The Star Wars franchise is one of my favorites of all time, and while Rogue One and The Empire Strikes Back are at the top of my list, I have a special place in my heart for Episode IV: A New Hope. We’ve done a bunch of 3-act analyses over the past few months, and I thought that it might be fun to dive into this movie and look at how that structure applies here. As always, if you’re wondering about the three-act structure (or want a refresher on how it works), check out this article to learn more about this framework.
Spoiler Alert! This movie came out in 1977, so it’s been around for a long time. If you haven’t seen it yet, what are you waiting for?!? There will be spoilers in this article, so don’t read on unless you’ve watched the film or don’t care about spoilers. Got it? Cool. Okay, let’s dive into our analysis of Star Wars IV: A New Hope.
ACT 1: One of the things that is most significant about the opening of this film is that it starts in medias res (i.e., in the middle of things). We get a little bit of backstory, which appears on screen as rolling text, but then we’re immediately thrown into a space battle between an imperial Star Destroyer and a small Corellian Corvette. There are laser blasts flying left and right and eventually, the smaller ship gets captured.
In the next scene, we are on the Corellian Corvette, watching as the crew desperately tries to defend the ship from the invading stormtroopers and the main antagonist, Darth Vader. Before being captured, Princess Leia (of the rebellion) manages to put some information into a small droid, R2-D2. That droid, along with his counterpart C-3PO, get into an escape pod and fly down to Tatooine, the planet below where the ships are fighting. On Tatooine, the droids get picked up by a sandcrawler filled with Jawas, who ultimately sell them to a moisture farmer.
CHARACTER: Luke Skywalker is a young moisture farmer, living on Tatooine with his aunt and uncle. He dreams of leaving the desolate planet for adventures in the stars, but his uncle insists that it’s too dangerous and he’s better off staying home.
VOICE: As with Die Hard, because this is a film and not a book, there isn’t really a voice. It’s more like a mood. We get the sense that this is an elaborate story, with a lot of moving parts and interesting characters. From the first moment, we get a feeling of adventure and excitement about the story.
WORLD: This is an elaborate world, with many different planets and bits and pieces of lore. In Act 1 we only get a small taste of this world, but already we can tell that it sprawls far beyond the tiny slice we get at the beginning of the story.
PROBLEM: Luke wants to go to the Imperial Academy to learn how to be a pilot. His uncle insists he needs to stay one more season to help on the farm.
EVENT: Luke’s uncle buys the two droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO, not knowing about their background and ties to the rebellion.
R2-D2 insists he is on a mission to find Obi-Wan Kenobi, to whom he must deliver a message. While Luke is at dinner, R2-D2 runs away into the desert. Unable to go after R2-D2 after dark, Luke must wait until morning, at which time he and C-3PO go searching. They find R2-D2 in a valley and get ambushed by sand people. Luke is injured but the sand people are scared away by a loud noise made by Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Obi-Wan helps Luke and takes him back to his house. Obi-Wan tells Luke about his father and gives him his father’s lightsaber. He also views the message from the princess and tells Luke that he must come with him to the planet Alderaan to deliver the droid (and the secret plans it contains) to the rebellion. Luke says he can’t.
PIVOT POINT 1: They leave and in the desert they find a destroyed sandcrawler—the same one that sold the droids to Luke and his uncle. Obi-Wan says that it must have been Imperial troops that destroyed the sandcrawler. Worried for his aunt and uncle, Luke takes his landspeeder back home only to find his home destroyed and his aunt and uncle killed. There is nothing keeping him on Tatooine now, so Luke agrees to go with Obi-Wan.
ACT 2: At this point in the story, we shift gears into “spaceships and monsters” mode. We meet new characters, see all sorts of different alien species, and spend a fair amount of time flying around in space. Luke, Obi-Wan, and the droids go to Mos Eisley spaceport, where they look for a ship to take them to Alderaan. There, they meet Han Solo and his co-pilot, Chewbacca (a Wookiee). They hire their ship, the Millennium Falcon, to go to Alderaan, but as they are leaving the spaceport, they get chased by stormtroopers. Once they leave Tatooine, they manage to evade the Imperial ships surrounding the planet by making a jump to light speed.
Meanwhile, back with Princess Leia in captivity with Darth Vader, she gets taken to the Death Star and handed over to Grand Moff Tarkin, who asks her to reveal the location of the hidden rebel base. When she refuses, he threatens to destroy Alderaan. Leia lies and gives the location of an abandoned rebel base. Tarkin tells the Death Star to fire on Alderaan anyway, destroying the planet.
Back with Luke en route to Alderaan, Obi-Wan teaches him the ways of the “Force” and trains him on how to use the lightsaber. Han Solo insists that the “Force” is hokum and that he’d rather depend on his blaster. They finally arrive at Alderaan only to find the planet isn’t there.
