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In flight again from the forces of the galactic Empire led by Lord Darth Vader, the Rebel Alliance has taken shelter on a frozen planet in the Hoth System. While on patrol, young Luke Skywalker is attacked by a snow creature, and in his delirium hears his old mentor, Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi, instructing him to go to the Dagobah System for further instruction in the use of the 'Force' and the skills of the ancient Jedi knights. When Hoth is overrun by Vader's stormtroopers, Luke heads for Dagobah with the 'droid' R2-D2, while his friend, the mercenary space pilot Han Solo, barely escapes with his Wookie companion Chewbacca, Princess Leia Organa, and R2's fellow droid, C-3PO. Luke begins instruction under wizened old master Yoda, while Han dodges imperial fighters through an asteroid belt, eventually heading for the Bespin System, where his old rival Lando Calrissian operates a mining colony. Darth Vader has preceded him, however; the group is captured and Han is tortured (Vader intends to lure Luke from Dagobah and press him into the service of the Empire). Sensing his friends' danger, Luke abandons his training (despite warnings from Yoda and Ben Kenobi that he is still too inexperienced to resist Vader's dark influence). Luke confronts Vader in a laser duel, during which the latter reveals that he is in fact Luke's long-lost Jedi father. Rejecting his enemy's blandishments, however, Luke is nearly ejected into space, before being rescued by Lando, Leia, Chewbacca and C-3PO, who have fought their way free from imperial stormtroopers. But Han has been put into a carbon-frozen state and taken away by a bounty hunter. The reunited friends gird themselves for his rescue and further battle with the Empire.

The most dazzling trick in the Star Wars armoury remains its opening caption, announcing that what we are about to see takes place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away". The trick neatly conflates past and future, fairy-tale and science fiction; but it also neatly evades the responsibility of science fiction (to imagine the future we deserve) and the challenge of fairy-tale (to create a world in which we might have lived and can therefore believe). The Star Wars series, now in unpromising infancy, basically asks us to imagine and believe nothing - its technological sophistication does away with the need for the former, and its camp melding of myths in storyline and characters acknowledges the impossibility of the latter. With the revelation that Lucas has such a series in mind, even the genuinely 'fun' elements of the first film - its comic-strip eclecticism, its movie-serial dash and narrative tropes - are pedantically filled out and institutionalised, much as the galactic landscape is by effects technology. Star Wars will actually become an episode in a movie serial - to be subtitled "Episode IV - A New Hope", with episodes I-III and VI to IX still to come - though to judge by Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back, its continuing logic will simply be more of the same. Empire begins, in fact, as if Star Wars had never been, with the Republicans still in flight from the Empire's totalitarian forces. That story counts for less than gimmicks, and characters less than both, might be judged from the lack of resonance in the one narrative revelation, concerning Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. The choice of Irvin Kershner as director, presumably to help bring out the human elements over the comic-strip streamlining of Lucas' own direction, proves in the event ill-advised: the human elements are cutely second-hand (Han Solo and Princess Leia's romantic sparring out of Thirties comedy) and soon overplayed at the expense of comic-strip drive (Solo's malfunctioning hyperdrive system might churlishly be taken as a metaphor here). The defence that this is all good clean fantasy, closer to sword and sorcery than science fiction, is also scuttled by the imaginative shortcomings of the Yoda episode, where Muppetry meets The Lord of the Rings. What the series so far appeals to is audience naively rather than innocence (the perfunctory conflict of good and evil is less the driving force than the steady escalation of special effects), and cynicism rather than wonder (this is Buck Rogers on a super-colossal budget, inviting us to lose ourselves in the gloss not the story). That Steven Spielberg, who communicated a more 'creative' wonder in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is to direct Lucas' next fantasy production, Raiders of the Lost Ark, might be a greater force for good than all the Force collected here.

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