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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.
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.
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.
I just couldn’t get through it. But to each his own, I had a good friend who refused to read Pratchett’s Thief of Time because “books need chapters” lol
Yeah for sure, it’s not for everyone, and getting through the whole series is borderline a chore lol.
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.
Yeah that’s not quite the same thing
Send them both to the mines
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.
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.
Look motherfucker if you don’t give me a steak I’m gonna scream
💩🥩
Meanwhile:
It was Disney all along.
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.
