Welcome back to my ranking of The Skywalker Saga. Last time, we covered the very worst of these films, but today things are gonna start getting a bit more positive.
#6) Revenge of the Sith
Regardless of how much you hate the prequels, most people generally agree that Sith is the strongest of the three. Which isn't exactly a glowing achievement, I'll grant you, but I do think this film is a lot better than people give it credit for, and the separation between it and Clones and Phantom is significant. For one thing, this is probably the most exciting and action-packed of the prequels, which doesn't automatically translate to better, but in a series called Star Wars, I'd consider it a significant factor. Similarly, this seems to be the most stylish and visually vibrant of the prequels, with the opening shot of the battle over Coruscant a particular highlight. Yeah, it's not got the charm of the OT's model shots, but if you're going to go CG, go all out, and that's exactly what this first shot does as the camera weaves between hundreds of Republic and Separatist cruisers, showing off the sheer scale and spread of the battle, with a manner reminiscent of a historical epic.
Lucas's direction has also improved. It's still not very good, but having watched them back to back, it's definitely not as hideous as Clones, although the problem with Sith's delivery isn't so much about being wooden as it is about being overly hammy and melodramatic. In particular, Ian McDiarmid seems to be having a great time as Palpatine, who was always a bit of a pantomime villain anyway to be honest, and Hayden Christensen is...well, he's certainly trying! Natalie Portman still seems to be struggling but I'm sure I saw at least one emotion in there, somewhere. There is still one perplexingly awful "love" scene between Anakin and Padmé, but I guess to make up for how few there are, they made it possibly the worst one yet. The lines don't even sound like they connect to each other, as if Lucas just threw a bunch of sonnets at a cement mixer and picked out whichever scraps of paper survived.
You know what is good though? Obi-Wan and Anakin's chemistry. Yes, I know every fucking line of McGregor's has been memed to shit, but do you know why they capture our hearts so much? Because it's banter. It's rare in a Lucas script, I'll grant you, but Anakin and Obi-Wan have a genuine rapport with each other, and you can believe that they're good friends. They talk like friends, they quip like friends, they tease each other like friends, and when Obi-Wan has to defeat Anakin on Mustafar, I can really believe how upset he is.
On a related note, the opening sequence where Anakin and Obi-Wan rescue Palpatine from The Invisible Hand is probably the closest any of the prequels get to reproducing the fabled 'Star Wars feel' that makes those OT films so enjoyable, in that the tone and scenario of the sequence are actually pretty similar to some of the ones you'd find in New Hope or Jedi. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar: the core group of protagonists infiltrate a heavily defended enemy base with a specific objective to reach and a half-baked plan that they keep improvising as they go. It's also got the same sense of humour, the cheesy one-liners and snarky dialogue and banter between the protagonists, and it's got a constantly evolving sense of peril. There are flashes of this formula elsewhere in the prequels admittedly, probably the next closest being the retaking of Theed Palace in Phantom, but it just doesn't have the charisma or character chemistry to make it work nearly as well as it does here in Sith, where it ends up being one of the highlights of the film.
This film does go off the rails eventually, of course, but what I found surprising was how far into the story the film got before it happened. The set up to Anakin's turn to the dark side actually makes a lot of sense. As sloppily as it may have been executed in Clones, we know that Anakin has a past trauma about losing his mother to the Tusken Raiders, and was too late to save her despite acting on a premonition he had of her in danger. So it makes a lot of sense for him to get obsessively paranoid about losing Padmé when he has similar premonitions about her. His tension with the Jedi council also makes a lot of sense, if you consider even from the very beginning they were sceptical of training him, and Anakin has always seemed to be held at an arm's length from the rest of the Jedi, ironically because they feared that he would be too dangerous, which then drove him towards wiping them out. Like that's actually good writing. And when his trust in the Jedi order is wavering, along with the lies fed to him about the Jedi trying to take over and the chance to save Padmé, it actually makes a lot of sense that Anakin lashes out at Windu, considering as well his impulsive nature. From that point onward though, it falls apart. Immediately swearing allegiance to the Sith and taking on the Vader moniker? Nuh-uh. He's not there yet. He's still travelling downhill, but he is far from reaching the bottom. But no, we go straight from that regrettable impulsive decision straight to evil bastard within about a minute. Even then, maybe we could swallow it with the melodrama of the thing if it weren't for...
The. Fucking. Younglings.
