I think a general sense of hatred of the prequels prevents folks from giving Revenge of the Sith its due. Lucas writing and direction improved greatly from Eps 1 and 2, and 3 is really a fantastic movie.
For the sequels, however, 8 and 9 are on equal grounds of suckage. I still say that 8 ruined any hope that the sequels had and 9 was just a dumpster fire of trilogy ending.
Empire is the best. It has solid writing, a clear vision, and is surprisingly tight in its execution. Just look at the duel between Luke and Vader, where every action they take communicates something about the character, it’s not just mindless action filler. Hell, they even avoid the incompetent stormtroopers problem, as they only miss shots that are actually difficult.
RotJ has some silliness and the emperor’s plan is idiotic, but it’s still a satisfying end to the trilogy, even with the damn ewoks.
3 is improved over 1 and 2 but still has weak writing, spotty acting, pacing problems, and a lot of little issues that add up.
Rogue 1 is a mess. The droid is mildly amusing, Donnie Yen is full of wasted potential, and Grand moff Shrek is jarring, but everyone else is bland and forgettable. It’s only saving grace is a cool fight at the end, but that doesn’t excuse the boredom leading up to it. At least AotC was interesting in its incompetence.
7 is an empty husk. It wants to echo a new hope, but it doesn’t know how to do that without just undoing the original trilogy. It’s Star Wars designed by committee and sanitized by the marketing dept.
Bad mouthing TPM is beating a dead horse. Darth Maul is cool. Episode 1 pinball was fucking awesome. And everything else sucks.
The best thing I can say about Solo is that it was forgettable.
Last Jedi thought it was brave for giving us unsatisfying answers to the questions that TFA probably shouldn’t have asked. Too bad it wasn’t brave enough to do anything interesting or different with the actual plot, like having Kylo or Rey actually switch sides during the cliche “join me” scene. Wouldn’t want a scene of him coming back to his mom looking for redemption and her needing to deal with the conflicting emotions that come from wanting her son back, but knowing that he killed his father. No, we couldn’t do that, it would be too unexpected and different. And it wouldn’t leave time for angry milking, the pointless casino quest, and unjustified paranoia driving a conflict that in no way serves the plot, and all the other time wasters that make up this piece of shit.
Yes, the Star Wars Holiday Special is better than RoS.
RoS barely qualifies as a movie. It’s like someone took random pages from ten different scripts for possible sequels and shuffled them together. The Room, Troll 2, and Plan 9 From Outer Space are all smarter movies with better stories. The only things separating this shit from those movies are a huge budget and the Star Wars IP.
7 ruined what Star Wars was, it turned from an exciting open world full of possibilities and imagination... into just another bland blockbuster. 8 at least made the world created more interesting, even if the story and characters were all over the place.
I’ll watch 3 again on Friday just to prove you wrong
Edit: turns out I had just enough time between meetings this afternoon. Still pretty meh. It’s no 2, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to the original.
This is the correct answer. A New Hope and Return of the Jedi are quite good as well and Rogue One is amazing, but Empire stands alone at the top and it’s not close.
Yeah, I can only imagine gen Z who didn’t see the originals first and instead saw the prequels in theaters would put 3 over 5. For me the gap between 5 and the others is just massive, but I also love Star Wars and to me no movie has lacked that specific magic. Even if I need to turn my brain completely off for 2, 7 and 9 to be able to enjoy them…
My personal order from best to worst Saga movies would be:
5, 4, 6, 3, 2, 1, 7, 8, 9
1 and 7 are kind of on equal footing for me (ranking is almost interchangeable), but overall I think TPM was just kind of a bad start to the Prequels (though they got better), whereas TFA was actually a somewhat strong start to the Sequels that got exponentially worse.
R1 and 4 is really hard to decide so both can swap positions, 1 is better than 2 because of maul, Solo could be a great movie if they didn’t make the whole Han background happen in a few days, 8 and 9 sucks.
Here’s the controversial take: that scale starts at 7/10 and goes down from there. Because Star Wars is a mediocre series overall. And I like the stories, but making a great star wars movies seems to be out of reach for Hollywood writers and directors.
Watching through them all with my daughter, started at 1, just finished 5. It’s full of errors, like Obi Wan saying that Yoda had trained him and that he (Obi Wan) was as rash and impatient as Luke was. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the people making episode 5 hadn’t even seen episodes 1 or 2 and barely paid attention to episode 3!
The Battle of Endor is definitely the best space battle in a Star Wars movie. People give ROTJ crap because of the Ewoks, but to me they’re a non-issue, especially by prequel/sequel standards.
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