For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. It's very much an action adventure set in space.
FWIW this is literally the first time I’ve encountered someone claiming that it isn’t science fiction.
(Soft SciFi, to be sure, but still: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...)
Well, there's Science Fantasy [1]: Jedi and the Force are very much Wizards and Magic.
I've heard it called Space Fantasy, too.
[1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceFantasy
Those seem like obvious fantasy now, but from about the 1950s through the 1970s, a lot of serious people believed that there were undiscovered powers of the human mind that science was on the verge of discovering or confirming. Mental powers are therefore a common anachronism of sci fi from that era.
Most science fiction stories are going to feature some elements that are essentially unexplained and therefore act like magic in the story. I think most folks would consider 2001 to be science fiction but the powers of the monolith are at least as crazy and unexplained as what the Jedi can do.
Star Trek canonically has telepaths, telekinesis, and godlike beings that can alter reality with mere thought.
Why don't people call Star Trek space fantasy as well, when its universe is even less grounded in realism than Star Wars?
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/46481/did-george-l...
Because all the stories are " a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," it's not even clear if Luke and the gang are humans or some other species. Of course it's easy to think of them as humans, and most people do, but it's not necessary. This ambiguity is also by design.
I'd just say Star Wars is science fiction with lots of fantasy elements, as well as lots of influence from different genres (Earth-based war films, adventure serials, etc.)
I see the fact that humans in Star Wars seem to be the "same species" as Homo sapiens to be similar to the fact that movies that take place in ancient Greece have the characters speak modern English. We are expected to understand that humans in Star Wars evolved there, not in Africa on Earth. It would be more realistic to have the main characters look very different from us, but it probably wouldn't make for as enjoyable a movie.
That said, Lord of the Rings has a lot more traditional things like elves and fairies and wizards, and a lot more "pure" magic. They are also completely lacking much of technology from today or even the time it was created... no telephones or automobiles, for instance. (Star Wars has things that are more advanced versions of these)
They both call it science fiction.
Lucas was wary of that label because science fiction had a (well-earned) reputation at that time as a ghetto of heavy-handed allegory with hammy acting and terrible special effects. Lucas was striving for more than that.
He was trying to create a modern myth, or modern fairy tale. But genres are defined by their conventions, and Lucas chose space opera conventions (space ships, lasers, aliens). Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction so Star Wars was considered science fiction.
J.R.R. Tolkien was like Lucas in that he also tried to create a modern fairy tale. But he chose wizards and dragons, so his stories became fantasy.
But science fiction can also be something like The Twilight Zone: a genre that explores "what-if" scenarios. A genre that takes some fictional premise and attempts to explore the consequences logically. An example premise could be, how might modern society have evolved if the Greek gods were real? A sci-fi story would try to approach that question in a scientific and logical way. Star Trek often followed this pattern. Star Wars doesn't.
A weakness of defining sci-fi by a futuristic setting is that you can change the genre with only superficial changes to the story. Other major genres - comedy, horror, mystery, romance, action - are defined by the feeling or thought process they try to evoke. But take Star Wars and replace the planets with kingdoms, the Jedi with wizards, and the force with.. well, that's fine as it is.. and you can create a story with the exact same plot points but without a futuristic setting. There's no actual science in Star Wars; only a futuristic setting.
Setting doesn't feel like it should be the feature that defines a genre. You should be able to have a comedy, horror or mystery take place in a futuristic setting and a sci-fi that takes place in the present (and we often do, eg, The Handmaid's Tale).
I'll note that there aren't many movies that stick to just sci-fi; most incorporate a lot of action (like The Matrix). This is probably because filmmakers feel 2+ hours of science fiction would be boring. The movie The Martian heavily cut from the science of the book and focused on the action (while the book had little action and a lot of science). You see a strong sci-fi focus more often in literature and TV.
Jurassic Park feels more action/horror focused to me, but it has a sci-fi premise.
Yep. Arrival is an adaptation of a Ted Chiang short story, Story of Your Life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life)
All of this stuff has inspiration from classical fantasy. That doesn't change whether or not something is SciFi or not.
There is an intersection of SciFi and Fantasy for sure, and the line gets blurred. Artificial human stories can be cyborgs, androids, clones, golems, or chimera, or even explicit fantasy races like minotaurs.
If it's an android, then it's SciFi. But if it was a clay golem made with magic (but otherwise the same story) it's fantasy.
See golem stories for instance. They explore a lot of sci Fi themes but are basically a fantasy theme. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
I regard the superhero genre as a modern version of the old divine pantheons — heroes and villains, supposedly far beyond human, yet oddly well-balanced against each other (Hawkeye should not be in the same battleground as Thor in the same way and for the same reason that Choi Mi-sun should not be in a battle featuring an attack helicopter).
Sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic and all that.
That doesn't detract from your point.
Many people call Star Wars "science fantasy", but I'm extremely confident that this is used less frequently than "science fiction" to describe it and I am absolutely confident that I'd be able to find marketing copy by LucasFilm or distributors describing it as science fiction, even if that aggravates people who are really into more cerebral sci-fi.