Opinion | We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore

The ostensible moral of “Star Wars” is anti-technology, pro-“feelings” — a very ’70s sensibility. The Empire is a rigid, militaristic hierarchy, obsessed with its high-tech weaponry. But underlying it is an older tradition, represented by Darth Vader, that’s religious, mystic. The “technological terror” is obliterated, but Vader escapes: Like Sauron, he can’t be destroyed, only driven out. It’s a prescient parable for our own governing technocrats, who thought they were exploiting atavistic fanatics to do their bidding, only to learn too late that the force of hatred was more powerful, and they’d been its servants all along.

“Star Wars” is ultimately a religious film — one of a wave of them in the decade of the Jesus Movement, films as disparate as “The Exorcist” (1973) “Oh, God!” (1977) and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). It’s a caution against allowing your humanity to be effaced: The storm troopers and Vader are masked, robotic, like the police and surveillers in “THX 1138.” Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels (an influence on “Star Wars”) describe how, when people lose faith in science, it must be presented to them in the guise of religion to get them to accept it again. “Star Wars” did the opposite, selling religion and traditional values back to people disenchanted with the church in alluring, futuristic packaging.

Whether the message or the packaging prevailed is hard to gauge. The generations raised on “Star Wars” did not exactly heed Obi-Wan’s advice to turn off their computers (and dread “catching feelings”), but the religion Lucas invented, based vaguely on ’70s West-coast Zen, is now an official one: Jediism received tax-exempt status in the United States in 2015.

The success of “Star Wars” has obviated a lot of its original virtues. Much of the fun of watching the film for the first time, now forever inaccessible to us, was in the slow unveiling of its universe: Swords made of lasers! A Bigfoot who co-pilots a spaceship! A swing band of ’50s U.F.O. aliens! Lucas refuses to explain anything, keeping the viewer as off-balance as a jet-lagged tourist in Benares or Times Square. We don’t see the film’s hero until 17 minutes in; we’re kept watching not by plot but by novelty, curiosity.

Subsequent sequels, tie-in novels, interstitial TV shows, video games and fan fiction have lovingly ground this charm out of existence with exhaustive, literal-minded explication: Every marginal background character now has a name and a back story, every offhand allusion a history. But Mr. Lucas’s universe just doesn’t have the depth of Tolkien’s Middle-earth; it was only ever meant to be sketched, not charted. Sequels and tie-ins, afraid to stray too far off-brand, stick to variations on familiar designs and revive old characters, so there’s nothing new to discover.

Mr. Lucas continued to pursue avant-garde ambitions and a subversive ’70s agenda: The only other films he ever directed, the prequels, are the most depressing blockbusters of all time — kids’ adventure films whose boy hero ends up a baby killer. The only other American movies comparable to them, in this regard, are the “Godfather” trilogy, made by Mr. Lucas’s mentor, Francis Ford Coppola.

We literally can’t see “Star Wars” anymore: Its control-freakish creator won’t allow the original version of the film to be seen and has stubbornly maculated his own masterpiece, second-guessing correct editing decisions, restoring wisely deleted scenes and replacing his breakthrough special effects — historic artifacts in their own right — with ’90s vintage C.G.I., already more dated than the film’s original effects.