In the new, remastered Star Wars, the added effects, which range from leathery desert beasts inserted into already existing shots to an awkward new scene in which Han Solo bargains his way out of a jam with a computer-generated Jabba the Hutt, don't do much besides call attention to themselves. In general, I can't say that I'm wild about directors mucking around with our memories by fiddling with their classic films. In this case, however, the tweaking doesn't matter much, since the first half of the movie, where most of the changes take place, is meandering and coy to begin with. I found I had less affection this time for the Mutt-and-Jeff antics of C-3PO and R2-D2; and Mark Hamill, with his gee-whiz '70s doofiness, is, at first, a shockingly callow hero--we might be watching the intergalactic coming-of-age of Richard Carpenter. To give Lucas credit, though, much of the innocuousness is actually by design. Part of what's ingenious about Star Wars is the way the film seems to start out in the shaggier cinematic era it's about to leave behind. When Luke commences his training as a Jedi, hooking up with Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford, who never again looked like he was having this much fun), you can feel the testosterone leaking into the movie. Lucas' "serialized" plot has a capricious elegance: Once they're inside the Death Star, our heroes execute their moves as spontaneously as James Bond. And Darth Vader, the man with the machine face, remains an awesome image of future-shock fascism, with James Earl Jones' electromagnetized threats calling up a subliminal echo of the Wizard of Oz's lordly malevolence.
More than any other single sequence, the climactic dogfight is the one that made Star Wars revolutionary. A miracle of editing and special effects, it remains an elating action spectacle. Having revved up the pace notch by notch, Lucas now leaps into the joy of sheer momentum. Like Luke Skywalker himself, we start to take in the action not with our minds but through our senses. It's literally a rush. You can feel yourself turning off your brain and getting sucked into the movie's vortex, into a whole new age of cinema as sensation. Of course, that same thrill-ride rush is what Hollywood has been desperately repackaging for 20 years now. Only in Star Wars, however, was the Force this powerfully with the audience. We succeeded in making a movie so popular that just to sit there and watch it was to share in the victory.
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