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Notes -
I wrote last week on Revenge of the Sith, and how it benefited from the ambiguity between the "good" side and the bad. As Padme said, "[what if] the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?" @SubstantialFrivolity responded that, despite its flaws, Revenge of the Sith was the best of the Star Wars movies due to this complexity, and mildly criticized the original Star Wars for being a derivative "hero's journey".
Since I first watched Star Wars at age 7 (just before the abominable Special Editions came out, in its unadulterated form) it has been my favorite movie.
It is not a derivative "hero's journey". It is a distilled "hero's journey". A restless youth is trapped in a backwater. One day he seizes the opportunity to do something greater, and is suddenly thrust into confrontations of galactic import. He rescues a literal princess, with the help of a ragtag band of comrades. And while he doesn't "get the girl", that is not actually a critical component of a hero's story: rather what distinguishes the Journey is the acceptance and subsequential overcoming of an offered challenge.
A key part of a hero's journey is that the morality of the conquest is never in doubt. In Star Wars, evil is evil and good is good. From the first moment of the movie, where a gigantic, sharp, wedge shaped ship fires on a smaller, fleeing vessel; to the black, masked villain stepping into the pristine white interior; to the almost flippant destruction of an entire planet, the Evil Empire is clearly evil. The princess is being held captive, and it is a moral imperative to rescue her. The Death Star is threatening to kill all the characters we have met throughout the movie, and it is obviously a moral good to destroy it.
It is a common modern trope for a Hero to self-doubt and self-incriminate following the successful completion of the quest. (We see this writ large in our society's embarrassment over "colonialization"; which, at the time, was a manifestation of an "ascendent" society). Yet Star Wars had such clear Heroes and Villains that it carried through three sequels unexamined. It wasn't until the second movie of the sequel Trilogy that this narrative began to be subverted (and explains the audience backlash against The Last Jedi).
In short, Star Wars is pure. It is purified in its distillation of the Hero's Journey. It is pure in its depiction of Good and Evil. It is pure in its innocence. From the humble beginnings on a desert planet to the triumphant return of the motif in the Throne Room, Star Wars perfectly embodies something elemental and essential, untainted by cynicism or doubt.
My criticism was more that the hero's journey is not an interesting story. I don't think Star Wars is more or less derivative than anything else which attempts it.
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