Ah, someone dared to add the Star Trek films to this conversation. Well, I’ll address that first. As individual stories, I think the consensus is that the order of the Star Trek films greatness is II, IV, VI, III and then the rest in any order. However, when you truly examine each one for how closely it matches the original series, V comes out on top. It has the same feeling as many of the original episodes. I is probably the next closest and, prior to the airing of TNG premier and the uncut version of The Cage, is the closest we get to seeing Gene’s real, and very cerebral, vision of Star Trek. II, III, IV, and VI take the best of what NBC infused into Star Trek (the action and military side of things) and made some excellent films, but they aren’t as quintessentially Star Trek as I and V. So, the question in how you rate them is based on whether you rank their overall quality higher or their Trekness higher. Those who ignore the Trekness tend to find I and V to be horrible films not worth watching. Those who think Trekness is the most important would rank them the best. I, and most people I know, like to balance the two and so we find I and V acceptable while acknowledging the superiority of the other 4. The TNG movies are Okay, but they aren’t as good. Generations was the of the Star Trek movies until 2009. The 2009 movie took that title away and then Into Darkness set a bar so high for awful that I don’t think it will ever be beat as the worst Star Trek movie. Abrams writing for Star Trek is a new low that those of us who endure watching the third season of the original series in its entirety thought Star Trek could never reach.
As you can rate the different Star Trek movies based on what you use to judge them, so too you can rate the Star Wars movies similarly depending on what you want to judge them on. SW/ANH comes out bad if you judge things too harshly by modern standards. Those of us who have been watching it for nearly 40 years tend not to see those things. TESB got a bad rap when it first came out, but now many Star Wars fans rank it the best. ROTJ had the Ewoks and for many that was a turn off. For many of us it wasn’t. The SE’s were an attempt to modernize a 20 years old franchise. For most of us the changes were detrimental, though I’ve always found that overall the changes to TESB made it better.
Then the Prequels. I think the people judged fairly making them the best selling of the six films. They are not bad films or they wouldn’t have broken records worldwide. They did not fit with many fans expectation and that tends to color judgement. For anyone who was roughly 10 when any of the PT came out, they are likely to truly appreciate them. Those of us who are older, especially those of us who are original fans who saw Star Wars in the theaters in 1977 (between the various rereleases, I saw it 10 times, including a double feature with Logan’s Run at a drive-in), the Prequels can’t live up to the originals. Not ever.
Then there is the article that started this conversation. For one the man is a demented idiot off the bat. Hating John Williams music is blasphamy. Not only from a Star Wars perspective, but a general movie perspective. If you don’t like Williams, you cannot like the majority of composers or the films they worked no and you have no business being a critic. Williams comes from the tradition of Roza, Korngold, Steiner, etc. It is classic movie music at its highest. So his opinion about which films he liked best are rubbish… at least until you hear why he liked the two he did like. Think about it for a minute. He liked the visuals and editing. He watched some scenes over again with the sound off - think about it. No dialog. No dialog means that the majority of complaints I see on OT.com were completely thrown out, leaving only the visual of Eps 2 and 3. These are the culmination of GL’s years of filmmaking. Ep 1 was him getting back into the driver’s seat after years away. Eps 2 and 3 show him in full form at the height of his skill at assembling a movie. If you are basicly ignoring the sound and concentrating on the visuals, and likely are adverse to CG, but just looking at the visual story telling, Eps 2 and 3 are pretty damn good. I found the opening of Ep 3 to be excellent, but I also appreciated the music, the Anakin/Obi-wan friendly banter, and the story telling as a whole, not just the visuals.
I think there is room for many interpretations. Ranking any of the PT higher than any of the OT is not going to be popular around here because, let’s face it, this is an OT centered website. But I don’t think it is just or fair to insist that someone who loves Star Wars and finds us must be trolling or insane or whatever else you want to call it, because they think one or more of the PT are actually good. I think they are substantially inferior to the OT, but I think they are good movies. Lucas really missed the ball by not getting help on the writing end. He crafts a good story, but he is best when others help shape it and refine it.
And we have seen what Kasdan can do on his own and he certainly isn’t responsible for the magic that was TESB and ROTJ. TESB had Leigh Brackett and Irving Kershner, but ROTJ can’t claim that and yet most of us think it is nearly as good as the other two. I think that is because of GL’s ability to craft a story. I think he manged to recapture that in the PT, but he crammed too much in and tried to write it all himself without any other eyes on the scripts. That is his downfall and why the PT just aren’t as good. I find them to be more true to the OT than TFA. TFA nails the characters and the world, but fails to have any spark to the story. It is a good film because the characters are good. As a story is is flat and unimaginative. Between the two you have the two aspects that made the OT great. GL’s story telling and someone else’s script revisions and dialog.