First of all, Star Wars and Lord of the rings have a lot in common when it comes to history. Both have a huge creative background on them that draw heavily from other storylines. I think that the best part of both is neither the language used or the story itself, but more the way that everyone interacts and responds to change, temptation, stress and so on. In star Wars, Luke is very impatient and a bit of a twat, and this is to be expected. Frodo does end up failing in the end, and Gandalf gets his ass kicked. Yes everything turns out OK. But Actually it doesn't and I think that's perfect. After the War of the Rings, there is another section in LOTR called, the War of the Jewels.
More importantly, after the first 6 episodes of Star Wars there are 3 more. In these, Luke actually crosses over to the Dark side and is responsible for a whole lot of evil. In the end he crosses, back and finially brings balance to the force, because he experiences both the light and dark side and knows both their powers. And this brings me to the best and most personally intriguing element of these two series.
I think the key element of both Star Wars and LOTR is the message: power corrupts. As a bit of a politico, this message is very important to me having been close to a few powerful people and people that wanted to be powerful. Really it rings true, Gandalf does not take the ring knowing full well that if he seizes the power to destroy the evil, he becomes the evil. He knows the only way to destroy the evil is to destroy the source of all-power itself. Star Wars talks about this as well. The road to the dark side is tempting. And anger, fear, aggression all lead there. We see this throughout the movies. Only when Frodo and Luke act with compassion and a certain level of principle do things start going their way. And remember that a lot of people die when this happens in order for them to achieve their goals; there's debate and compromise and fighting and trail and hardship etc. And both of them end up scared for life. But the only thing that endangers them is the constant temptation to use their power when it should not be used and this leads to some bad action for everyone involved.
I met a number of people in politics who are like this. Really, they make decisions that are very, very undemocratic because they feel that they are constantly under attack from people that want to bring them down: media, financial sponsors, uneducated radicals, rightwingers (or left wingers on the other side) etc.They are motivated into secrecy out of fear that they will be overrun by others wanting to do them harm. I always had this dilemma in student politics, should I do something rash that could backfire and let the opposition, media, internal power players use it against me? A lot of times I did not. Others took this to other realms stating that they would not release info for fear that it would be used aggressively against them. Something that we did a number of times to politicians, because in the end if you choose to engage in the game, that is what it becomes. You (the good) versus them (evil). You hope that one day you take over and are able to do real good, but you don't even notice that you've already become what you hate and are forever paranoid. Talking Heads said it best. "There was a party, everyone went away, people came and took there place, but no one knew that people had already been there". Something like that anyways