Star Wars, like many WEG games, gives players a choice in character creation: They can either select (and personalize, somewhat) a character archetype from the rulebook or they can create a character from the ground up. There is no particular advantage to doing character creation either way; you will not end up with a way quul tougher badder meaner character if you run an archetype, for instance. Archetypes can just save you some work, if you want to run the kind of character who fits in well with the setting.
Characters can start off with a starship of their own, unlike many space-based RPGs; because they can run anything from a former Senate member to a street kid and remain in-theme, starting equipment is a cooperative effort between player and GM. This is also seen in WEG's Torg, and it is something that I really like in heroic-type games.
The games aren't set up to mimic the films (there is no The Empire Strikes Back adventure), but this is probably a good thing. The players run characters in a different part of the Rebellion or Empire, and spend their time in other adventures. They may have heard of Skywalker, or perhaps crossed paths with Jabba the Hutt, but they have other things to do. This could be limiting, but in the hands of a skilled gamemaster it is not a problem. One of the optional settings, also, is after the fall of the Empire, meaning that the events of the movies have already transpired, keeping players' actions from seeming futile.
The game's rules function much as described above; to perform a task a player rolls a number of dice equal to his or her skill in the hopes of getting the total to equal or better than a given target number. There are a number of modifiers that apply to spice this up, but that is it in a nutshell. Players may perform multiple actions in a turn, under certain limitations; this helps them echo the lightsaber-flashing, laser-zarking, rope-swinging action seen in the films. The system is, on the whole, very dramatic, allowing characters to do things that regular people could never achieve.
The game, like the setting, is not science-fiction. Sure, it has a lot of the trappings of science-fiction; there are spaceships and hyperspace and aliens and laser blasters and stuff. But it's fantasy in different trappings. It uses a lot of heroic-mythic archetypes to excellent effect, and it has a strong moral message, rather than being about changes to humanity, which is what I often handwave as a working definition of science fiction.