Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope

Synopsis

A frustrated farm boy wants off a remote desert planet.

A princess steals highly sensitive military intelligence.

A mentor appears.

A smuggler accepts a contract.

An engineer does all the work.

And an empire discovers the consequences of poor vulnerability management.

What follows is one of the greatest films ever made.

Review

Star Wars isn’t really about space battles.

It’s about people.

More specifically, it’s about the people every organisation seems to have.

Luke Skywalker starts out as the frustrated junior employee.

Stuck on a remote site.

Convinced he’s capable of more.

Certain management is holding him back.

He wants off Tatooine the same way many people want out of that first role they’ve clearly outgrown.

The difference is that Luke gets lucky.

A mentor spots potential.

Obi-Wan Kenobi doesn’t give Luke all the answers.

He doesn’t give him a certification path.

He doesn’t schedule a workshop.

He simply gives Luke enough guidance to start figuring things out for himself.

That’s what good mentors do.

They don’t solve your problems.

They help you solve them yourself.

Then there’s Uncle Owen.

Every organisation has one.

The manager who believes: “We’ve always done it this way.”

No innovation.

No ambition.

No change.

No growth.

Just another year supporting moisture farming because that’s how it’s always been done.

Then we get to Han Solo.

Every successful project eventually involves somebody who ignores half the process and still delivers.

Han is that person.

If Han worked in cyber security he’d be a penetration tester.

If Han worked in consulting he’d be a contractor.

If Han worked in architecture he’d definitely have bypassed at least three governance boards before breakfast.

And somehow he’d still be right.

Princess Leia is the programme sponsor.

Everyone else is reacting.

Leia already has a plan.

Captured.

Escapes.

Leads.

Organises.

Delivers.

The entire project succeeds largely because she’s the only person in the room who appears to understand the objective.

In fact, she’s also the only person performing any meaningful risk assessment.

The Empire allows the Falcon to escape.

Han thinks they’ve won.

Luke thinks they’ve won.

Chewbacca thinks they’ve won.

Leia isn’t convinced.

Because Leia is the only person asking the uncomfortable question:

“What if they wanted us to escape?”

While everyone else is celebrating a successful extraction, Leia is already thinking about the consequences.

As it turns out, she was right.

The Falcon wasn’t just an escape vehicle.

It was a tracking mechanism.

The Empire thought they were executing a clever surveillance operation.

The Rebels thought they were escaping.

Both sides believed they were using the situation to their advantage.

The difference was that the Rebels had already identified a critical vulnerability in the Death Star’s architecture.

The Empire had not.

That eventually proved to be a rather expensive oversight.

Then we have C-3PO.

The tea boy.

Always worried.

Always complaining.

Always explaining why everything is difficult.

Produces an impressive number of status updates.

Rarely fixes anything.

Meanwhile R2-D2 quietly saves the organisation every twenty minutes.

R2-D2 is the engineer.

The actual engineer.

The one doing all the work.

The one getting none of the credit.

The one fixing problems nobody else even understands.

Gets criticised constantly by management.

Keeps delivering anyway.

The entire Rebellion would have failed repeatedly without him.

Then there’s Chewbacca.

The work bestie.

Doesn’t care about politics.

Doesn’t care about meetings.

Doesn’t care about governance.

Shows up.

Helps.

Saves the day.

Leaves.

Every successful team has one.

And finally…

Darth Vader.

James Earl Jones deserves his own category.

Forget five stars.

The voice alone gets 100 out of 5.

No shouting.

No panic.

No lengthy explanations.

Just:

“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

And suddenly everyone remembers their action items.

Then there’s Grand Moff Tarkin.

The micromanager.

Believes technology solves everything.

Believes bigger means better.

Believes nobody else knows as much as he does.

Ignores risk.

Ignores warnings.

Ignores architects.

Ignores penetration testing findings.

Eventually discovers the difference between confidence and competence.

Unfortunately this happens shortly before the Death Star experiences an unplanned decommissioning.

The subsequent investigation concluded:

• It wasn’t DNS.
• It wasn’t certificates.
• It wasn’t a firewall rule.
• It wasn’t a networking issue.

A full root cause analysis later confirmed:

ERROR 404

DEATH STAR NOT FOUND

Final Verdict

A New Hope is what happens when talented people are trusted to execute against a clear objective.

The Empire had:

• More budget
• More resources
• More technology
• More people

The Rebels had:

• One mentor
• One ethical hacker
• One engineer
• One sponsor
• One work bestie
• One farm boy looking for a promotion

And somehow they still delivered.

Nearly fifty years later people are still talking about it.

That’s usually a sign the architecture was sound.

There is, however, a small lesson here for future galactic governments.

If your moon-sized superweapon contains a single-point-of-failure capable of destroying the entire platform, it may be worth conducting an architecture review before moving to production.

A lesson that had, in fact, already been documented. The architecture review was completed. The findings were submitted. The risk was clearly identified.

They built it anyway.

Completely Unqualified Verdict:

The Empire spent billions building the Death Star.

The Rebels spent one afternoon reviewing the documentation.

Guess who won.