Star Wars

Viewed for the first time in an age, it's exciting to note how much of Star Wars' screen time is apportioned to two puppets bickering and struggling through a desert. Compared to the immediacy of the blockbusters the hugely successful film begot, it's almost an art house move. In these moments George Lucas and his team manage to wring a sympathetic, childlike, performance out of a remote control bin and a couple of bleeps - the minutiae of this universe is so well conceived that when R2 wanders down a dark sand crevice it's actually quite distressing.

Lucas' biggest coup is the pervasive, used-universe dressing. Technology in Star Wars isn't brand new or even clean, it's leaky trash, cobbled together by space pirates. It tells a story - a great civilisation has vanished, their whizz-tech now in the hands of simpletons and bushwhackers. The digital elements added along the years tend to undermine this distressed, analogue mood. It's impressive enough to see a sand monster sunbathing at the corner of a frame, we don't really need to see it capering in the foreground. The design work in Star Wars is imaginative enough to exist as the effect, without any need for hyper-mobility. It's a shame then that Lucas doesn't seem to agree; the original cinema release is only available (officially) in a deliberately marginalised, non-anamorphic DVD that requires zooming to fit the dimensions of a 16:9 television set.

Enough griping. It's easy to see why Star Wars became such an immediate success. Lucas stages two equally exciting, successive, climaxes. The daring rescue of Princess Leia would be quite enough for any usual hero yarn, not Lucas' though. As soon as the rescue party dock they're being outfitted for dog-fighting - blasting off in nimble X-Craft for a suicidal space war. The attack on the Death Star is still a thoroughly dazzling sequence. Aside from some incredible model work, it's refreshing to see so much absolute carnage. The tension, courtesy of editors Marcia Lucas, Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew, ratchets up into the stratosphere as stereotypical cosmic pilots are zipped and zapped by faceless Reich robots. Soon only The Chosen One is left. Use the Force Luke!