Star Wars

Director: George Lucas

Release Date: 1977

Should this be on the list?
Without question, this is top 100. You can make an argument that Empire Strikes Back is a better movie, much in the same way that you can argue that Godfather II is better than The Godfather (spoiler alert, it is), but for all it did to change Hollywood alone, this deserves to be ahead of all its sequels.

Rating: 5 Stars out of 5

Would I watch this again?
Can, and have. In all of its forms.

I don’t sleep well, and I never have. Even when I was very small, I would very often get out of bed and wander around at three in the morning. This is true, still to this day. As you go through a lot of these movies, you’ll begin to notice that a good amount of them were watched between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m., in the midst of a normal bout with insomnia. Which makes this story all the more strange.

I can rightfully say that I have seen Star Wars in the theater, first run, even though I slept through most of it. I was six years old at the time. Shortly before the droids hit the sand, the Sandman hit me, and literally I remember nothing of the movie until about twenty minutes from the end. If I had to take a guess, it was Luke’s strained cry of “Noooo,” upon the loss of Obi-Wan Kenobi that woke me up. To the best of my knowledge, I have not fallen asleep in a movie theater before or since, and very rarely fall asleep at a movie at home.

Since that time, I’ve wondered why, of all movies, this is the movie that I chose to fall asleep to. While it’s true that I dropped off during the least stimulating moment in the entire movie, you’d think I’d have woken up to the sound of a light saber, or the futuristic bar band, or to Han shooting first. But none of these things roused me at all. I was not aware of the existence of Jawas until I got some of the Topps trading cards months later, and just where Chewbacca had come from (as far as I knew) was anybody’s guess. Over the next few years, I managed to learn all the finer points of the plot, pieced together from classmates who had seen it multiple times and could talk of little else, but that was about it.

When movies became more readily available for on-demand viewing thanks to the advent of the VCR, I more than made up for what I had missed, but it still bugs me to this day that I fell asleep that first time. Psychologically speaking, it’s probably why I have a hard time falling asleep in front of the television.

All that said, the movie still holds up, and nostalgia aside, objectively holds up better than most of its sequels.

I won’t bother commenting on the ins-and-outs of the plot, because you most likely know it already, but to sum up: Luke Skywalker becomes man as he uses the Force, rescues princess in distress, loses mentor along the way, blows up evil empire’s half-baked space station, Darth Vader spins out blah blah blah.

When the re-issue version of Star Wars came out in 1997, needless to say, I was there opening night. I considered myself a fan. Never to the extent that I felt the need to go to conventions, and in costume, but a fan nonetheless. There were two guys in line behind me, and while they weren’t in costume, they were discussing the life and times of Wedge Antilles, who in the movie is an extremely minor character who shows up at the end. Apparently, through various novelizations and other non-movie Star Wars stories, Wedge had some tremendous backstory I knew nothing about. Apparently I was wrong and I was not a fan, not really, and at that moment I was exceedingly OK with that.

We were packed into the theater, and I was more or less forced (no pun intended) to sit about three rows back at the very right of the building. When Luke said his line “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!”, the crowd erupted in a chorus of “Awwwww,” in a terrific Rocky-Horror-like bit of audience participation. We all got to see Greedo shoot first, awkwardly. We all got to see the CGI Jabba the Hutt, which seemed particularly synthetic. And all tolled, I remained awake.

The “Star Wars Remix” versions are OK, but they lack authenticity somehow. I remember leaving the theater with a touch of a smile, glad that I had seen it in its entirety, but still feeling like I had experienced something completely different.