For the next few weeks, we will be counting down our 25 favorite blockbusters! Read all of the entries here.

**5. Star Wars (dir. George Lucas, 1977)**

by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

Star Wars: A New Hope, July 31, 1977

The summer I was the same age as the kids in Stranger Things, I spent July staying with my too-large family in a too small cottage on the shore of a lake in Maine, as we did each year. There was no TV for three weeks, only fishing and reading and swimming and sailing and making forts in the woods and walking barefoot on the paths and making new friends from other states and having crushes and bonfires and bottle rockets and this kind of thing.

But I was a child of the media age, and I longed for electronic entertainment. I wanted TV, I wanted reruns. And when the vacation was over at the end of July the first thing I did when I got back to Massachusetts was to call my friend. I still remember his phone number, by the way.

“We’re going to the movies tonight,” my friend said, “and you’re coming. You got to see this thing.”

We pick up the story in medias res. Men in vests and white helmets line the corridor, armed. They stare at the bulkhead with wizened British faces. They are terrified, but resolved. The door blows in and… are those robots? As it turns out no, the genetic makeup of those white armored badasses will be debated to the end of time, but they are, it’s clear, people not toasters.

What gets you is how arrogant their tactics are. They just kick in the door and come through. Several get taken out by the nice looking British guys in the helmets, but the rest don’t care. The individual doesn’t matter. Strength matters. Power. Their indifference to the yearnings of the Alliance is akin to their indifference to their own lives.

They blow the corridor clear in like twenty seconds.

This is when Vader strides though the smoke, and I instantly grow bored. My tolerance for fantasy and mysticism has never been high, and age 11 may be its low ebb. I ignore the vampire guy and focus on the fallen stormtroopers. And the ship, and the blasters, the stuff I like at this age. There will be plenty. Lucas likes showing off his cool spaceships as much as I liked looking at them – still do – and the battles are a gas, and the robots are more interesting than you expected, and… we all know the rest. The sheer inventiveness and power of the thing wins you over. It’s a fucking blast. That movie births millions of imaginations. It was Harry Potter for Gen X.

I will see it six more times that summer, once in a drive-in with my brother and sister. I convinced my oldest sister, a despiser of science fiction, to come because, I insist, Star Wars is not like all those other science fiction movies.

Her verdict: It is exactly like all those other science fiction movies.

But I knew she was wrong.

Luke stands before the ruins of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s farm, oily black smoke trailing across the desert. You squint. Those blackened forms on the ground in front of the house. Are they? Is that? Thirty years later I will watch John Ford’s perfect The Searchers and will see that Lucas stole that shot lock, stock and barrel. But it doesn’t matter. That’s kind of the point of Star Wars, Lucas turning the lenses of classic American cinema on science fiction. Or fantasy. Or whatever Star Wars is.

The second act sends Luke and Obi-Wan into the belly of the Beast. In contrast to the dusty dented look of the rest of the picture, the Death Star is immaculate, shiny, and up to date. The corridors reminded me of my middle school, and I will spend countless hours, bored in class, daydreaming of battling Stormtroopers along with my friends, through the halls of Rupert A. Nock Middle School.

Han Solo rhymes with Rick Blaine in Casablanca – a movie which informs more than a little of Star Wars DNA – and how Bogart limned the portrait of the cynic with the heart of gold. Harrison Ford’s Han sticks his neck out for no one either. He doesn’t trust high-minded schemes, or ideologies, or revolutions. He trusts his friend, Chewbacca, and his blaster. He’s been from one side of this galaxy to the other, and has seen some strange stuff, but nothing that would make him believe. No thanks, he’ll take those weird car battery-sized boxes of money.

Good luck with your revolution suckers.

In the end, of course the jaded ironist comes back to the fold. In America, irony is always temporary.

When we get to the rebel base on Yavin 4, the picture begins to coil itself up for the one of the greatest endings in cinema history.

The Rebel fighters rise out of the jungle and form up for their attack. What will happen in the next few minutes will change the world. Ours, I mean. Lucas watched a lot of Second World War dogfight footage preparing to film the assault on the Death Star, and the 1977 viewer understands this instantly. We have never seen this before, but we know just how it works.

The difference watching this scene, compared to science fiction at the time, is night and day. Previously, a lot of SF film was hermetically sealed behind a membrane of electronic music and shiny metal suits. Lucas gives us space hippies and space cowboys and space wiseguys.

The ships were perfect. The X-Wing fighter is exactly what a pursuit ship should look like in this universe. Exactly. What’s more, there are dents and rust and squawky radio distortion. It may be a galaxy far far away, but this is more real than most combat scenes I have watched.

Backed up as always by John Williams’s propulsive score, the Rebel fighters and fighter bombers hurtle toward the space station. The surface bristles with weapons. The X-Wings drop in low and fast and began to work the defenses. Enemy TIE fighters rise to confront them, and the ensuing aerial battle is probably about the point that my eleven year old mind exploded like a proton torpedo. Kevin was no longer at home, he was with Red squadron, dogfighting for our lives, calling out threats to each other, turning barrel rolls and Immelmanns.

In subsequent Star Wars lore, time will be dated from the Battle of Yavin, and the same is true of me. I was never the same after, either.

At last Red 5 steers into the trench, the Rebels’ last shot at that fucking thermal exhaust port. Wedge and Biggs, Luke’s old buddies, have his six, and he takes them in full throttle. I personally have never flown Beggar’s Canyon, but I’d be willing to bet it was not lined with quite so many pulse cannon.

Vader and his element drop in behind our heroes and begin to pick away Luke’s cover. But the Force is strong with this one.

In the First World War, Allied pilots used to caution each other, “Beware the Hun in the sun," about German fighters attacking with the sun at their back to make them hard to see. Well, this is the Han in the sun. The good old Falcon, a yodeling Wookiee rather than a bugle call, comes thundering out of Yavin’s star. A few deft shots clear the way for Luke. The score builds. Use the Force, Luke.

We needed it, this movie. We were dying for this movie. It was the 70s and cynicism had washed over everything. Also, polyester. It was an age of cynicism and polyester. Much was squalid. We were eating horse meat and waiting in line for gas. We’d lost our way. Now I don’t mean to sit here and tell you that George Lucas’s hippie Flash Gordon riff saved us, but… something changed. A mental muscle we had not been using was suddenly active, and our imagination had been taught something old, as though it were new again.