Geektastic Movies for 2015

[Grieve]

I am not sure what long term significance means but their were certainly great Sci Fi movies/show before Star Wars that influenced Lucas. You make Starwars seem like everything changed for SciFi post Starwars and that isn't the case at all. Their was plenty of quality SciFi out there before Starwars.

Well apart from the fact that a bunch of the movies you listed came after AFTER Star Wars, including Close Encounters, The Thing, Alien, Outland, Mad Max, and The Black Hole, I think you are missing the point. Star Wars wasn't just sci-fi, it was space opera. It was epic and huge in a way sci-fi had never been before (except maybe 2001), from the very first seconds when you see that massive star destroyer come into the screen and then keep on coming and coming and coming. I love all the movies you mentioned (and I've seen them all, mostly several times). But nothing before Star Wars was anything like it. The reason why it doesn't seem so special now is that so much that came after it WAS like it. But back then, no-one had seen it anything on that scale before.

As for Luke being whiny, c'mon, they were trying to give the guy an arc. Lucas wanted him to go from the whiny kid at the start, to the maimed and disillussioned kid at the end of Empire, to the (mostly) calm and focused Jedi at the end. Newsflash - teenagers ARE whiny.