Culture news Star Wars owes a lot to this film released 8 years before: some scenes are downright copy-pasted
It’s known that behind each masterpiece there are a ton of influences – sometimes more or less obvious… This is obviously the case with Star Wars, and here we’re talking to you about one of its inspirations.
If you only have eyes for Star Wars, you probably know that George Lucas – its creator and director – was inspired by quite a few films to create his masterpiece… We can for example cite the cinema by Akira Kurosawa (The Hidden Fortress), Lawrence of Arabia, or even Metropolis! But that would be forgetting war films, including The Battle of Britain. Directed by Guy Hamilton and released in 1969, the feature film focuses on a crucial aerial confrontation of World War II. An ideal base for Lucas to develop the visual grammar of his X-Wings and “TIE”.
Disturbing similarities
As reported by a Star Wars fan on the forum “The Cantina”, we can notably find an extract from The Battle of Britain where two soldiers speak on the radio – and which is very reminiscent of the exchanges of the Rebel Alliance during the attack on the Death Star, on A New Hope. “War and automobile films shaped George Lucas’ young life in Modesto, California” – explains the magazine The Smithsonian. “Both can be guessed in the space battles of Star Wars.” Still regarding war films, Reach for the Sky would also have been important.
Of course, if we can cite the works that influenced Star Wars, we can reproduce the exercise in the other direction, with the projects that were inspired by the work of George Lucas… On this point: a whole section of popular culture and science fiction would probably not exist without the adventures of Luke Skywalker | his friends. For example, we can cite Battlestar Galactica, Stargate or (on a much more recent note) the film Rebel Moon by Zack Snyder. All this thanks to a creative who wanted to give dynamism to space battles considered too slow at the time. Well done, Lucas.