Having said all that, it's clear that Lucas' story sense has long swirled down the toilet, if he ever had much to begin with. The Empire Strikes Back looks more and more like a series of happy accidents; from Jedi on, we see that these are kiddie flicks, and we were mistaken to think they were anything but.
Recently I thought that maybe Lucas made a strange kind of error by casting Alec Guiness in the first one, because that implied a weight and seriousness to the part. When I think of the first one's Tatooine scenes and how I reacted to them when I first saw the movie, I realize they set me up for a lot of unmet expectations. The whole tone of those early scenes in the original movie suggested the Jedi were this mystical, wise group, and in reality they were a bunch of keystone cops who couldn't do anything right. The mythology is filled with silly stuff. Lucas, like Frank Herbert, seems to think that lopping off people's heads jihad-style is more "civilized" than using a gun; the Jedi never seem to know what's going on in the society they supposedly keep in line; the Emperor plays them like a piano--what good is the Force if it doesn't clue you in on any of this stuff?
Lucas' prequels only show he's as full of PC BS as any Hollywood New Ager. I love how he tries to make political statements in these kids movies. "Only a Sith deals in absolutes"--gee, isn't THAT an absolute?
The opening in Sith is just amazing from a visual perspective, and I enjoy it and the rest of the movie on that level, and it does have some decent moments throughout. But I've long since gotten over the expectation that these movies are suddenly going to become adult movies. They never were.
As an example of how Lucas lost his way when he stopped making fun Saturday matinee adventures supported by a mythic spine, look at his one real invention of the series--the lightsabre. In this one device he combined the science fiction elements with a fantasy one--that's the key to the whole series. It's not science fiction, it's a fantasy taking place in an SF universe.
In the original Star Wars, we saw the lightsabre turned on once, then used quickly in the bar, then briefly as Luke trained, all building to ONE lightsabre fight. It wasn't all that athletic, but Kenobi was old by that point, though he could still defend himself. It worked just fine because it was different.
In Empire we briefly saw the lightsabre used on the ice planet and in Luke's training where he confronts the vision of Vader. So when he and Vader meet, it really felt dramatic--wow, they never met in the first movie, but here they are battling each other! And the scene had a payoff--Luke is wounded in a way similar to the wound that began Vader's transformation into a mechanical being, AND Luke learned who his father was.
In both movies the sabre battles were interesting and different--when they started we were focused on the screen, because in the first one a major character died, and in this one there was a huge dramatic payoff.
By the time Jedi comes around, Luke is using his lightsabre to deflect laser blasts. We see this thing is just a tool, like a wrench, not a mystical object. The Vader and Luke fight in this is really routine, talky, boring, except for the end when Luke goes hog and really tried to hurt Vader.
In the prequels it's all lightsabres all the time. The third one had so much of it it was repetitive and tedious for the most part.
I thought the final battle with Kenobi and Vader in Revenge of the Sith was quite good, actually, but just as the Jedi were shown to be morons, the lightsabre no longer had its mystic feel. It was just like using a glowing baseball bat.
Lucas really mucked up his series from the beginning, when he had the Death Star destroyed in the first/4th chapter--he did this because he didn't think he'd get to make the others. (He claims now that the original intention was to destroy it in the final chapter. I'm not sure whether or not I go for this--the early drafts of Empire Strikes Back and Jedi suggest otherwise--but whatever.) The series as a whole seems to build towards ONE Death Star and its being destroyed in the final chapter, so what does he do when he's out one Death Star? Builds a second one, with basically the same structural flaw as the first. So the big climax of the series is a rerun.
At one point the grand finale would have been an assault on Coruscant, the home world of the Emperor; this would have made a lot more sense dramatically than a second Death Star. Also, we would have briefly seen a shot of the dead Jedi's spirits watching Luke and Vader battle--I think that would have been amazing.
Lucas's growing power enabled him to cast aside those who tempered his excesses, like Gary Kurtz, who produced Star Wars and Empire. In an interview he said his ideas would have made a very different Jedi. No Ewoks, and in the end Han and Leia marry, I think, and Luke goes off to continue the fight against the empire.
Anyway, I think way too much about this for a man my age, but the first movie was hugely inspirational to me as a 12 year old, and was part of what made me try to become a fiction writer, so I have no problem having so many geek thoughts about it. It's one of the best and worst things to happen to the movies in my lifetime.
It gave me the first compelling fictional character I found since the Lord of the Nazgul - Darth Vader.
I read an early draft of "Star Wars" and it was inane.
Alan Ladd wanted to make the movie and so it was made.
Frank Herbert's use of knives in Dune was symbolic of the society that his characters lived in. Shields (or politics) kept houses from using whiz-bang lasers and projectiles against one another. Indeed, using the book's only laser weaponry against a shielded target ended with the death of both the shooter and his intended victim. The only thing that could injure a shielded target was a knife slipped slowly through it.
Likewise, the lightsaber was originally intended to suggest that the Jedi came from an earlier, more civilized, time. However Lucas screwed it up later on, it was an excellent symbol as wielded by Sir Alec Guiness.