Again, everything to do with the younglings has been memed to death, and it doesn't take a genius to see how misguided and tonally kinda fucked up that is for what is basically a kid's film, but you know what, I get it. This isn't a pleasant story; it has to go there at some point. But not with Anakin. That's the problem with it. Like I said, Anakin isn't there yet, he's still at the top of his descent and should still be a somewhat good character. If I were writing this, I'd have Anakin shut himself away somewhere straight after the Windu scene and have some kind of breakdown as he comes to terms with what he's done. Meanwhile, the clones, which are faceless non-characters that are directly under the command of Palpatine, can go and do all the child-murdering in the Jedi temple, which is not only a lot more emotionally plausible but keeps Anakin as relatable as he can possibly be at this point, and it would sell the Shakespearean kinda tragedy angle that Lucas is going for a lot better. It is just straight-up inconceivable that Anakin goes from being an essentially good but haunted character who just wants to save his wife during the birth of his child(ren) to an unfeeling and unconflicted child-murdering machine within maybe an hour tops of in-universe time.
The other big problem for me is that Sith's entire plot about Anakin being manipulated by Palpatine makes no sense when you realise that prior to this film, there is very little relation between Anakin and Palpatine: they barely interact in either of the previous two films. And yes, there's a three-year gap which maybe The Clone Wars series plugs (but it doesn't count since it was made afterwards: that's called a retcon, boys and girls) where this might have been explored, but coming to Sith straight from Clones and being told Anakin is super-close best buds with Palpatine is baffling. Especially when Anakin randomly drops a line to the effect of "my allegiance has always been to the senate." WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? You've been a Jedi for the past thirteen years of your life; the closest you have ever gotten to politics is six inches inside the senator of Naboo!
#5) The Force Awakens
We have now crossed the threshold of 'bad' Star Wars, a term I'm still somewhat at odds with, and into the realm of 'good' Star Wars. I know a lot of people would draw this line a lot later, but no,there are at least five really solid Star Wars films, and here we have the weakest of them, The Force Awakens. After growing up with the OT and the prequels, when the lines of 'good' and 'bad' Star Wars were much more clear cut (to the point that a list ranking them like this was almost pointless), the announcement of a new trilogy made by Disney was met with a lot of trepidation, changing to tentative optimism when the trailer dropped and actually wasn't half bad. How refreshing it was when Awakens turned out to be not only a genuinely enjoyable blast of a film but also managed to recapture the same 'feel' of the OT and the magic of Star Wars which I only then realised had been so sorely missing from the prequels. Then a couple of days passed and we all collectively realised the reason it felt so much like the OT was because it was the OT: a flashy remake of A New Hope, to be precise, but with heavy use of the Find and Replace tool. Luke becomes Rey, Tatooine becomes Jakku, Ben Kenobi becomes Han Solo, Vader becomes Kylo and the Death Star becomes Starkiller Base. And that's just a sample; I nearly wrote a post back in the day exploring just how much of Awakens was just blatantly stolen from New Hope before I realised everyone and their stuffed Ewok was five steps ahead of me.
Of course, flashier doesn't mean better, just more polished and expensive. And when you make everything bigger and better, the cracks that existed in the original also become bigger and more problematic. The one that bothers me the most is Starkiller Base. Now, the Death Star has always been a bit of a hangup, even in the OT: in New Hope, we can just about accept that the Empire has the power and money and influence to build a space station the size of a small moon with the power to destroy planets. But with its swift destruction, plus the death toll and the presumed economic hit that surely accompanied it, you'd think the Empire would be dissuaded from trying it again. So when in Jedi they've just built another one in a fraction of the time and even larger in size, which is then also immediately destroyed, you'd think that any other Empire wannabes might be wise to avoid building such colossal and surely expensive battlestations in future, and that maybe future Star Wars writers might try coming up with something a little more original for their future instalments rather than just more planet-destroying superweapons. So then Awakens comes along with Starkiller Base, a Death Star that is to the first one in size what Jupiter is to Earth, with the ability to destroy five planets at once. This, ladies and gents, is how you raise the threat in the laziest way possible. "Look, it's five times as deadly, so its five times the threat". Except it isn't though, is it? Because while the ability to blow up one entire planet at once is quite a formidable threat for an audience to get behind, just simply upping the number of planets doesn't actually elevate the threat to any new level. The graph of 'number of planets that can be destroyed at once' against 'threat level' is not directly proportional: it's got to be at least logarithmic! And before you ask why I'm trying to illustrate my point with statistics graphs, may I remind you you are reading a ten-thousand word retrospective on Star Wars: I feel like most people who've read this far into such a document have at least some understanding of graph theory.
