Next to Donald Trump, Darth Vader Looks Pretty Silly

Now nearly a half century old, Star Wars has become a fixed touchstone we can revisit to understand how much the earth around it has moved. And boy, have things moved a lot in the past ten years.

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I was trawling through the streaming services for something to watch recently and discovered the original Star Wars trilogy on Hulu. It landed very differently as I was watching it this time around. Now nearly a half century old, Star Wars has become a fixed touchstone we can revisit to understand how much the earth around it has moved. And boy, have things moved since I watched twenty years ago.

At its release in 1977, critics, whether they liked it or not, didn’t take it seriously. I remember sitting on the living room floor with my mother (I was nine) as she read the capsule summary in the Idaho Statesman. It referenced a beeping trash can and a disposable B-movie plot involving half-baked mysticism and space swashbuckling. We shrugged and decided to give it a shot.

Space movies weren’t really a thing yet—nor were summer blockbusters. 2001, A Space Odyssey had come out a decade earlier, but it was a philosophical meditation. It was released just 23 years after a nuclear bomb ended a world war and amid a Cold War in which two superpowers were racing to the stars. Its visuals captured the wonder of the age, but the dark plot reflected the growing ambivalence of people who were starting to wonder if all this change wasn’t happening a mite too fast.

Nine years later, we were in a different place. If 2001 was at the far unsettling, thought-provoking end of science fiction, Star Wars was on the other silly end with big explosions, campy dialogue, and nothing whatsoever to provoke thoughts (or even thought). The older critics, who had lived through a vast war with real stormtroopers, were generally more likely to dismiss it. Pauline Karl and New York Magazine’s John Simon, born in 1919 and 1925, wrote famously negative reviews. Robert Ebert, born in 1942, was far more positive. Ebert was raised in the pop art technicolor of the post-war years, when life was safe and suburban. The lessons of the great wars were being drained of nuance, distilled and packaged into archetypes by the time he was in high school—the very ones George Lucas (born 1944) later presented in Star Wars.

Then there was my generation, still in our tender years when the Millennium Falcon blasted off. Star Wars wasn’t the first blockbuster, of course—movies had been big, disposable entertainment for decades. But the summer spectacle was born in the 1970s. It was a new form of movie that fused lowbrow subject matter with the most expensive and sophisticated filmmaking technologies, all aimed squarely at the teen and pre-teen set. Star Wars used puppets and animatronics rather than CGI to create their fantastic cast, and in 2025 it looks a little dated. But Lucas’ vision of spaceships, laser blasters, and hyperspace travel became templates movies have used ever since. Visually, it was a completely new experience, and nine-year-old brains across America were blown.

I have no memory of the movie itself. (Rocky, from a year earlier, was vastly more memorable.) At the risk of being excommunicated from my generation, I’ll admit I’ve never really loved the initial trilogy. It was fine. Lucas has real strengths and did change film history. He understood giant set pieces and how to pace an action movie with their careful arrangement. He doesn’t get humans, though, so the characterization and dialogue is laughable. Worse, he’s sentimental, so you end up with pat storylines and a failure to wrestle with real issues. In one scene, for example, Leia watches the Death Star destroy her home planet, and in the next she’s cracking jokes with Han. We see that Darth Vader is bad, and the rebels are scrappy, and that’s the end of the political elaboration. The Force?—the less said about that the better.

Whether the trilogy is objectively good or bad is less interesting than what its interpretation at any given moment reveals about that time, or about the interpreters. In 1997, Lucas re-released Star Wars. The 1990s were the 20th century’s happiest years, a lull following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time when Americans were convinced of the triumph of their moral universe. World wars, the Cold War, the creep of communism, the threat of nuclear annihilation—these existential matters had all been settled. And for the comfortable Americans, all in the affirmative. We had defeated the dark side.

That 1997 release reinterpreted Star Wars as a piece of nostalgia that affirmed our goodness. Lucas did this literally, using CGI to alter the movie and change key moments. In one scene in the original version, Han Solo shoots Greedo, a menacing bounty hunter set to haul Han back to Jabba the Hut. In the re-release, Lucas recut the scene to have Greedo shoot first. In that triumphant American decade, Lucas indulged his impulse to darken or lighten any of the morally gray areas so they appear brightly white or black.

To be fair, that was the mood of the era. To have a good guy shoot a bad guy without provocation was to unsettle the pat morality of the 1990s-era Star Wars. It fundamentally changes the plot as well, because in the original, Lucas presents Han as a dubious figure of suspect ethics—he’s an ask-no-questions smuggler, after all. But like a a government cleaning up its history, Han’s story is laundered so that the real criminal becomes a lovable rogue.

Typical of Lucas’ instinct, these changes scarred his original art.

In reducing the story to a simple Manichean dichotomy, he robbed evil of its seduction and threat, and good of its perseverance and hard work. Good and evil became inevitabilities, as stripped of mystery as the Force with the midichlorians he was about to unleash. In real life, countries do fall under the sway of evil leaders, and the reasons are anything but black and white. But in the sunny 1990s, we didn’t really dwell on that.

Which brings us to 2025. The existence of an evil superpower with unspeakable destructive capacities (if not a Death Star) has suddenly become a whole lot more tangible. The thorny questions Lucas ignores in his movies are today quite potent: how does a Darth Vader arise; why do people willingly submit to such a figure; and how does a movement like the Empire’s come to see itself as a moral agent and the force for good?

The closest Star Wars gets to wrestling with these issues is Vader’s unconvincing deathbed conversion to the light side. In the original trilogy, motivation is a major gap in the plot. Outside of minions and the characters in the Mos Eisley cantina, we don’t actually see regular people very often. Do they support the Empire? Are they better off under Vader? What are the Empire’s goals? Pursuing the dark side corrupts the hearts of Emperor Palpatine and Vader, but Lucas never lets us see the humans behind these stereotypes, the flesh-and-blood people wrestling with their moral compass.

In 2025, Star Wars seems pallid and unconvincing. For the past eight years, Americans have been wrestling with an autocrat with a will to ultimate power. If you only understood humanity through the lens of Star Wars, where the evil of the Empire is self-evidently a bad thing, you would imagine that people would rise up to stop such a leader. Star Wars fails today because it lacks the imagination to offer examples of a population who like Darth Vader, who want to live in his world. Lucas presents the Empire as an unthinking, unreasoning force of evil. Nowhere in the movies does he offer the perspective of real people who might support it and help give the empire its strength. It’s just a childish version of good and evil archetypes.

As Trump’s second term begins to take form, we actively grope for metaphors to explain our times. 1930s Germany has emerged as the front-runner, though others (Mussolini, Putin, and Orbán) crop up from time to time. Star Wars is not much help. If you know the good guys are going to win, you don’t need to understand the bad guys. In a world in which a plurality have chosen the bad guy and the outcome is anything but assured, we need stories with more explanatory power.

Just this week, in the real world, the administration jailed a mayor for protesting its immigration actions and threatened to jail Democratic congresspeople for theirs. The DoJ opened a probe into Letitia James, who prosecuted Trump in New York. At the same time, Trump burnished his imperial ambitions by accepting a $400 “flying palace” from Qatar to use as Air Force One. Many people, looking at all this, have decided it looks pretty good. Some want to join Trump on that plane. Even those who are unsettled by his actions, like white-shoe law firms and Columbia University, have joined Trump rather than the rebel alliance.

Donald Trump is a flesh-and-blood dictator who is attempting to seize control of our country. It’s a confusing time, and people fall on a spectrum in their willingness to support the emerging empire. Next to all this, Darth Vader looks pretty silly.