Origin: This first film in the famous set of movies was released in 1977, and according to IMDb, it was written and directed by George Lucas. It stars (no pun intended) Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, and follows his story of attempting to rescue a Rebel Leader, Princess Leia from the Empire.
Purpose: This film was created primarily to entertain. Unlike many popular films, it was not based off a novel, but a novel, The Adventures of Luke Skywalker was published about 6 months before the release of the film. This film had several new special effects, and required a whole new team to be set up for in order to create these ground breaking sci-fi effects. The director didn't follow the traditional sci-fi perspective, and instead created a future world that had been "used up" according starwars.com. This broke the template for many previous norms of sci-fi films.
Value: This film gives us insight to what was happening in the time period. The Cold War was still going on in the 70's, as was the Space Race. The film, with lots of science and astronomy, relates to the attention surrounding the Space Race. In fact according to thecoldwar.org, the Space Defense Initiative was dubbed Star Wars, which shows the effect this film had on the space race.
Limitations: This film doesn't really accurately describe any conflict or race between the USSR and the USA. It's helpful by showing the mentality surrounding the time period, but gives no insight to how the real life conflict occurred.
Side Note: Interested in more about the space race? Well, check out this other project that I have done for this class!
Sources:
http://www.coldwar.org/articles/80s/SDI-StarWars.asp
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/01/weird-differences-between-the-first-star-wars-movie-and-its-preceding-novelization
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/
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