Old Data

Holy *bleep*, how has it taken me 43 years to realize that when Artoo shows Luke that part of Leia's message it's not an accidental glitch? He deliberately baits the poor sap with just the most enticing part of the recording to trick him into removing the restraining bolt.

I've finally gotten to Episode IV in my reverse-chronology viewing of the Star Wars films, and wow, there's so much to see here.

Of course, since Artoo's memory was never wiped, he knows exactly where he is when the Jawas drop the droids off at the Lars homestead. So he uses the message both to tempt Luke into freeing him and to name-drop Obi-wan Kenobi in hopes of gaining more information on how to find him. Luke helpfully tells him Obi-wan lives out beyond the Dune Sea, so Artoo heads that direction the instant he's able to, which explains why Old Ben is so close when Luke catches up and encounters the sandpeople.

Somewhat more sinisterly ... Artoo tells Luke and Threepio about the life forms approaching from the south, doesn't object when Luke goes to investigate, and doesn't warn Luke about how close one of those life forms is getting. Is he deliberately setting Luke up in order to get back to business? Or does he simply hang back out of easy warning range because he thinks Luke is doing something foolish that might endanger his mission? Hmm.

People have made a lot out of the fact that Ben doesn't acknowledge Artoo even though he surely would have recognized Anakin's faithful droid, but there's an easy explanation for that: admitting he has a history with Artoo would open Ben up to questions about that history from Luke -- or even from Artoo, through Threepio -- and it's extremely obvious from the ensuing dialogue that Ben wants to tightly control what Luke knows about the Jedi, his father, and what happened between them twenty years earlier.

There's also a richer context for Ben telling Luke that his uncle didn't hold with his father's ideals and thought he "should have stayed here." If we think of Anakin as the teenage Jedi whom Owen met in Episode II, the quote doesn't make sense -- why would Owen think some guy he'd never seen before ought to stay on Tatooine? But if we consider that Owen knew Shmi Skywalker for years and understood how important her son was to her, along with how hard it was for her when he left, the picture becomes totally different. If Anakin had stayed, Owen might literally have had him for a brother while growing up, and his step-mother would certainly have been much happier in all the years he knew her.

It's worth noting as well how deliberately restrained Obi-wan is in this film, and how intensely Alec Guinness's expressions imply that there's a greater context to virtually everything he sees in and says to Luke. In the wake of the prequels, I found Obi-wan's character much darker in A New Hope -- an idealistic but now somewhat bitter man who's been in hiding for decades and seems perhaps a bit out-of touch and over-zealous when he says, "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you are to come with me to Alderaan." But with the much wider view of his character as portrayed in The Clone Wars and Rebels, his devotion to Anakin and to Luke brightens those expressions with more of their long-ago nobility for me. And it's now clear that he learned a lesson about trying too hard to dictate to Anakin how a Jedi should behave and what the right path was.

As for the original movie's place in the nine-episode arc, now that it's complete ... I think my key takeaway is that Star Wars was always, from the very start, a story about people much more than a story about war amongst the stars. Despite the much flashier special effects of the space battles in subsequent movies (even just one movie later in ESB), the attack on the Death Star in A New Hope remains riveting because everything about it focuses on making the participants feel real. The scene of the Rebels preparing their ships for takeoff is a masterpiece of staging, composition, and editing that immerses the viewer in the intricate mechanics of the effort these people are going through, and the pilots' actions within their cockpits, especially as they start experiencing malfunctions and damage to their fighters, makes it clear that flying one of these contraptions is really hard. The whole movie works like crazy to make its people feel real, even the least-important of the extras, and the result is a film that we as human beings can connect to on a level science fiction rarely achieves.