i.e. the classic if the Empire in Star Wars is basically generic evil,
Wrong.
The Empire in Star Wars is a fascist state / government. This was the intention of George Lucas, and few people realize that. Mostly, because Indiana Jones has made Nazis into some kind of "Disney Villain creature".
George Lucas indeed intended to have the Empire being fascist, and it shows through so many details now forgotten by the masses, because nobody cares for that. Both Lucasfilm and Disney never put their fingers on that, because - frankly speaking - it was successful in terms of profits, and they didn't want the customer to be stirred and irritated at all !
Star wars in its very first incarnation is nothing biut an ecclectic highly experimental art movie on a facist state, and that a hero's journey of a simple farmer (being a farmer in a desert - how much deeper than that can you become ?) is able to undermine it - with the help of a few friends.
It is no wonder why the original Star Wars Empire looks so much like Nazis : It is modelled after them. It's more like "Nazis in space" than anything else - or at least that was George Lucas' intention.
That you call it "generic evil" merely shows how few you know about it.
Lucas may well have been inspired by various concepts of fascism, but Episode IV hardly goes into any kind of serious details about the form of government. All we really get to see is a totalitarian superstate that rules by intimidation and expects immediate and unconditional obedience. That could be a lot of things and nothing about that specifically says "nazism".
Also, certain elements of fascism are missing from what we were told of the Empire in Episode IV. The nationalism isn't obvious since there are no other space nations, there's no specific reference to racial purity either (and clearly non-humans are tolerated, even if none appear to have gained employment as stormtroopers, technicians, or ship captains). And it is unclear how the senate is pushing protectionism to maintain a solid private economy. In fact we don't get any details about how the local planetary economies work and how that plays out in an interplanetary context.
This isn't to say that Lucas didn't think of the Empire as fascist but merely that there are limits to how strongly they pushed that angle in the movie.
