The Empire Strikes Lame Poses: Piffle, sir. Piffle, I say. There were a few moments of joy in the first one, I'll admit. And that's why the original will always stand as the best. But Luke is: Such. A. Drag. Through the whole trilogy. Empire existed only to advance the plot with yak yak yakking about the force. Then Jedi came along and upped the ante on twee aliens, with Mark Hamill doing his brooding face in every scene. Oh dear god!

As for FX, look at Kubrick's 2001, released in 1968. Look at Star Wars, released nearly a decade later. It's a difference of degree, not kind.

Finally, to take up your genre point, I don't think Lucas so much created a new genre as transposed some old ones: westerns, samurai flicks, and Flash Gordon serials. Genres that had bad guys in black hats, a sword/gun slinging hero with a special code of ethics, a mercenary hired onto the side of righteousness who ridicules the morality of the hero but who ends up himself a partisan. Watch Kurasawa's "Hidden Fortress"; now imagine the fortress is . . . in space, and that the two bickering peasants are robotic. Hmmmm. Oh, and what was the Japanese word for the period samurai piece? Jidai, was it? That word sounds oddly familiar . . .