I liked Star Wars for the fantasy and I knew that the story was sort of cheezy. Yet even as a thinking 16 year old kid I thought that pretty soon we would be seeing much better science fiction stories with super special effects, not the old 50’s and 60’s stuff. I remember hoping for a better Star Trek series or movies. Then Alien came out..hard sci fi and scary to boot...I was thrilled..science fiction starting to come into its own on the big screens. Close Encounters was brilliant I thought, clever little history twists , family friendly and barry the cute little boy though i didn’t like the Aliens taking the boy and scaring his mother...not cool. TV sc fi was hoaky though special effects were better than the 60’s. The Big Beginning for Battle Star Galactaca was cool but the show sort of fell off and lost vision after a while.(The reboot was much better in the early mid 2000’s). So I think Star Wars really opened the door for better sci fi films and yes some dogs. I think the best star wars film dramatically was The Empire Strikes back. Rogue One had the same Vibe in the 2000s but the dramatic vibe of the ESB movie was what I hoped all the Star Wars movies should have shown. The Return of the Jedi was good, great special effects, and the audience snickering at the sort of ewww factor when Leia was revealed as Luke’s sister and everyone in the theater, I just knew it because I was thinking it too, were thinking back to that huge juicy smooch Luke’s sister gave him in the ESB. Ewww!
Then there 1982’s Blade Runner and the dam burst open for epic sci fi. Real dilemmas, real clones who had what Major Kusanaga of the Ghost in the Shell anime books and later movies, called Ghosts, Self aware selves, who wanted to live but were limited in life span and the company CEO couldn’t fix it even if he wanted to, violent movie with streaks of raw human empathy. The movie was brilliantly casted with Star War’s Harrison Ford who stood out of the way with his acting and showed he really had deep star power. He was a surprise as he was in Apocalypse Now where he played a secondary character but was humble about it. He was a surprise again in Indiana Jones: Raiders in 1981..completely different character, closer to Han Solo, but that was okay, it was what the roll called for. I thought him as being a swiss army knife actor, what ever the roll, Ford could find the “blade” for it.
So thanks to a 3rd rate sci fi movie with first rate special effects and a dynamite music score that made the movie bigger than it has a right to be, the door was open for greater and better sci fi to come!
First rate reply - thanks for sharing.