Star Wars IV: A New Hope
The 45th Anniversary of The Birth of a Saga
A New Hope is a perfect rendition of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. It follows every single beat Campbell wrote out to the T, but presents it as a space odyssey with a spectacular flare that makes it hard pressed to forget.
George Lucas’ first movie with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is one of the most iconic stories to ever spark a franchise with its illustrious world and practical effects to mark the silver screen.
Despite its out-of-this-world storytelling and the intricacies of the Republic and the Jedi, etc., Luke Skywalker’s journey is one that is tried and true and definitely one to last the ages.
I mean, it’s so popular that we celebrate and have epic franchise deals for it even today, 45 years after its release to the world :D
1. Ordinary World
Don’t let the desert planet with 2 suns fool you. Luke is farmer. Tired of his ordinary world. Blue milk, raised by relatives. If I started off the description with the latter, we could pretend Luke is living a Southern life and he wants to go off to play football or something else…manly.
2. Call To Adventure
Buying R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) and C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) opens a can of worms for Luke. The R2 unit has a mind of its own and is determined to complete some sort of mission and goes missing almost immediately. Luke, unbeknownst to him and him just trying his best, begins the first step in this journey by going after R2 and the secret message inside him.
Meeting Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness), who tells him his father was a Jedi and that Luke himself must also answer the call is met with immediate awe.
This little farmer boy, this nobody in the desert farmland of nowhere, could be a somebody.
How terrifying.
3. Refusal Of The Call
So Luke obviously calls BS and trips, stumbles, falls into denial.
It can’t be him, it should be someone else more worthy, made of sterner stuff, who knows what it means to be a hero.
Luke is grateful for Kenobi’s influence and presence, but he doesn’t think he is Main Character worthy.
And besides, he needs to help his Aunt Beru (Shelagh Fraser) and Uncle Owen (Phil Brown) run the farm, who, as we all know, do not meet the happiest of endings.
4. Meeting The Mentor
This step dips into the Call to Adventure a bit because it’s upon Kenobi and Luke’s meeting, into Kenobi nursing Luke back to health that they have the Jedi conversation and Kenobi receives the hologram message from Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher).
Kenobi proffers a lightsaber to this idiot:
and everything feels very exciting and cool for our hero save for the fact that he feels way out of his league, which makes us relate to him.
5. Crossing The Threshold
Luke decides to help Kenobi, only after returning home to his Aunt and Uncle burned to a crisp. With no where else to go, Luke throws his lot in with the shady old men who’s lived at the edge of the desert his whole life.
Sounds super safe and TBH I’d do the same.
6. Tests, Allies, Enemies
Here we meet Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia and Darth Vader (David Prowse) and the hose of Imperial and Rebel forces.
This is basically the Rising Action if you remember that from elementary story plotting.
You know the stuff. Trials and tribulations, stuff the protag has to go through to discover themselves.
7. Approach To The Inmost Cave
The inmost cave is best literally represented in Episode V on Dagobah, but in Episode IV, it’s the newly minted squad trying to deliver Leia to Alderaan but meeting nothing but space rocks where it once lived.
Oh and then being sucked into the Death Star and needing to escape that nonsense, where all their troubles stem from.
8. Ordeal
The team needs to disable the tractor beam, save the princess, and escape. Easy Peezy right? I mean, it’s a fun delve into the world within the Death Star and the ingenuity of the characters getting out of a hairy situation, but we lose Kenobi and that’s a horrid moment for Luke.
Kenobi has become that father figure for him, and he loses that within a few days and must carry on without him.
9. Reward (Seizing The Sword)
After escaping the Death Star, Luke and Co. join the rebellion to take the despots down since they have its faulty blueprints.
Luke isn’t that scared farmer boy anymore. He’s been galvanized into action and justice, either by a moral code or by fear, who knows.
But our boy is ready to take down the Empire or die trying.
10. The Road Back
The Empire probably snuck a tracker on the Millennium Falcon and so we get an extra intergalactic space fight right before the really big intergalactic space fight.
Luke and Han defeat the enemy TIE-fighters by going PEW PEW PEW in their little blaster turrets aboard the Falcon and they have no choice but to engage in legitimate warfare with the Empire, now tracking them to the rebel bases.
11. Resurrection
The resurrection is the taking down of the preliminary Death Star. There’s one shitty shaft that goes down into the core of the ship that, if perfectly shot, would detonate the entire thing which if you think about it is severely poor planning and the engineers, excuse my language, deserve the boot for that design flaw.
Luke calls on the Force and manages to send this shot down perfectly and win the first battle in a lengthy war against the Republic.
Luke doesn’t die. I mean, Obi-Wan does and so does everyone on the Death Star, but Luke lives through the rebirth, and finally accepts his destiny as a Jedi.
12. Return With The Elixir
Luke can’t very well go home since his relatives are dead dead, but he returns to the rebels a hero, with his head held high. There, he is presented some medals on ceremony and things seem real peaceful.
Until we hit the opening scroll text of Episode V:
I fact-checked my beats against the Story Lab’s, and they have a much more in-depth, formal analysis of this story on their website.