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.
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.
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
Both things can be true.
Back then we didn’t think it possible that Disney could come in and fuck up as bad as they did.
It's like poetry, it rhymes
"Each stanza kinda rhymes with the last one... [grimaces] ...hopefully it'll work."
Episode III: somehow Anakin jumped straight to child murdering evil. Twice that we know of.
Episode VI: somehow ewoks were the lynchpin to take down the whole fucking Empire.
Episode IX: somehow Palpatine returned!
Yep, checks out.
Gen X: “I believe you mean 1999, not 2005”
Uhh how about 1997?
On one hand, yes.
On the other hand, that new Death Star approach scene was pretty tight.
Yeah that's not quite the same thing
Both are true
The wheel weaves what the wheel wills.
Try spinning that’s a good trick
If I had a braid, I'd have ripped it out by now. But you can be sure my arms are crossed!
I have a friend that grew up reading the Wheel of Time series. He talked it up a lot. I got through the first two books and couldn't keep going. He said, "It gets really good at the end of book three. Book four is amazing. Books five, six, and seven are only okay. There's a couple more that are really good, but the last book falls flat."
And I realized that's probably how people that never watched Star Wars experience it after we recommend the movies to them. "This one specific movie is amazing, and those two are pretty okay. That one was good in its time and I like it for nostalgia. We didn't talk about how the movie series ended. Want to watch the cartoons?"
I'm reading through The Wheel of Time for the second time right now and my experience has been different. It's crazy how the tone changes from the first book to the last, and the amount of character development that occurs. I think each book is been better than the last, and each for different reasons.
That's just how almost everything goes, isn't it? Simpsons, Walking Dead, Dune, Game of Thrones, etc.
Endings are hard, and most things have an unsatisfying ending or go on for too long because they keep making it as long as it makes money.
And if I were alive in 1977 I would say that too.
It's just a western with lasers.
/fakeflamwarmongering
It’s just a western with lasers.
I mean, what's wrong with that?
I go one further and say it is a fantasy western with lasers and magic
Oh, nothing, it's a superb spectacle, it's exactly what it was (re-(re-(re-(re-(re-)))))designed for by people who knew what they were doing.
And your definition is better! :)
It's a Samurai movie.
But a lot of Western movies were also inspired by Samurai films.
The great Kurosawa films were all remade in a different genre in the West.
Yojimbo and Sanjuro became A Fist Full of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More.
Hidden Fortress became Star Wars.
Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven and Bug's Life
Rashomon became The Outrage.
Meanwhile:
It was Disney all along.
Lucas ruined Star Wars by doing it his way.
Lucas ruined Star Wars by selling it and the buyers didn't do it his way.
Dang.
I’m going to buy the last Ribeye steak so I can take a Huge steaming Dump on it and sell it back to the starving man who I bought it out from under.
Who was in the wrong here?
The man who was selling it could have done the benevolent thing and sold it to the starving man but in the end he is running a business and I offered more money.
I could have done nothing and the man would have got a fresh clean steak with no poo on it but did I do anything wrong? Technically I did buy the steak and was free to do as I please and the starving man technically didn’t have to buy It but he was starving so he did, how is that my fault?
The starving man could have paid more for the steak but he didn’t have any money but how is that any one’s fault? No blame can be placed on anyone except maybe himself depending on his circumstances.
Now in the above scenario the man who purposely chose to torment a starving man was clearly in the wrong because it was out of complete malice and spite and punching down but all he did was buy a steak and take a shit on it not illegal under any justice system.
Now I ask you who is in the wrong? The answer is us for attaching to much value to a movie that did not change the original yet we go to the trough and eat it like a starving man.
What does that have to do with my analogy? Not much but I think we can all agree that despite Disney and Lucas doing nothing technically “WRONG” we would not feel right about the above analogous scenario.
Send them both to the mines
There’s only one Star Wars movie. The rest are fanfiction.
Y’all are just lucky the teen vampires and pokemen haven’t shown up (yet).
It's revenge of the sith
Fair.
Nightsisters are kind of like vampires and porgs are kind of like pokemon. We've also seen zombie storm troopers, but I was kind of fine with that because it was so ridiculous I couldn't stop laughing.
Sigh... Its the same as it always was, the people who hate Star Wars the most themselves the biggest fans of Star Wars.
Everything made after they were a child is not as good because it never lives up to the nostalgia.
Ding ding ding.
