A New Hope is the film that created modern blockbuster cinema, and it did so by being something very specific: a myth engine. Lucas wasn’t writing characters in the conventional sense. He was populating archetypes — the farm boy, the wizard, the rogue, the princess — and placing them in a universe with such complete visual and sonic identity that the archetypes felt fresh rather than familiar. The Death Star trench run is thirty minutes of pure mythological storytelling, and it works because Lucas built the mythology carefully enough that the audience believed in the stakes.
My rating: 8.5. This rating is for A New Hope alone, evaluated as the film it is. The Force Awakens is discussed separately because comparing them is instructive about what distinguishes a genuine character arc from its hollow imitation.
The Myth Engine
Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey isn’t a template Lucas consciously applied — it’s the underlying structure of myth that Lucas absorbed and expressed. The ordinary world, the call to adventure, the refusal, the mentor, the threshold, the ordeal, the return — A New Hope follows this structure not because Lucas was being systematic but because the structure is how stories about transformation have always worked when they work.
Luke Skywalker functions as a protagonist because he starts incompetent and arrives at his capability through loss and learning rather than through discovery of pre-existing ability. He can’t shoot straight. He doesn’t know how to use the Force. He gets in the way. The people around him are better at almost everything. His growth across the film is real because Cameron — unlike the makers of The Force Awakens — understood that a hero needs to earn their moment rather than simply arrive at it.
The binary sunset scene is the film’s emotional center and one of cinema’s most efficient pieces of character establishment. Luke watching the twin suns set, longing for something he can’t name yet — that image tells you everything about who he is and what he wants without a word of exposition. Lucas trusted the image. It paid off completely.
Luke’s arc works because he is bad at being a hero for most of A New Hope. He misses shots, needs rescuing, relies on others constantly, and succeeds in the trench run by abandoning his targeting computer and trusting something he barely understands. That incompetence is the story. Without it there’s no arc, no growth, no earned moment. Before you write your protagonist’s first impressive feat, establish what they’re bad at first. The failure creates the space the success needs to mean something.
John Williams
Williams’ score is not background. It is the film’s emotional architecture. The Force theme, the binary sunset melody, the Rebel fanfare, the Imperial march — these aren’t accompaniment to the story. They are the story, operating in a different register simultaneously. Remove the score and A New Hope loses a third of its power. The music is doing character work, world-building work, and emotional work that the visuals and dialogue don’t carry alone.
This is the highest function a film score can serve: not to tell the audience how to feel, but to carry emotional information that the images generate but can’t fully deliver without the musical counterpart. Williams understood this intuitively and has demonstrated it across a career that is the most significant in the history of film scoring. A New Hope is where that understanding was first applied at full scale.
The Force Awakens as Contrast
The Force Awakens earns its 1 through a specific failure that the contrast with A New Hope makes visible: Rey is a protagonist who never fails. She flies a ship she’s never flown without difficulty. She beats trained fighters without training. She accesses Force powers without development. She is never threatened, never outmatched, never required to grow because she arrives already capable of everything the story needs her to do.
This is the Mary Sue problem in its purest form — not a female protagonist, not a powerful protagonist, but a protagonist who has been protected from narrative consequence by writers who confused capability with character. A character who can do everything has nothing to earn and therefore nothing to prove and therefore no story.
The Force Awakens is also a structural copy of A New Hope — same beats, same structure, same plot mechanics in a different costume. The decision to remake rather than continue was the first evidence that the franchise’s new ownership didn’t understand why the original worked. You cannot honor a myth by repeating it. You can only deepen it or betray it. The Force Awakens betray it.
Luke starts the film wanting to leave Tatooine but afraid to. He ends it trusting something he doesn’t understand to make a shot that saves the galaxy. That arc exists because Lucas gave him room to fail first. Rey starts the film already capable of almost everything and ends it still capable of almost everything. The gap between those two character designs is the entire difference between storytelling and wish fulfillment.
The Force Awakens demonstrates what happens when you protect your protagonist from failure. Rey’s capability is never in doubt, which means the audience’s investment in her success is never fully engaged. Threat requires credible failure. Without credible failure there’s no tension. Without tension there’s no story. Before you write your protagonist through a challenge, ask honestly whether they could fail. If the answer is no, the challenge isn’t one. Put them somewhere they might actually lose.
The Verdict
A New Hope earns its 8.5 as the film that invented modern science fiction cinema and did so with enough structural integrity and human truth that the invention held. The worldbuilding is original. The myth structure is correctly deployed. The cast found what the material needed. The Force Awakens earns its 1 as proof that the structure works because of things the sequel couldn’t copy: personal stakes, character transformation, the specific human truth inside the operatic framework.
FAQ
Is George Lucas a good director?
Specifically good at certain things and limited in others. His visual sense is genuine and original. His sense of myth structure is sound. His direction of actors and his dialogue are weak — the performances in the prequel trilogy demonstrate what happens when actors are given Lucas’s direction without editors who can fix the results. A New Hope’s performances are good largely because the casting was right and the editors (including Marcia Lucas) shaped the film into what it needed to be. Lucas’s contribution is real. It’s not the contribution of a complete filmmaker.
Which version of A New Hope should be watched?
The 1977 original theatrical cut, if accessible. The Special Edition changes are largely additions that clutter rather than enhance — the Greedo shoots first change is the most discussed because it alters Han’s character, but the added Mos Eisley sequences and Jabba scenes are also problematic for different reasons. The original cut communicates the film Lucas and his collaborators made. The Special Editions communicate what Lucas wished he’d been able to make in 1977, which is a different and lesser thing.
Why does Han’s return matter so much?
Because Ford spent the entire film establishing Han’s cynicism as authentic rather than as performance. He walks away. He means it when he walks away. The stated self-interest is believable, which means when it fails — when he comes back because he cannot actually be that person — the failure is meaningful. If the cynicism had been clearly fake from the beginning, the return would be expected. Because Ford made it real, the return is the film’s emotional climax even though the explosion is the visual one.