I wrote this in 1995, and it makes quite interesting reading in the light of the current Episode I hysteria.

SOMETIME IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, George Lucas had a vision. He'd seen 2001: A Space Odyssey and like everyone else he was mightily impressed. But he was also disappointed, for although 2001 was by turns majestic and awesome and breathtaking, Kubrick's stunning and incomprehensible masterpiece was stifled by its meticulous adherence to realism. That Douglas Trumbull's space scenes remain almost believable a quarter of a century later is a testament to Kubrick's painstaking research, but what Lucas saw was, well, a little bit boring.

Lucas's vision was a simple one, and an honest one: he didn't want NASA and Pan Am and plausibility, he wanted freighters spewing cargoes of exotic spices into the void and Lensmen and Kzinti warriors corruscating across the galaxy in their implausible inertia-less spaceships, bumping each other off with equally implausible energy weapons. He wanted Asimov, Doc Smith, Larry Niven and Frank Herbert and he wanted to take them out of the dusty pages of the 1930s pulps and splash them across the screen in CinemaScope and Dolby Surround. Trumbull told him it couldn't be done, and most of the studios wouldn't touch it, but Lucas's inexperience was tempered with enough tenacity that he somehow raised the money and did it anyway.

The result, Star Wars, was and is all the things I read about when I was growing up. It's the golden age of sci-fi - in your face. Unoriginal though its source material is, Star Wars is irreversibly embedded in the global psyche; 2001 isn't, Forbidden Planet isn't, and Flash Gordon isn't - Star Wars was something else, something important enough that it was able to capture the public's imagination in the way few films have before or since. 'Star Wars' has entered the language as a synonym for the highest of high tech. But why?

Star Wars portrayed, with an unprecedented veneer of authenticity, the sort of thing die-hard sci-fi fans had been reading about for years. Vehicles looked well used, and spaceships were old bangers held together with sticky tape and string. The costumes didn't look artificial, and the props were handled without the self-consciousness that is the downfall of so many SF films. We know it's not real, and any deep analysis of the science is doomed to failure, but the attention to detail is such that suspending our disbelief is easy. It's that gritty realism, however counterfeit it may be, that makes Star Wars one of the finest sci-fi films of all time.

By the time The Empire Strikes Back hit the streets, the bandwagon was picking up speed. People looked at Star Wars and decided it was the special effects that made it work. So, more of the same should be better, right? Well, Return of The Jedi showed that wasn't true. Star Wars didn't have much of a plot, but there was a simple storyline. Empire followed that up by continuing the simple storyline. Jedi was conceived as the final chapter in a serial, where the various odds and ends had to be tied up. It seems this was the writer's only brief, and all the money went on production.

Somewhere between Empire and Jedi, it seems to me that an anonymous studio executive got his way and engineered a subtle shift in the target audience. Star Wars was mostly played straight, and Empire was a surprisingly dark film with a downbeat ending. Jedi, on the other hand, was a more sentimental and clearly kiddie-targeted affair that betrayed true aficionados. This kiddie appeal combined with appalling comic-book plot resolutions and such unconscionable production decisions as unmasking Vader obscured genuine grandeur in the film's backdrops.

It seems to me the problems of plot resolution could have been swept aside with a single stroke. I hate to cite Star Trek as a good example of anything, but the trekkies have really got the situation sussed. The Trek movies, bland though they are, avoid most pretensions of linearity and become self-contained episodes. The various TV Star Treks do it even better, with different sets of characters for TNG, Deep Space 9 and Voyager.

If they stick to Lucas's fabled nine-part plan, at least the next Star Wars series will carry little baggage in the way of plot constraints. Now all they have to do is find a good director. I always thought the best thing they could do for the next Star Wars series would be to give the director's and producer's chairs to younger people - after all, movie-making has changed in twenty years. Get some new ideas in there, but retain the spirit and look of the original and let's not o/d on special effects. The rumour that Lucas himself will direct is a fascinating one: surely he, if anyone, can rekindle the fire. I just shudder at the thought of him bringing his pal Spielberg in on the act...