The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie. Or is it? — Page 15

... pair of Siamese twins? Yes, they could have.

Joss Whedon isn't a fan of the ending.

Presumably not enough beloved characters died.

It's hard to make comparisons because of the completely different circumstances in which SW and ESB were made. I guess you could say that the heart says SW, while the brain says ESB. Just consider that ESB was not immediately universally recognised as being great. But it's hard to maintain that when you consider the emotionally resonant moments in ESB. It's clearly not some incredibly cerebral film that you really need to think about. It's more likely that reviewers at the time were just idiots.

What might be interesting is to discard the traditional comparisons ("SW vs ESB", "ROTJ vs the previous two", "the OT films vs their prequel counterparts", etc.) and try to draw lines between the different films that are less evident.

For instance, both SW and ROTJ have endings that involve both a space battle, a lightsaber fight, and, in ROTJ, a big pitched battle on the ground. The prequels have this too, except for ROTS, which instead offers a battle at Coruscant at the beginning, and an overdrawn lightsaber battle and flashes of different Clone Wars battles and the Jedi being wiped out by Order 66 at the end. ESB similarly has the Battle of Hoth at the beginning (which is just to cover the Rebel escape anyway; at no point do they have any hopes of gaining any kind of victory against the enemy), and after that, it's much more character-focused. The confrontations of Luke vs Vader in ESB and Obi-Wan vs Anakin in ROTS take centre stage, while the war only rages on in the background.

Think about it. Throughout ESB after Hoth, the Empire is everywhere, and the rebellion is nowhere. Luke is at Dagobah, and the other main characters are on the run. Only at the end do they rejoin the Rebel fleet, and the wider story is resumed. It's remarkable how, in this sense, arguably the greatest film most closely resembles ROTS, which is just a giant turd. It strikes me how the last of the prequels, the "darkest" one, seems to take on the characteristics of the middle of the original films, also the "darkest" one, instead of resembling the last original film. Of course ROTS fucked everything up that ESB did right. So much for rhyming stanzas, Jorge!

The major difference is that the prequels were conceived of as a trilogy from the start, with the separation between them well-defined. With the originals, it's less clear because of the constant historical revisionism, but the least we can say is that SW can stand alone, and that revelations later in the series like "Leia is Luke's sister" were not immediately evident in 1977. No amount of insertion of Hayden Christensen and "NOOOOO!!!" can change the fact that the OT is much more disjointed and the three films differ from each other so strongly.

So picking favourites out of them is very much a matter of personal tastes and emotions, and it's hard to say anything definitive except that ROTJ was remarkably weaker, and that it already held some of the worst elements of the prequels. But by now the pendulum has swung so far to the other side that in these review aggregators, ROTS is now rated higher than ROTJ, which is extremely wrong-headed in my view, and ROTJ can now almost be considered underappreciated, considering that it still does a satisfying job for all its flaws.

Come back S_Matt!

lol

Oh man, I forgot how entertaining this thread was, even beyond the first page.  I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Can we restart the racist debate?

Honestly, Empire Strikes Back is a fairly middling entry, imo, but we’ll see how I feel when I get around to it in my ongoing rewatch.

Anakin Starkiller said:

Honestly, Empire Strikes Back is a fairly middling entry, imo

The son of Kane Starkiller must not become a Jedi-Bendu.

*smacks with lazersword*

ESB is the better directed film imo but ANH has a certain quality that has never been duplicated. I’m guessing it’s due to it being made when there was no clue to what it would become and it being the first SW movie made as well. It feels very different to me when I watch compared to the 8 that came after.

Creox said:

ESB is the better directed film imo but ANH has a certain quality that has never been duplicated. I’m guessing it’s due to it being made when there was no clue to what it would become and it being the first SW movie made as well. It feels very different to me when I watch compared to the 8 that came after.

Simpler innit? No Sith, no family complications, really, no greater weight, no back story, just simple fairy tale.

I agree. The structure and tone are very particular, plus it’s got the special 70s vibe.

How rude!

R2-D2 is obviously the star. A cantankerous 1970s anti-hero who plays by his own rules.

To me the Empire had a real employee problem which seemed to worsen once Tarkin died. Vader had to become head of Human Resources and he clearly wasn’t cut out for that job. All of his captains and admirals were screwups. Vader’s only solution was to force choke them and keep promoting from within. Even that didn’t work so he was forced to bring in the bounty hunters and he was hoping that would light a fire under some asses. It worked for a little bit all the way through the Cloud City incidents but again due to gross incompetence, the Falcon gets away. Vader quietly storms off and I’m sure he probably resigned from Human Resources position shortly after.

I can’t tell whether to take this thread seriously or not LOL. Shame the OP decided to leave as there does seem to be some legitimate discussion mixed into the ridiculousness of this thread.