SUPPORTING CAST: Act 2 is where we see a lot of the supporting characters come into their own. These characters get increasingly more important, and the story goes from focusing primarily on Luke to being more of an ensemble cast.
PRINCESS LEIA: Leading up to her rescue, Leia appears in only a few short scenes, but already we can tell she is a force to be reckoned with. She is a strong character with a powerful ability to withstand the various forms of “persuasion” Darth Vader uses to pry the information he wants from her. She is good with a blaster and has a keen mind when it comes to battle strategy. She might be a princess but she’s certainly not a damsel in distress.
HAN SOLO: This guy is a rogue who’s not above shooting first if the situation calls for it. We get hints that he’s got money problems, and in a short scene we discover he is in debt to the mobster Jabba the Hutt. He’s a great pilot who knows a lot about how to fly (and how to get out of sticky situations), but unlike Luke—who’s fairly innocent and sees the world as black and white—Han is all about the grey areas.
OBI-WAN KENOBI: The wisened mentor, Obi-Wan, has been through a lot. He fought in the Clone Wars and lost his best friend, Anakin Skywalker, when he was killed by Darth Vader. By the time we meet him in this story, we get the sense that Obi-Wan is tired and that this is likely to be his last adventure.
DARTH VADER: He might seem imposing with his big, scary helmet, but in this story, Darth Vader is not the main source of evil. You could probably point to the Death Star as the primary antagonist, with Grand Moff Tarkin as the human stand-in primary villain and Vader as more of his second-in-command. We get the sense that Vader is a bit impulsive and quick to anger, often choking people first and asking questions later. As the series progresses, Vader becomes a more complex character, but in this film he is just a straight-up “bad guy.”
CHEWBACCA, C-3PO, and R2-D2: These three round out the group on the Millennium Falcon, and they are primarily used as comic relief.
W.O.R.S.T.: As the story progresses, things get worse and worse for Luke and his friends.
WANT: Luke does not start out wanting to be part of the rebellion, but slowly events unfold that pull him more and more into the role of a rebel. At first, he just wants to take the secret plans on R2-D2 to Alderaan. Once he realizes that the planet is destroyed and the Millennium Falcon gets captured by the Death Star, Luke’s primary motivation is survival. Once on the Death Star, he discovers that the princess is there, so his goal shifts to rescuing her. Finally, once they make a successful rescue and get away from the Death Star, Luke gets fully pulled into the rebellion and helps lead the attack on the battle station.
OBSTACLE: The primary obstacle in this story is the Death Star itself. It starts out in the background, with only a few scenes taking place on it. Once Alderaan is destroyed, however, the battle station becomes more prominent, first as something that Luke and his friends need to escape, then later as something they need to destroy.
RISK: Once Luke’s aunt and uncle are killed, he has very little left to lose. They were his only family, and there was nothing else keeping him on Tatooine. When they get captured by the Death Star, he is willing to risk his own life in order to rescue the princess and escape with his friends.
STAKES: The stakes become clear once we find out what the Death Star can do. It’s a battle station that can destroy an entire planet in a single blast. Unless this power is eliminated, no planet will be safe from the Empire.
TRANSFORMATION: Luke’s transformation is relatively subtle in this film. We know from the beginning that he’s a pretty decent pilot, but in the grand finale of the movie we see just how skilled he really is. We also discover that the Force runs strong in his family (his father was a Jedi) and by the end of the film, he has begun to learn how to channel the Force and use it to defeat the Empire.
MIDPOINT: The midpoint of the story is the moment the Millennium Falcon comes out of light speed at Alderaan’s location only to find a bunch of debris and no planet in sight. In the distance, they see a “small moon” that turns out to be the Death Star. This moment is a Temporary Triumph in that it appears Luke and his friends have succeeded in their mission, only to realize that the planet they seek isn’t there.
Because this is an action-adventure story, there isn’t a whole lot of introspection at this moment, but we do get a hint of it when the Millennium Falcon gets trapped in the Death Star’s tractor beam and Luke says, “I have a bad feeling about this.”
The rest of Act 2 consists of Luke and his friends working together to escape the Death Star and rescue the princess from the prison block. In the process, they have to impersonate stormtroopers, get caught in a garbage compactor, and eventually blast their way free of the battle station.
PIVOT POINT 2: After turning off the tractor beam, Obi-Wan and Darth Vader have a lightsaber duel in which Obi-Wan allows himself to get killed, saying: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Luke witnesses Obi-Wan’s death and is distraught, but he has no time for grief. Instead, he has to jump into one of the Millennium Falcon’s gunner chairs and help Han Solo shoot down TIE fighters so they can escape. This is the moment when Luke first begins to embrace his role as a part of the Rebellion.
