Worst to Best: Explained
- A New Hope
"I was utterly underwhelmed by “A New Hope,” impressed solely by the world-making of the script—the delivery of a ready-made but minor mythology—but neither moved nor fascinated nor at all delighted by the filmmaking. Rather, I was shocked—that the director of “American Graffiti” could have constrained himself to create such a turgid, stilted, flat, and textureless movie.” - Richard Brody, The New Yorker
The palette of Hollywood in the 70s, that had for the past few years been introducing avant-garde storytelling to a wider audience, now was doomed with the release of Lucas’ original space-fantasy. Being one of the first blockbusters, it became such a phenomenon that it laid the groundwork for all of the mind-numbing films that we associate with the term “blockbuster movies” for the next 40 years. Lucas, ironically, played a part of the banality of modern Hollywood, filled with dull stories, like seeing the same superhero plot with a new coat each year, and actions films that try to numb the mind with the overstimulation of the senses.
7 & 6. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi
“Empire” and “Jedi” had nothing parodistic; their absurd earnestness and the bombastic banality of their direction (by Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, respectively) are a perfect match for the oppressive, hectoring John Williams scores that accompanied them. If there was nostalgic, faux-naïve whimsy in Lucas’s inaugural installment of “Star Wars,” it was gone from “Empire” and “Jedi,” replaced by a hegemonic bellow for devotion and belief.” - Brody
ESB can’t decide if it is a serious movie or a silly one. It is sort of a mess with no solid conclusion, making a film that can’t really stand on its own. I tend to agree with the thoughts here if you’d like to know more: http://www.simplysyndicated.com/why-empire-strikes-back-sucks-gundark-poodoo/
ROTJ, while repeating many of the same mistakes as the original Star Wars film, this is really where the idea of Vader as a sympathetic character is developed.
The only redeeming quality of these films are the elements of Darth Vader’s redemption the introduced to the saga, a twist that made the films grow beyond mere “adventure films”. They really have nothing else to offer beyond this, save for some of Yoda’s philosophical preaching.
5 & 4. Force Awakens and the Last Jedi
With The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, they’re both just okay. No strong feelings either way about them. They are not as imaginative as Lucas’ prequels, but there is considerable effort to address the legacy of a character like Vader. Even though that twist allowed for the beautiful tale Lucas created in his prequels, they did present a problem with the idea that only one family could really effect the destiny of this galaxy. But with the new character of Rey, we have a character who is clearly a nobody in Episode 7 and we get to see her come to accept that she has no destiny. But, it is a strong message that she has to make her own destiny, and Rey, just like anyone, can make a real difference. The story of Rey and Kylo Ren are the most interesting aspects of these new films, with Finn and Rose being my second favorites if they can conclude their arc in 8 appropriately in the next film. I’m sure IX will fit into the middle of my list as well, especially if they can devise a conclusion with Ben Solo returning to Leia that reflects Anakin leaving his own mother at the beginning of this saga.
- Revenge of the Sith
"The labyrinthine opening shot of “Revenge of the Sith”— of Anakin and Obi-Wan giving chase to Dooku through the space vehicles on the planet of Coruscant—is a mighty and audacious gauntlet-throw, the digital equivalent of the opening shot of Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” It wheels and gyrates and zips and pivots with a vertiginous wonder that declares, from the beginning, that Lucas had big visual ideas and was about to realize them with a heroically inventive virtuosity. And the rest of the movie follows through on that self-dare.
If I had seen “Revenge of the Sith” in real time, in a theatre upon its release, in 2005, I think that, at the moment when Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), sizzling in the blue lightning that Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) reflects back at him, cries out to Anakin (Hayden Christensen), “Power! Unlimited Power!,” I would have leaped out of my seat yelling with excitement. The entire movie is filled with an absolute splendor of the pulp sublime, and that moment is its very apogee. Lucas reaches historic heights in the filming of action: the martial artistry of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s double duel versus Dooku, the gaping maw of outer space and of the airshaft into which the heroic duo drops, Obi-Wan’s light-sabre fight with the four-armed Grievous, and, above all, the apocalyptic inferno of the confrontation of Obi-Wan and Anakin (which, regrettably, cuts back to Yoda and Emperor, a much duller battle). I watched these sequences over and over—happily, with the sound off to get rid of the musical score—and was repeatedly and unflaggingly amazed by Lucas’s precise, dynamic, wildly imaginative direction.
The scripted politics of the conflicts have a grand imagination to match. What Lucas brings to the script of “Clones” and Sith” is a quasi- (or pseudo-) Shakespearean backroom dialectic of power-maneuvering. The dialogue is just heightened and sententious enough, just sufficiently rhetorical, to convey the grave moment of ideas in conflict and the grand mortal results of that dialectical clash—the making of a villain and the unmaking of a republic.” - Brody
Also, see Camille Puglia’s thoughts on ROTS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibkmh72_1pw
- The Phantom Menace
Phantom Menace evolved the franchise in a way that other franchises seem to fail at. Unique and imaginative, instead of giving us more of what “the fans” wanted, George decided to tell a story that grew beyond what the original Star Wars was meant to be. Instead of being a Flash Gordon-ripoff that tells an over-simplistic fairy tale, George set out to decontextualize this saga as a tragedy on the scales of Othello or Faust. He planted the seeds of a “Citizen Kane” in space. A young Anakin, bright-eyed and full of optimism, is taken away from his mother. The Jedi Order was nothing as fans had expected, instead, Lucas decided to portray them as a flawed order that practices non-attachment and have them represent a very unhealthy version of masculinity that inevitably leads Anakin to give in to his own fears and turn to evil.
#1 Attack of the Clones
"This peculiar contradiction began to resolve itself with the pleasures of “Attack of the Clones.” There, Lucas’s force awakens. The movie’s rich-hued palette alone is a jolt from the start, and the movie’s action scenes have an alluring, entrancing kinetic vigor and texture. The speeder chase with the paid assassin, with its swoops and spins and drops; Obi-Wan’s fight with Jango Fett; and the serial duels with Count Dooku—all of these display balletic gracefulness and dazzling rapidity along with closely-textured compositions in depth, surprising pictorial imbalances, and angles that are as expressive as they are surprising. The colossal scale of the assembled clones toward the end of the film has an awe-inspiring power greater than anything in any of the four films that preceded it. My hypothesis is that digital technology caught up to Lucas’s imagination. Finally, by 2002, digital technology, which he had begun to use in “The Phantom Menace,” liberated him from the limits of optical effects and, by means of C.G.I., could create the fusion of live action and animation that was implicit in the project, and in his vision, from the start.” - Brody
This film is the epitome of what George Lucas always wanted, being able to tell a story that his completely his own, separated from Hollywood and with technology that was finally able to bring his wildest dreams to life. With it being the first major feature film completely shot on digital, it paved the way to the democratization of filmmaking, and now anyone can make a movie and find an audience online. Lucas was never able to successfully create his American Zoetrope he envisioned, a place for filmmakers to tell their stories away from Hollywood, but in a way, he succeeded through the breakthroughs that truly began with this film.
