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Hot take: A New Hope was groundbreaking at the time (and is ordinary by today’s standards), Empire Strikes Back is all-around great, and every other Star Wars piece of media exists simply because of those two reasons.
The prequels were also pretty groundbreaking in CGI use for the time, but primitive by today's standards.
I’d say that’s the problem with CGI. It’s never going to look better in the future, whereas practical effects almost always leaving me wondering how they managed to make something look as good as it does
It really depends on what the CGI is used for. Having 100 clones on screen without 100 extras still looks good. Having a pure CGI character delivering dialog is going to age badly.
I think Gollum still looks pretty damn good,and those movies are just as old (give or take a year? two? who remembers...)
Having 100 clones on screen without 100 extras still looks good.
Better than having 100 extras in storm trooper costumes? I'd rather see just a dozen storm troopers over 100 CGI troopers. Quality over quantity.
I think 3 still looks great.
Yeah, watching them all a couple of years ago I came to a similar conclusion. The first is important, if not necessarily great. The second is a classic.
After that it's mostly toy adverts and money grubbing. I like Rogue One, some of the Mandalorian and Andor. It really opens up some decent fiction once you get away from the boring Jedi. Even the games have better stories than most of the movies.
get away from the boring Jedi
Goddamn the Acolyte was rough
Yeah, Star Wars peaked with ESB. That's not to say it's all complete shit since then, but nothing in Star Wars has risen to the height it was at 44 years ago.
Two rejoinders to that: the video games and the books. Rogue Squadron, Shadows of the Empire, and even that one game in the arcade (that was so frustrating) were amazing. I personally wasn't as much of a fan of the Thrawn trilogy as some, but the books about the kids of the movies' characters were pretty fun to get through.
I think the majority of the X and millennial fans fell in love through those just as much as from the original movies.
Same. I know a lot of things get blamed on the prequels and sequels, but the issues with the series do set in as early as rotj.
can you elaborate on that? this is the first I'm hearing about rotj having issues, I always thought people liked the entire original triligoy more or less uniformly
This is not speaking for everyone that thinks there's a bit of a dip in rotj, just myself. It's a fine movie, but it has a few issues that could be looked at as the small cracks showing in the franchise that would become bigger problems later.
A big one is they reused a few beats from the first movie. Start at Tatooine, deal with the death Star, destroy it. Kind of explored territory, similar setup to the first movie. Honestly not too bad in and of itself, but the franchise really leans in to callbacks and reusing narrative structure, and this is where it starts.
Character motivation and writing is a little shaky in places. It's enough to hold the movie together, but it was better in the first two movies. Stuff usually just kind of happens to the characters, rather than the characters having active agency in the story. Villains become non-threatening and incompetent, hell even storm troopers start turning into the useless cannon fodder they're known for now. The characters are overly hammy, and the line readings are wooden at times. This goes a bit back end forth with the franchise, but it is a noticeable downgrade compared to the first two movies. Especially with how good Empire was with this sort of thing, it stings a bit. This goes on to be a huge issue with the prequel trilogy, on and off in the sequels as well.
Luke and Leia being twins is the first example of the plot event that happens because they wanted drama and a big reveal, but didn't set it up ahead of time. It's not hugely bad, but it's a bit why go in that direction? It kills the Luke/Leia thing that the last two movies have been building on, I assume so everything is clean for the ending, but it's a bit much of a jump when they sort of made out last movie. The lack of planning is something that bites them in the backside pretty hard with the sequels, but it shows up here first.
The last one that's weirdly specific, but Yoda wasn't supposed to talk like that. He is putting on an act in Empire, up until he's found out, instantly drops it, and doesn't talk like that for the remained of the movie. When he turns up in Jedi again, he starts talking in the fake voice he was using, and now he's forever stuck in that way of speaking. It's iconic now, but it's a little weird continuity wise.
There's a lot of pretty decent stuff in the movie, but compared to the genre defining first and amazing second, it's just pretty alright. Which is fine, but it's hard for me to shake the feeling that it's the beginning of the series solidifying into a slow decline. Most things go that way, and I don't have strong feelings about the series these days, I more just find it fascinating how you can see the momentum of a cultural touchstone progress from movie to movie.
oh wow thanks so much for that thorough explanation!
All good, it was an opportunity to hammer out my thoughts as well.
So the Patrick H Willems take?
Uhhh. Sure? I haven’t watched the whole video but it seems like he’s talking about episodes 7, 8, and 9. I mean to say that I think if you introduced someone to all of the core Star Wars movies today, 8/9 movies are practically nothing special. Reducing that information quite a bit, we can derive that Star Wars is 88% mediocre. Of course, time, nostalgia, and art don’t work that way so there’s obviously a whole lot more value and love in the series than “it’s only 11% good” conveys, but I just wanted to put my hot reductive take out there to be inflammatory
He's talked about Return of the Jedi being the first nostalgic Star Wars film.