Star Wars, Considered

Quite a short piece, but here's a reviewer who gets it. She even nails my thoughts on ESB, and manages to make a point that my hundreds of repeat viewings didn't catch:

Star Wars: A New Hope is actually pretty goofy — the hero, for one thing, doesn't show up for something like a half-hour — but Lucas' genius is that he creates a perfect narrative snowball. The film gathers characters like lint — two fugitive robots run into a dead-end farmboy and are found by an aging general who leads them to a mercenary who takes them to a princess who gets them sucked into an entire resistance movement. And the stakes escalate relentlessly: Luke sets out one morning to find a runaway robot; seemingly by day's end, he's blowing up a space station that destroys entire planets.