A New Hope vs Empire Strikes Back

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Question: George Lucas is both writing and directing the movies, so what combination I ask is rendering Phantom Menace a redeemed film?

I've honestly always liked Phantom Menace. Even back in the day I thought that some of the criticism was overly harsh, and having rewatched all three of the prequels I stand by that.

It's such a wildly inconsistent film. There's a lot of it that's straight 1* material, and then there's stuff like Duel of the Fates and the wonderful sounds that pod racers make as they corner that's legit excellent 5*, and on the whole it averages out to a film that I like more than I dislike.

Attack of the Clones though is just utterly wretched.

Back to the actual question Empire is more polished than ANH, which I think works in its favour. It's biggest weakness is that its story doesn't stand alone, like ANH's does. It's arguably not so much a trilogy as one film on its own followed by a pair, despite almost everyone rating Empire over RoTJ. Personally RotJ has one big advantage in that it was the first Star Wars film I saw at the cinema.

Nerdwriter has a video that talks about the difference in cinematic depiction of Vader between the two movies. How shiny his suit is in the next movie and how he's in much more command of things. It's really quite foundational considering these movies were written by the installment.

[stryke]

Mine would be 4 > 6 > 5 > 3 > 1 > 7 > 8 > 9 > 2 with some of those '>'s being close to a equals sign and some of them being more like >>>>>

The only one worse than 2 is that Clone Wars film that got a cinematic release. I like what the series became, but oh man, is that think a stinker, even more so given it has a character called Stinky.

[McAvoy]

I keep forgetting about that Clone Wars movie. Definitely boring and not good at all. When I rewatched Clones Wars years back when the last season was going to premier I didn't even bother watching it as a form of a pilot.

I guess I should probably figure out where I would rank Rogue One and Solo too.

[hammerofglass]

I ended up watching the Clone Wars movie several times because I had a patron count "secret shopper" gig. Such a bad impression that I refused to even look at the show until after season 6 was out.

[McAvoy]

I ended up watching the Clone Wars movie several times because I had a patron count "secret shopper" gig. Such a bad impression that I refused to even look at the show until after season 6 was out.

I saw it in the theaters because my girlfriend at the time had a kid sister who was into Star Wars. She also had a crush on Hayden Christianson. I thought it was a good idea at the time. I like Star Wars too. Clone Wars movie? Sounds good to me. Take the sister with us? Brownie points with the girlfriend.

Yeah. I was bored. That movie was the reason why I didn't really watch the series until I think Season 5 came out.

Also, as a note. I did the same exact thing for the first Twlight movie. Man I had to bite my tongue after the movie was over. I had so many critiques of that movie.

[Madner Kami]

Not much point in comparatively rating the movies, because each and every one of them has flaws and strengths and none are perfect if you consider them in concert, while some of them are improved by being part of the concert. Except for three: Fuck the sequel-trilogy. The first one might, individually seen, have some good moments, but in concert they are an absolute shitshow and incoherent mess. If Episode 8 and 9 would've been better and more consistent, Episode 7 might come off better, but none of that happened. As someone whose primary fandoms were both touched by JJ Abrams, I have to say: Keep that man away from your franchises.

Some things do stand out though:

• The best stand-alone movies are easily and by far "A New Hope" and "Rogue One".
• Phantom Menace: It is good. It genuinely is. There's no single part that doesn't work (yes, not even JarJar), but it's the concert that is dissonant. Cut out the Pod Race or make the Pod Race the part where the two Jedi become aware of Anakin in the first place, so the Pod Race's portion of the movie becomes shorter. As is, it adds another lengthy climax to the movie that sticks out like a sore thumb in addition to "The Duel of the Fates" and the overall fight on Naboo. The way it's structured, it's exhausting to watch because it adds an extensive climax where there should be none and cutting it's run time could help improve the battle over Naboo, particularly the space portion.
  Overall, age Anakin up and that would solve a lot of the problems of the follow-up movies. Make him 12-14ish, just hitting puberty. That would also work a lot better with his romance towards Padme and someone who's just about to hit puberty makes a whole lot more sense as someone who's "too old to become a Padawan".
  Alternatively, cut all the Naboo-related stuff and focus on how the Jedi came into contact with Anakin in the first place. You can use the Naboo-background as a plot-point to get the story going, but leave everything Naboo-related that comes after leaving Tatooine for another movie. As is, both parts of the story are too important to be left standing besides each other, as they eat each other's attention and importance.
• The Clone Wars standalone movie is crap, but it's good crap, because it for once focuses on what a Jedi could actually do. None of the movies really show you how powerful a Jedi really can be beyond the light-saber shit and the occasional mind-trick and that's just wrong. Jedis are supposed to be powerful. Frighteninly so and they should feel supernatural and unbelievable, which actually adds to their later quasi-mythical perception by the likes of Han Solo. That's what "The Force Unleashed"-games do right. That's what Tartakovsky's Clone Wars does right. It needs to be there. Wait, we were talking about Tartakovsky's Clone Wars movie, right?
• Attack of the Clones. Much of the criticism for this movie comes from the Anakin-Padme stuff and much hate flowed to Hayden for it, but people fail to realize: This isn't Hayden fucking up. That's just how the character is written and directed by Lucas. He's supposed to be socially awkward. However, as is, this doesn't work with the romance and neither does it really work with how the other Jedi don't seem to have much problem fitting in. Qui-Gon gets a pass, because he's kind of an outsider to the Order and is generally supposed to be more down to Earth and in touch with the baseline reality (much the same for Obi-Wan), but the rest of them? All of that needs rewrites, badly. The rest of the movie is good, except you really need to adress the reason for why the Jedi feel the need to co-opt the obvious trap that is the Clone Army. It doesn't flow from the story, because the rescue could've been done by a small task force of Jedi on their own.

[phantom000]

Love it or hate it, ESB only really works as part of a series while ANH can work just as well by itself.

I think it was Joss Whedon who said that problem with ESB is that it doesn't end, it just stops. Granted, Fellowship of the Ring does the same thing but that's the point, it was always meant to be part of a trilogy not a stand alone film. ANH was intended to be a one shot film because no one thought it would be a franchise until it blew away all its competition at the box office.

I won't argue which is a better example of cinematic storytelling, ESB is probably the better film in that respect, but I think if you introduced someone to Star Wars through ANH, and they didn't hate it, their reaction would probably be 'hey that was fun!' While if you tried the same thing with ESB their reaction would be more like 'what the hell?'