ACT 3: The third act of this film is one of the most epic in all of storytelling because there’s not one, but multiple overlapping rules of 3. How awesome is that? But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In Act 3, Luke and his friends arrive at the secret rebel base and analyze the plans R2-D2 is carrying. It turns out that while the Death Star seems impenetrable, it does have one small weakness, which they can exploit. Because the Death Star is built for large-scale attacks, it’s not prepared for small ships approaching it. This means the rebels can send in single-person fighters to fly down a trench until they find a small shaft where they can send proton torpedoes, causing a chain reaction that would destroy the entire battle station. Luke immediately volunteers to go on the mission while Han Solo decides to leave with Chewbacca on the Millennium Falcon.
Act 3 of the three-act structure generally has three components, which I call the 3Cs. These are: crisis, climax, and closure (or denouement). The crisis is the build-up leading to the climax. The climax is the grand finale scene where the central conflict of the story comes to a head. Finally, the closure (or denouement) is the “sigh of relief” following the climax.
CRISIS: This is one of my favorite parts of this film because we have multiple overlapping Rules of 3. As the small ships approach the Death Star, they attack in groups of three. In fact, we see three separate runs where a group of three ships attacks the battle station. The first run includes three Y-wings from Gold Group that attempt to destroy the Death Star and fail. The second group to make the run is a subset of Red Group (the group Luke is part of) and consists of three X-wings. The third group is also from Red Group and includes Luke, his best friend Biggs from Tatooine, and a third pilot called Wedge. The first two groups of fighters get shot down, so it is up to Luke and his group to destroy the battle station.
The overlapping Rules of 3 work as follows. We have three groups of ships and the first two groups fail while the third (Luke’s group) succeeds. In addition, Luke’s group consists of three ships. Two of the three ships are unable to complete the mission, but the third ship (Luke’s) is finally successful.
CLIMAX: After the first two groups of ships are destroyed, we have Luke’s climactic run to destroy the Death Star. We have three pilots attempting to complete this run. Wedge is the first to be eliminated, though he does not die; his ship is damaged and he is unable to help the others so he retreats. Next, we have Biggs, who is covering Luke from Darth Vader (in his special bent-wing TIE Fighter) along with two other enemy ships. Biggs is able to hold the enemy off for a while, but eventually he is shot down. Finally, we have Luke, who at first tries to use the targeting computer to aim the torpedoes. Then he hears Obi-Wan’s voice telling him to “use the Force” so he turns off his computer and follows his instincts.
Just as he’s about to shoot, Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter closes in. But before Vader is able to shoot at Luke, the Millennium Falcon appears and shoots at Vader’s ship, sending it flying off into space. Luke aims and the torpedoes go into the shaft. The Death Star explodes as the remaining rebel ships fly away.
ENDING TYPE: This is a happy ending. While Luke doesn’t start out trying to destroy the Death Star (he doesn’t even know it exists), he does want to stand up to the Empire. Once he realizes what the Death Star can do, his goal becomes to destroy it, which he does, making this a Happy Ending. He gets what he wants (to stand up to the Empire) and still wants it.
We could argue that this film is also a Change of Heart ending because Luke’s goal does shift as the story progresses. That said, because his underlying goal (standing up to the Empire) stays the same throughout the film, I would still call this a Happy Ending instead.
DENOUEMENT: The film ends with a scene back on the 4th moon of Yavin, where the rebel base is located. All the rebels have congregated in what appears to be a temple of sorts. The Princess is at the front and Luke, Han Solo, and Chewbacca walk up the aisle toward her. She awards Luke and Han medals. We see that the droids are repaired and happy (R2-D2 had been damaged in the Death Star battle). Everyone applauds and the credits roll.
CONCLUSION: This film is a great example of how to use the Rule of 3 to build tension in the crisis and climax of a story. In this case we have multiple Rules of 3 in play: the three groups of ships attacking the Death Star, each group containing three ships. This means that each run down the Death Star trench is like a little mini-Rule of 3. Then, of course, we also have the final group of three ships which includes Luke, and ultimately is able to destroy the battle station.
We could also argue that we have rules of 3 with various groupings of characters. For example, on Tatooine, we have Luke, Obi-Wan, and the droids (who operate as a unit in most scenes). Later when we are in the Death Star and the characters are rescuing the princess, we have Luke, Leia, and Han Solo as the primary characters. Yes, we also have Chewbacca, but in the Death Star escape section of this film, he acts almost as an extension of Han rather than a separate character in his own right.
So, in the end, we have Rules of 3 surrounding the plot structure as well as Rules of 3 in terms of character groupings, making this film a wonderful example of the many ways the Rule of 3 might come into play in a story.
Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!
P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.
