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Rated: PG; Length: 121 Minutes; Genres: Action/Adventure, Sci-fi; With: Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill

EW's Complete Coverage

Star Wars
A
By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

The return of the ultimate popcorn movie. The enhanced ''Special Edition'' doesn't add much (there are some new, computer-generated beasties), but to see George Lucas' ecstatically entertaining retro sci-fi adventure in a theater again, amid crowds cheering both the movie and their own propensity to cheer, is to feel an ambiguous rush of nostalgia -- a nostalgia for the moment when we agreed to reunite as a culture by going back to the future. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) defeats the Empire by rising up out of himself to embrace something larger: the Force. The magic of Star Wars lies in the way that his triumph is mirrored, emotionally, by the audience's sense of becoming part of something larger than itself -- a universe of fans.


Posted Feb 07, 1997
 

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