Star Wars: The Archive

This was the first movie whose coverage I archived, but now I’ve archived the archive!

• The Ultimate Story Checklist: Star Wars 
• How Star Wars Proves That Legacies are Better than Prophesies 
• The Value of Obi Wan’s Counterintuitive Metaphor Family in Star Wars
• Luke as Emotional Manipulator in Star Wars
• The Value of the Half-Fact in Star Wars
• The Way the Worlds Work in Star Wars 
• The Value of Shaggy Dog Storytelling in Star Wars
• Considering Luke's Late Introduction and the Deleted Scenes of Star Wars
• James Kennedy wrote an in-depth letter (1, 2, 3) about why we like Luke, and I responded
• How Star Wars Tapped into Real Life National Pain
• How Return of the Jedi Dared to Confront the Great Hypocrisy
• How Star Wars Set Its Tone and Rewrote Our Genre Expectations
• Freudian and Jungian Arcs in Star Wars
• The Value of Moving Up the Timeline in Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back 
• The Value of Writing it Bad Today so You Can Write It Better Tomorrow
• The Way That No World Works in the Prequels
• And finally, I did a four-part series (1, 2, 3, 4) entitled The Force Awakens Was Great Until It Wasn’t 

When I updated the checklist to version six, I lost some answers that were interesting from the longer checklist, so let’s put those here:
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Are the physics of the world (realistic or stylized?) established early and maintained throughout?	The princess is hit by a laser and faints somewhat harmlessly. Horrible things will happen off-screen to characters we don’t care about, but characters we like will be hurt only in gentle ways, as in Obi Wan’s vanishing, which he accepts before it comes.  Even the choking is indirect, which makes it more chilling but less brutal to watch.
Are set-up and pay-off used to dazzle the audience (and maybe distract attention from plot contrivances)?	Not really.  The plotting feels somewhat haphazard, without much payoff in this movie.  This isn’t necessarily bad: the shaggy-dog all-over-the-galaxy plot-progression is actually quite thrilling in an off-kilter kind of way.  We never cycle back around to anything (never go back to Tatooine, etc.) or cut ahead (introducing the rebel base before Luke gets there, etc.)