Star Wars

Hollywood began in an amusement arcade, so it's appropriate that its most profitable film should be as formally enchanting and psychologically sterile as a Gottlieb pinball machine. Star Wars is at least 40 years out of date as science fiction, but objections pale beside the film's major achievement: nearly 50 years after it was conceived, pulp space fiction is here for the first time presented as a truly viable movie genre. Discounting 2001, which isn't a genre movie, it's like watching the first Western to use real exteriors. And audiences rightly feel that this is something they've been owed for some time. Star Wars itself has distinct limitations, but the current return to a cinema of spectacle and wonder is wholly encouraging. Or would you prefer The Sound of Music?