It's difficult to fully explain, but I guess if you imagine you were watching a thriller and one of the villains enters and says "I shot a hostage". Everyone's really shocked because this is a significant shift of the status quo, and now the blood being shed is innocent and what-have-you, but then if the same character comes back in and says "I've shot another four hostages" it just doesn't really have the same impact. You're certainly not five times as shocked, that's for sure. Starkiller Base isn't any more powerful or formidable plot-wise than the original Death Star except for being slightly more efficient. OOoooOOOOoooOoooOO, I'm so scared.
What also doesn't help was in A New Hope even though we never actually saw the world of Alderaan, we knew its emotional significance to Leia and so we still felt pretty bad about its destruction. In Awakens, even though we see people on the planet screaming as they see the blast approaching, we still feel nothing because we don't know who any of them are or why they're of personal importance to the main characters (spoiler alert, they aren't). Yeah, everyone's like "it sucks those planets got blown up", but there's nothing akin to Leia having her entire home, family and friends killed that made us feel something. Otherwise it has about the same emotional impact as a star destroyer being taken down. It's just flashy effects more than anything relevant to the story. Not to mention, which planets did they destroy? What were they called? Because they were never established other than just simply containing the Republic in some fashion, and so we have no real connection to them. Somehow the stakes actually end up feeling lower than they did in New Hope. Maybe if they'd destroyed Tatooine or Bespin or Coruscant we might have felt something, but then that would just be cheap manipulation. At least Starkiller Base was the last we saw of the Death Stars.
There are other niggles with the film, but on the whole, Awakens is a pretty solid and entertaining Star Wars film, even if it is just wearing a New Hope skin suit. If the OT didn't already exist, Awakens would probably be considered one of the best space fantasy blockbusters of its time. Of course, without the OT it wouldn't exist at all, so that's a paradox, but you get what I mean. Ultimately, while it didn't do much new, I do appreciate the logic of Awakens: that Star Wars fans had been let down so many times before and were nervous of how Disney was going to handle it, that Awakens essentially stood to prove that Disney understood the material and how a good Star Wars film should be, before they ventured forth and paved their way with a new story. Which is why it's such a shame to look back now and see Disney didn't have a fucking clue what they were doing.
#4) Return of the Jedi
Ok, things are starting to get a bit more serious now as we enter into OT territory. Originally, I was gonna spend a bit of time talking about the various changes that have been made to the OT but as with most things, the word count ballooned, and now I'm going dedicate an entire post specifically to them. So in the meantime, if you're wondering why I'm not mentioning Greedo shooting first or the dance scene at Jabba's palace or the blinking ewoks, don't you worry, it's coming.
Most people seem to be in agreement that Jedi is the least good of the OT, and while there are many factors as to why that is the case, I wonder if it's worth speculating that maybe some of the negativity towards Jedi comes from people watching it at the end of Star Wars marathons, and who are maybe starting to tire. Jedi is the longest of the OT by about ten minutes, and probably the most languidly paced, which isn't a bad thing, but it is the only one of the three where the action just kinda stops for a while in the middle, and if you've just sat through New Hope and Empire back-to-back immediately beforehand like I and many other fans do when we rewatch these, I think it's understandable that Jedi comes off as maybe the least exciting of the three. Which is still the equivalent of saying "this gold bar is probably the least shiny in the vault".
Now I have a bit of a rocky history with Jedi. When I first saw it as a three-year-old, I was mildly traumatised by the Rancor and its door-related demise. Not in like a bad way, in a perfectly healthy three-year-old-watching-a-mildly-scary-film kinda way. Plus I ended up developing a phobia of slugs at some point in my childhood (unrelated to Star Wars) and Jabba kinda freaked me out as a result. So for the longest time, I refused to watch Jedi, going so far as to read the novelisation instead of subjecting myself to the film again. I did revisit it eventually and of course I was completely fine, and I found myself kinda fascinated by the film, in the same way most people do when it comes to nostalgic horror.
So until very recently I kinda had Jedi on par with Empire in my mind as the best Star Wars films. Adding to that was, ironically, the Jabba the Hutt sequence at the beginning, because it's the best glimpse we ever really got into the seedy underbelly of bounty hunting and organised crime in the Star Wars universe, an area which I've always found a lot more intriguing than the 'evil Empire versus Rebels' plot and that I'd always wished we had a film entirely based around. Luckily, that's pretty much exactly what The Mandalorian is, and it's a big factor as to why I love that series so much. Oh, and Solo, which sort of does it too but really... rubbishly.
