Watching Star Wars 22 years on, the early doubts are easy enough to understand. The hindsight giggle at Brian De Palma's preview remarks is aimed at his financial miscalculation, rather than his artistic philistinism. The special effects are very impressive: it is appropriate that a large part of Lucas's fortune should accrue from Industrial Light & Magic, the wow-shot company he developed to market the revolutionary techniques used in the original movie. But, in its elements of conventional dialogue and plot, the first film has a meandering beginning in which oddly camp androids, C-3PO and R2-D2, glide about between Mark Hamill, whose first try at Luke Skywalker stands as the wettest performance in a leading role until the final scenes of Titanic, and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia with the ludicrous ear-muff hairdo, presumably an evolutionary response to the cold winters on her home planet of Tatooine.
Mel Brooks subsequently made the Lucasspoof, Spaceballs (1987), but there are many moments in Star Wars itself that feel like a rare example of an original creation already descending to self-parody. Only with the arrival of Harrison Ford as Solo - a nice send-up of the cynical old flyer in so many war films - and the first scenes of Darth Vader, the faceless leader of the enemy forces, does the kind of momentum develop that could seriously be expected to keep viewers on their seats.
Because we all now know the ending - not of Star Wars, but of its reception in America and elsewhere; the millions of tickets, toys, tears and theories that have followed - a viewing of the first movie in 1999 feels like arriving in the desert to find hundreds of thousands of people kneeling in prayer, weeping and wailing in the direction of a tent. Entering the tent, you find a large throne on which sits the inspiration for this total devotion: it is a small, squeaking mouse.
Here, then, are six explanations of why a science-fiction film that was originally almost giggled out of Hollywood has moved beyond entertainment and taken on the shape of a faith. True believers are warned that they may find some of what follows offensive . . .
The first two theories - which can be summarised as Infantilism and ExtraTerrestrialism - are strictly cinematic. By Infantilism, I mean that one explanation of the cleverness of Star Wars is that it never over-estimates the emotional age of the core movie audience. Part of the legend of the film is that the only early viewer to appreciate it, supposedly predicting that "this will take $100 million", was Steven Spielberg. But - according to this thesis - he would get it, wouldn't he?
Because modern cinema's two great money-spinners - Lucas and Spielberg - are both regressives, producing what in effect are big-budget children's movies with enough visual panache and sub-spiritual mumbojumbo to appeal to adults as well. The plot of Star Wars draws heavily from fairytale (the attempt to rescue an imprisoned princess, who is discovered asleep) and nods to Tolkien in the large quantities of furry creatures featured.
This raises, by inference, the matter of Spielberg's ET, and introduces the second hypothesis about this phenomenon: Extra-Terrestrialism. Although it is a truism of once-famous producers drinking too much in Beverly Hills that public taste cannot be predicted, examination of box-office history reveals that a high percentage of the most famous movies of all time do share one element or, strictly, the lack of it: their central characters are either wholly or partially removed from the soil on which the cinemas stand.
Back and The Return Of The Jedi, this factor applies to ET, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and, most recently, Titanic, in which the extraterrestrialism is different but still central. If Hollywood is indeed a dream factory, then the most popular reverie it sells seems to be the one about leaving Earth in some way. Lucas and Spielberg - now responsible between them for six vastly lucrative space movies - have become the movie tribunes of a generation that heard the doomed Kennedy promise to extend the American empire into space. Lucas sketched out his trilogy soon after man walked on the Moon.
Kennedy enters the third explanation for the trilogy's success: Political.
It can be argued that Lucas has constructed a myth that conflates JFK's dream - man in command of space - with President Ronald Reagan's nightmare: invasion by the Soviets. And, with perfect historical neatness, Reagan's most famous policy innovation - the attempt to create an atmospheric shield off which Soviet missiles would bounce - took its name from Lucas's film.
The second and third movies were released during the rise and apotheosis of President Reagan, and it is possible that his presidency was his last and greatest contribution to the Hollywood that had invented him.
Many have pointed out that the basic story of Star Wars concerns the struggle of a good and decent people - symbolised by the Aryan Luke Skywalker - against a hostile empire, whose thugs wear tunics like eastern European army costumes and who declare that "fear will keep the local systems in line". Consciously or not, the three films are clearly an exoneration of US foreign policy during the Cold War. Where Spielberg has used his accumulating money and status to make increasingly liberal films, Lucas's politics feel deeply conservative. In Clerks, the film buffs express outrage that, at the end of The Return Of The Jedi, a huge new enemy space-station is blown up, killing all the construction workers. This has been seen by some as the ultimate in union-bashing.
And, apart from the Cold War symbolism, the planet of the good suffers from an enemy within: a gang of thugs headed by the huge, bloated slug, Jabba The Hutt. Depending on how charitable you are, Jabba - standing for a domestic malevolence that distracts from the fight against the true enemy abroad - represents either immigrants (his speech is sub-titled), Richard Nixon, the Mafia or, in his great, slothful fatness, capitalist greed.
A fourth possibility is that the appeal to Americans of the underlying myths is not that they are political but that they meet the national craving for Religion. Francis Ford Coppola advised Lucas when the success of the series became known that, rather than extend the sequence cinematically, he should found a religion with the scripts as the scriptures. This was a shrewd joke, as the films contain a simple but clear theology of good and evil.
Although widely assumed by the non-obsessed to take place in the future, the action of the trilogy happens, an opening caption establishes, "Long ago in a far, far galaxy . . ." So the films are a creation myth. Darth Vader, who left the paradise of Tatooine to seek to destroy it from without, is a sci-fi rewrite of Milton's Satan. The concept of the "Force", as outlined by Guinness's Obi-Wan Kenobi, is reverent but vague enough to appeal to adherents of both the established faiths and New Age creeds; an energy that can be used for either good or ill. When Guinness declares that: "I felt a great disturbance in the force," the words recall Christ's when he sensed that energy had drained from him when a sick woman touched his hem. This is merely one of many examples in the scripts of displacement religion.
Han Solo begins as an atheist - "There are no mystical forces controlling my destiny!" - before questioning his scepticism in the face of the example of Luke and ObiWan.