“The finger thing means the taxes!”
I get that the whole plot is simply a way for Palpatine to move from Senator to Chancellor or whatever the ranks were, but I was never clear on what the overall scheme was. Back in the day someone gave me a bootleg of the film on video because you had to wait a long time to see a movie again (remember that?) and that must have been when I first thought about it. After the WOW of the spectacle, pod races, etc, was gone I couldn’t summarise it.
The irony is that in the sequel trilogy a serious flaw is that way it’s all so small. There are no space politics, no big picture ideas. In SW you don’t need to understand because they just talk about an evil empire, and that’s a straightforward concept. But having both governments and resistance forces? What? Anything that the franchise does next needs to strike a proper balance on this.