desire to save Leia, his conflict with Han, in one film, that also perfectly illustrated other characters and ideas, and then does it in under two hours. It's a miracle of s film in that regard.

The Bad:

Really nothing in the original. The 1997 rerelease version were stuck with has the redundant Jabba the Hut scene that just repeats the geeedo scene from like ten minutes earlier. It's things like this that kind of illustrate how finely tuned original was and kind of foreshadowed the mistakes Lucas would make in the prequels- sacrifices ing story for stupid special effects gags and toy sells.

The Ugly:

*****, please.


In the end, I've seen this film probably hundreds of times, and it only gets better with every viewing. It's an absolute classic.
Cinco Ranch Aggie
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Regarding the visual effects in Star Wars ... they hold up very well, and in many ways, are better than what we've seen in later movies in this series. Every tangible object (i.e., not the laser blasts, but spaceships or laser turrets, etc) were scale models that a crew of effects artists built from scratch, often built upon wood and/or metal structures and finished out with pieces from readily available model kits they bought at local hobby shops. (On that note, I went to the museum in Fort Worth back in 2007 when there was a display of Star Wars miniatures, props and costumes, and was able to recognize the landing gear from an F-105 Thunderchief as some of the detail near the engine of the Millennium Falcon).

But ... not to throw a wet blanket on this ... there are some issues with the effects that never show up in a theater but are visible to the naked eye when watching on TV. These issues all stem from how the miniatures were filmed. The images were put through some sort of compositing process where, if you look closely, you can see the variations among the composited images as little "boxes" around Darth Vader's TIE Fighter, or whatever. When the Millennium Falcon comes into the Death Star docking bay, there is a glow of light around the entrance to the bay, and you can see the platform they mounted the Falcon miniature onto to film it coming into the bay miniature.

One thing I really liked about the special editions were the updates made in the Death Star attack. The updates gave the entire sequence a more filled in action, stuff going on in the background, whereas in the original version the camera focused mostly on 1 X-Wing at a time. I also liked the more busy Mos Eisley; an intergalactic space port city should have activity going on in the background, as in when we see ships lifting off or more traffic on the streets. If Lucas had just left it at stuff like that, I think the special editions would not be so reviled.
double aught
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Well said John.

This was mentioned in another Star Wars thread, but everyone should check out the podcast Blockbuster. It's a really interesting, well done review of the relationship between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and John Williams, and the creation of Star Wars.
Flashdiaz
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John Matrix said:

The Bad:

Really nothing in the original. The 1997 rerelease version were stuck with has the redundant Jabba the Hut scene that just repeats the geeedo scene from like ten minutes earlier. It's things like this that kind of illustrate how finely tuned original was and kind of foreshadowed the mistakes Lucas would make in the prequels- sacrifices ing story for stupid special effects gags and toy sells.


agree on the rest of the post.

I hate that extra Jabba scene... not only is it a repeat, it shows Han literally stepping all over Jabba, makes Jabba seem weak and pathetic. It weakens Hans concern over the bounty Jabba placed on him in the rest of this movie and ESB.
elfurioso92
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Iconic characters, costumes, sets, special effects, music. As close to perfect as a movie can get.
Brian Earl Spilner
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A few behind-the-scenes shots.

















YouBet
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Flashdiaz said:

John Matrix said:

The Bad:

Really nothing in the original. The 1997 rerelease version were stuck with has the redundant Jabba the Hut scene that just repeats the geeedo scene from like ten minutes earlier. It's things like this that kind of illustrate how finely tuned original was and kind of foreshadowed the mistakes Lucas would make in the prequels- sacrifices ing story for stupid special effects gags and toy sells.


agree on the rest of the post.

I hate that extra Jabba scene... not only is it a repeat, it shows Han literally stepping all over Jabba, makes Jabba seem weak and pathetic. It weakens Hans concern over the bounty Jabba placed on him in the rest of this movie and ESB.
Pointless and stupid add. If i recall correctly, the original Jabba was a humanoid and the only reason that effect was added was because Jaba had evolved into what he did with ROTJ and this scene had been filmed with original and ultimately cut.

Since jabba ended up with a tail they retroactively added Han "stepping on it" to let viewers know his tail was there. Just dumb.
The Collective
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It doesn't make sense. Why would Jabba send a bounty hunter and then have follow-up meeting almost immediately after the bounty hunter is dead?
PDWT_12
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I probably won't get around to rewatching this movie this month, I got to see it while the Houston Symphony played the score for it a couple of months ago (a very cool experience I recommend if you ever get the chance). Like most Star Wars fans, I love this movie. I was born just a little after this premiered in theaters (14.5 years or so), but I distinctly remember being around 4 or 5 and getting to watch it on VHS at our house. The burned skeletons, the alien getting his arm cut off in the cantina, I remember my parents thinking some of that was too intense for me. But I loved it. I won't spend too much time here, there's been enough said about this movie and the ensuing cultural phenomenon to fill a library.

What I Like:

The opening scene is was one of my favorites of all time. It sucks you in like very few movies ever do, regardless of how many times I've seen it. The opening crawl, the Corvette chased by a Star Destroyer, I'm locked into it every single time.

The perfect amount of world building. Just enough of solid information/backstory provided, just enough strange details in the background, just enough left up to the imagination. I can think of very few movies who walk that line so well. Bladerunner (both the original and 2049), maybe John Wick with the assassin guild and hotel for a recent example. It's not a long list.

"You're all clear kid. Now let's blow this thing and go home." Will never not give me goosebumps. Pure eucatastrophe.

I love how self contained this movie is. If it hadn't spawned sequels and prequels and cartoons and theme parks, the world would be much worse off. But it would still have 1 amazing movie that taught everyone what a Hero's Journey truly looks like, how to create a legitimately scary villain, and how to inspire awe in your audience, regardless of their age.

What I Don't Like:

N/A

Favorite Tracks:

The whole score is phenomenal but I guess you first have to bring up how incredible the opening title is. It's become so iconic it's hard for me to wrap my head around John Williams just banging that out from scratch on a piano. The Binary Sunset, Princess Leai's Theme, Burning Homestead, Imperial Attack, The Last Battle... I could spend too much time on the music here. It's all so good. The human race has never done anything to prove that we deserve John Williams but luckily he graced us with his genius anyway.


I believe it was brought up in the main Star Wars thread, but if you haven't listened to it yet I recommend The Blockbusters podcast. It talks about Lucas, Spielberg, and Williams as their careers began to take off with Jaws and Star Wars, and some of the issues they faced in their productions. It's a voice acting dramatization (like an old timey radio serial or something), which I'm sure some might find cheezy or annoying but I think perfectly fits the story it's telling.

Knowing how close Lucas came to not pulling this off, with Fox ready to shut him down, Obi-Wan death being written in later on, the fantastic editing done by Marcia, so many other things that went on behind the scenes that made George feel he had a legitimate failure of a film on his hands... It's a miracle that we get to sit here and ***** and moan about the prequels/sequels.


Rankings so far are:

A New Hope
Rogue One
Revenge of the Sith
Solo
Attack of the Clones
The Phantom Menace


Brian Earl Spilner
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Quote:

What I Don't Like:

N/A
I love it
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