Review: A New Hope

A New Hope is one of those films I have very little to say about.

It's well made, a classic and it earns its place in the pantheon of must-watch films but if I go purely by my enjoyment of my time with it, I can sincerely say it wasn't as fun or interesting as I'd hoped it to be.

This isn't my first rodeo, I watched A New Hope back as a child and over the years it's been kept fresh in my memory through cultural osmosis but I'd lie if I said it was something I was aching to go back to.

Whereas I'm surprised at how much I ended up enjoying The Phantom Menace upon repeat viewing, A New Hope I was startlingly apathetic towards.

I think a part of it is how some beats just don't connect with me. My particular standout is Luke finding the corpses of his aunt and uncle, a clearly traumatic and life-changing moment... But it's never mentioned save for one moment after it happens. Luke losing the only parental figures he's ever known is treated like getting begrudged permission to leave home. The lightsaber duel between Ben and Vader felt more flaccid and limp than ever. Han Solo's once-charming mischief comes off as boarish and the casual sexism that goes unchallenged kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

Other problems also crop up, but I'll get to those in a bit. If I had to describe my experience in microcosm it's that partway through I'd just.. Walked away. Seriously, I walked away to go to the bathroom and for 45 minutes just forgot to come back. Perhaps in '78 it was a breath of fresh air for genre films but with my current taste and having lived out two decades of watching sci-fi, it just doesn't feel as monumental as some make it out to be.

Still, I didn't hate the film. It was perfectly watchable. Not a revelatory film experience, actually, the mundanity of it all kind of seeped in and it just felt like I was watching a decent pilot episode for a TV show I had a passing interest in.

The flaws of A New Hope are mundane. They're... Barely worth talking about.

One thing the prequel trilogy does have is flaws worth talking about and I think both as a critic and an audience member I'd prefer a film that has a couple noteworthy flaws than a film that's decently good, perhaps even great but has just very little to leave behind when the credits roll.

Still, I welcome the rest of the films as a chance to re-examine this pop culture giant.

Perhaps I'll rediscover what it is that attracted me to these films in the first place.