> The originals are good movies but only empire is truly great and even then it's just a good flick. It asks almost no questions of the audience.
Star Wars (as in, "Episode IV: A New Hope") gets a lot of points on the greatness scale for basically inventing the multi-genre pastiche film, and for being a pretty good example of the practice. Empire's a better movie in a lot of ways, but less ground-breaking as far as the storytelling goes.
But yeah, no Star Wars films are high art. The first two, especially, though, get a lot of basic stuff right and have fairly straightforward plots, so they make for excellent examples for illustrating many of aspects of film story-telling: mood, plotting, characterization, foreshadowing, setup/payoff in general, et c.
There's probably no blade runner without star wars but it's just childish/shallow if you don't buy into George Lucas.
The originals are good movies but only empire is truly great and even then it's just a good flick. It asks almost no questions of the audience.