Today though, while the Jabba the Hutt sequence is still a highlight, it doesn't save the film, which definitely starts to suffer once said sequence concludes. There's definitely a sense of running out of ideas in Jedi. Some complain that the Jabba sequence is too long, and while I don't agree as such, I think it's still very deliberately there to kill some time. The Empire, in particular, seems to be running on creative fumes. As I mentioned above, the threat is just another Death Star (but don't worry guys, it's marginally bigger than the old one OOOooOOooOo), because the Empire has seemingly either run out of ideas of how to be threatening or have learned nothing from the first one (or both). And in another masterstroke of strategy, the Emperor is gonna be staying on the station too. And then a trap is set for the Rebels which involved letting them know the location of the new Death Star and the details on its shield system, and even consciously allowing them to sneak past the Star Destroyers guarding Endor. A very cocky move considering the Empire's track record, and while I get this was a plot to convert Luke to the dark side, it feels like the Empires not even trying to win at this point.
But then this isn't really about the Empire, this is about trying to conclude a trilogy of films with the biggest baddest threat of all and just not really knowing how to top what's come before. Not to mention contriving a way by which the Empire can be somehow permanently defeated in one fell swoop, and so taking out the new Death Star and also the Emperor if you fancy it and you're not doing anything else was about the best they could manage, like this is just some big ol' game of intergalactic chess.
Speaking of the Emperor, I know he's a beloved meme and the highlight of the prequels, but has anyone thought about how silly he is? His existence is important story-wise to motivate Darth Vader's arc, sure, but he's essentially a pantomime villain. Sitting in his chair looking like a witch, cackling like a witch, just saying evil things in his silly little raspy voice, it's very difficult to take him seriously and, let's be honest here, until the prequels came about this guy had zero character really. He's just the big bad evil guy, and has basically no real role or development otherwise. People complain about Snoke having no character or interest outside of being just a gross looking evil guy, but to be honest, both are about as complex as each other and their best contribution to their respective trilogies is being killed as part of the real villain's arc.
Let's circle back to the Death Star quickly. The last real complaint I have is there's something very slapdash about the final battle to destroy the second Death Star. Firstly, all the major characters are either on the Death Star confronting Mean Mr Palpatine or down on Endor taking part in a much more exciting setpiece. Yeah, I know Lando's leading the fleet, but that's my point really isn't it, it's Lando: a recent addition to the core group who's really one of the more minor characters in the series if you really think about it, so no wonder he's left to do the obligatory space fight while the rest of the crew has fun down in the forest. So there's this feeling that the Battle Over Endor is almost more of a formality than it is an exciting part of the story.
And do you remember when the Death Star was activated for the first time and blew up Alderaan and it was this really shocking moment? And do you remember when the second Death Star first activates and destroys some random Rebel cruiser and it's just kinda "ok cool." There's a theme developing with this particular post, but again, who was on that ship? Why did they matter? Yes, I get they're Rebels, but to us they're nobodies. Other than the faction they were aligned with there was nothing that separates that ship from every other ship that's being blown up. Hell, that one A-Wing that takes out the Executor has a thousand times the emotional impact and that's almost entirely because we see the guy in his final moments. That's all we really need.
Plus when the shield finally is down (by which point I'd like to point out the Emperor and Vader are already dead), the actual attack on the Death Star also feels so rushed and arbitrary. It's just "go in, establish the minimum amount of peril by showing the radar dish getting knocked off, into the reactor, one little pew pew, and then back out." It takes maybe two minutes and there's just no emotional connection there at all, it just feels like its ticking the box, like the editor's going "yeah, we know how this turns out. Let's just get on with it."
I gripe, but this is still the OT we're talking about, and Jedi is still a damn fine film with plenty of great moments. For all the campiness of the Emperor, the final showdown with Luke, Vader and Palps is one of my favourite sequences of the entire series, with its fantastic music swell as Luke finally snaps at Vader and battles him out from underneath the platform, the great visual representation of Luke's contemplation as he looks between Vader's dismembered stump and his own mechanical hand, and of course, Vader's fantastic (and SILENT) moment where he chooses between his son and his master, all utterly supreme.
And you know what? The Ewoks are fine too. Have a heart.
But Jedi is the weakest of the OT, and I think that's a fairly uncontroversial opinion. Unlike next week's hot take, which I think most of you have already foreseen. Hoo boy, this is going to be fun.
Tune in next week for Episode 3 of Star Wars: A Ranked Retrospective!
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