I’m sitting here watching my laserdisc copy of Star Wars, thirty years to the day after it premiered in movie theaters across the country. And I’m confronted once again with how well this movie has held up over the intervening years and how greatly the prequels disappointed me. I know I’ve waxed rhapsodic on the “not-so-special” edition before, so I won’t reiterate what I said there, except to say that everything I wrote remains absolutely true.

I constantly find myself marveling at how much more real the original trilogy seems than most of the movies that I watch today. There’s something about watching those massive model spaceships fly around that feels vastly more tangible than even the most modern computer-generated effects. I wonder if my own kids will feel the same way or whether they’ll deride the movies as looking ancient and clumsy. But give me Peter Mayhew in a Chewbacca suit over an all CGI Silver Surfer anyday of the week, and real locations over blue-screened, composited backgrounds—they just instinctively feel wrong and fake in a visceral way that I find hard to explain.

After the movie was over, I left the disc on and watched the five minute interview with George Lucas at the end. If you want to talk astounding, consider this: the budget of the original Star Wars was just $10 million dollars (the budget for the prequels and most special effects blockbusters today is well over a hundred million). Inflation needs to be taken into account, of course, but Lucas points out that $10 million was low budget even in the ’70s; most movies at that time were being made for $20-30 million. And of that $10 million, only $2 million were spent on effects.

And yet, for all that it started off the age of blockbuster effects films, Star Wars is a surprisingly quiet, intimate movie. There are action scenes—mainly the big Death Star vs. Alliance dogfight at the end—but they’re sparing, as opposed to many big budget movies these days—the prequels included—which seem to hang the rest of their story about the tentpole action scenes (Pirates 2, I’m looking at you).

The most beautiful, moving shot in the entire movie, to my mind, remains the image of Luke watching the twin suns setting on Tatooine. Not a word of dialogue is said—in fact the only sound is John Williams’s phenomenal score—and yet you know in your gut what the scene is saying. Despite the fact that the title of the episode was dropped in the original release, it takes no more than that scene to tell you that this is a movie about hope.

In the end, I think today mainly about how Star Wars has affected me. My first memories of watching the movie have long vanished into the mists of time—I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t seen Star Wars. It was the movie that started me on the journey of being a geek (if, in fact, a geek is not something that you inherently are), brought me together with many of my closest friends, and was the subject of my first published article. It’s a cornerstone of my life. And to this day, it constantly makes me want to push ahead and do more. Watching the movie fills me with an almost physical need to jump up from the couch and create something—to tell a story, no matter if it’s as sprawling and complicated as an epic novel or as simple and intimate as a quiet conversation. I don’t know if there’s a mystical energy field that controls my destiny, but I know I’m not alone in feeling as though somehow the movie taps into the Force itself—and like the Force, it will be with us, always.