Josh Whiting’s review published on Letterboxd:
I've been watching this movie compulsively since I was 3 years old. My son is 3 years old now, and I bought the original trilogy on Blu-Ray a while ago mainly with the intention of watching them with him. However, I don't think I'll be doing that anytime soon unless he starts asking about it and showing some major interest in it. Despite my childhood obsession it's been probably 10 or 15 years since I've watched it all the way through, so that might be enough distance from my childhood fervor to comment on it in some constructive way now.
With that disclaimer, the main thing I noticed this time around is how little time and emotion is spent on the deaths of Luke's aunt and uncle, Leia's entire home planet, the other rebel fighters who don't make it out of the death star battle, etc. The rare exception, Luke's sadness over the loss of Obi-Wan, gets a five second "I can't believe he's gone" scene before the action picks up again. The biggest worry at the end of things is whether R2 is going to be fixed, not sadness over the fallen fighters, nor any concern about what the next steps are for fighting the empire now that they have blown up the death star. But to spend any more time on that sort of thing would have just distracted from the action. I remember now that when I watched this as a child, even those brief moments of characters talking and bickering on the ship between action scenes seemed to go on forever and were kind of irritating. As an adult they didn't bother me quite as much. I find this an extremely informative observation for the purposes of trying to write a story, especially an action story for children. Strangely all the death and violence didn't matter to me much when I was a young kid, but now I guess I'm more sensitive to it or at least I want more respect for death and pain as an adult.
Something I absolutely love is how very little is done in the way of expositional and world-building dialogue to explain what is going on other than the text that scrolls up at the beginning. That text is actually totally unnecessary to the enjoyment of the show, because I couldn't read yet as a young child when I started watching the show. It just gave a sense of importance to my young viewing mind.The visuals do so much of this world-building work, and the few references to past events, the force, etc. are brief enough to engage and mystify without bogging things down in backstories. They wisely resisted the urge to show and tell everything. Again, all is laser-focused on the action and propelling the plot forward.
I'm sure that this has been said by pretty much everyone, but that CGI stuff that Lucas added in the 90s or whenever is pointless and not that great (they lost the laser-focus mentioned above), but I was relieved to find that it wasn't quite as intrusive or distracting as I feared it would be.
So this perhaps is how you build a mythology: you start with one small, exciting piece, some intriguing hints, and lots of action, and let the imaginations of the audience fill in the rest.