The Real Hero of the Star Wars Movies is a Robot; You Know The One
To this day people sometimes argue who was the real hero of the Star Wars movies.
Their creator, George Lucas, too had an opinion about this, if an unorthodox and somewhat tongue-in-cheek one, which he voiced way back in 2005, in an interview with Rolling Stone which had recently resurfaced on the web:
"…R2, who is clever and ultimately the hero of the whole piece. He's the Lassie of the movies: Whenever there's a pivotal moment of real danger, he's the one that gets everybody out of it."
Well, to think of it, he's right. R2-D2 the droid saved so many times that it is not easy to count, from carrying the plans of the Death Star across the galaxy at the very start of the very first movie, to preventing the whole main cast from getting compacted by the trash compactor, to repeatedly fixing things right in the middle of raging spacefights, to many other cases, where without its technical expertise, hacking abilities and initiative the story would have ended prematurely.
R2-D2 is also one of the few characters who has a role to play in every Star Wars movie in the three trilogies, making him one of the most important characters in the franchise and perhaps indeed its hero.
Insofar, of course, as you can believe that a mere helper bot, essentially something like a really clever version of an autocomplete program that you have in your browser, can be a hero. The first half of Lucas' quote, the second half of which you can see above, sheds some light on his opinion regarding the role of droids within the Star Wars universe:
"As your humanness is cut away, your become more like a programmed droid. Even though some of the droids, like C-3PO, are very human in nature, caring and worried that they're going to do the wrong thing. But they're programs – there's a difference. Even with…"
No wonder that at the end of Episode III Bail Organa could order to wipe poor R2-D2's memory with as much emotion as if he was saying to throw out a trashbag, without that being treated by the narrative as a crime, or at least as cruelty to pets (in case your knowledge of old American TV series is lacking, Lassie, mentioned by Lucas, was a dog).