Star Wars: The Force Awakens has finally arrived, and with it have come good-to-great reviews that almost universally note how the film apes the plot and characters of the original trilogy. Of course, that trilogy is itself a pastiche of earlier works, and as the franchise progresses it accrues a compounding debt to itself while deepening its influence on cinema at large.
Kyle Kallgren honors that debt and influence in the above video, an astonishing feat of editing that retells the story of Star Wars’ first installment, A New Hope, using only footage from other films, TV shows, and videogames. It’s a terrific piece of entertainment, but an even better work of criticism: Kallgren’s crafted an exhaustive deconstruction of how George Lucas’s monomythic themes have anchored art for decades.
