I don't think very highly of 3 but it's light years ahead of the previous movies. I wasn't old enough to be one of those weird '80s Universalfags like Belligerent NES Nerd who went to the theme park and jerked off to anything connected to Spielberg. The movies were slow and clunky and I hate them even more after finding out how bad they treated poor Eric Stoltz.
Especially considering the fact that Disney SW has convinced most people that Stormtroopers are useless buffoons.
I would blame RoTJ for that just as much as Disney tbh.
Not quite. None of the Ewoks actually killed a single trooper; the most they did was knock a few down, but that wasn't killing, and the Ewoks would've been cooked meat had Chewie not shown up with a walker.
True on both counts but the violence in RoTJ is also toned down quite a bit from the other two and even as a kid I took it to mean that the troopers who were knocked down and beaten with rocks were meant to be dead/neutralized. You are right about the walker though, Chewey ultimately carries the day. But then again RoTJ is my least favorite of the original six and I haven't sat down to watch it all the way through in some time so my memory of it is a bit hazy.
I could tolerate the toned-down kid-friendly violence of ROTJ, especially since it was the 1980s, and Lucas himself just had kids, so he was no longer the passionate director making dark, brooding films, but rather, the more family-friendly one making Christian allegories, with Vader becoming the prodigal son from Jesus Christ's parables.
The toned down violence isn't the reason I dislike Jedi, sorry if I implied that. The reason I dislike Jedi is because it has a super solid opening with Jabba's Palace and the Sarlacc fight, and then the ending space battle with Lando and Pancake Face is great and the throne room where Luke, Vader, and Palps are all having their little argument is fantastic to watch. It's everything else in the movie that I just find pretty boring, I don't really like Endor or the Ewoks they don't interest me. The speeder bike chase is okay but it overstays its welcome, and the fight at the bunker just isn't as fun as something like Hoth or the Blockade Runner was.
I see. I share some of your concerns with how it felt toned down, but I can forgive Lucas for that because it just seemed like the man was running out of steam. This isn't like the Prequels where everything was planned and he had a dozen EU authors who were all working with him on how it ended. He was throwing shit on the wall to see what sticks, and it was amazing that it worked for three movies.
The OT is an amazing work of art as a whole, made even more amazing when you know the background of everything that was going on behind the scenes. All the technical difficulties, the clashing egos, the labor disputes, the environmental hazards, the grand scale of the vision behind it all. And the PT is equally impressive to me because of how visionary and forward thinking they were on a technical level, combined with the fact that the vast majority of the funding for them came from George's own pocket and didn't use union labor basically makes them the world's most grand scale indie films ever made.
They're both impressive to me, but the PT has the benefit of a Lucasfilm empire fully-established as a power in the film-making world, as well as a story outline that was already planned out with a beginning, middle, and end, hence why I respect the making of the OT more since it was innovative, but also risky as fuck. Science fiction at the time was the domain of nerds who hated tradition and looked towards the future; combining it with fantasy and cowboy films as well as WW2 films was a risky endeavor, and the fact that Lucas and his crew pulled it off at all is nothing short of a miracle from God.
I've never considered Star Wars a science fiction film tbh. It's a fantasy film that just so happens to be set in a science fiction setting. Especially when you compare it to the sci-fi of its day it just plain doesn't fit in tonally, aesthetically, or (for lack of a better word) ideologically. I feel that's the true reason for its massive mainstream success, it wasn't trying to be philosophical or deep or deal with higher concepts. It was just a fun film with a simple, well executed, and self contained story that had lovable characters and a cool aesthetic to it. It also helps that ANH had one of the best sequels ever with ESB which took an already winning formula and then added a darker, more desperate plot with nearly flawless pacing and a cliffhanger ending that didn't leave you feeling empty inside. I think that's the secret to the OT's success more than anything tbh, the pacing.
I ironically find Star Wars to be the most realistic sci-fi film series when it comes to humanity and philosophy. We get spaceships, space wizards, space lasers, but the same things bring us down; greed, lust for power, incapability to work together or communicate properly, etcetera. Star Trek was unrealistic in that it tried to claim that humanity can bypass natural things like greed without a higher power. Warhammer 40K made no fucking sense from a logistical standpoint and just felt like they made a depressing universe for the sake of it. Gundam and Mass Effect are realistic in their technology, but Mass Effect went full space magic in the third game in a way that makes the Force seem tame, and UC Gundam gets eerily close to 40K levels of depression as the Universal Century came to a close.
You know I've never th9ught about it like that before. I really like that.
That's basically the secret of Star Wars, it's that it's so big, but by default fairly light-hearted and has some serious thought in the actual structure of the world, that you can go basically anywhere and do basically anything with the world. Gritty war drama? Got you covered. Serious religious dialogue that is actually compelling to real life? In spades. Swashbuckling adventure? Easy, literally the first EU books were about that. Organized crime stories? Up there too. Making something fit in the world and feel "Star Wars" is exceptionally easy, which is why Disney's repeated failures are so baffling.
To be fair, Destiny is a game where you're running around in a helmet basically all the time, outside of social spaces (and even then most people keep their helmets on). A Jedi robe set would be difficult because there really isn't a Jedi character that typically wears a helmet, at least not one that people would know and recognize. Either you add a random helmet that doesn't really fit, or you abandon the idea entirely, and they went with the latter. (Maybe a Clone Wars-inspired outfit with the clone trooper armor beneath a robe and a helmet on, but then you'd get people complaining it's not really a Jedi outfit.)
Filoni (and Lucas?) also ripped off this idea from a Z canon (final tier, completely fanfiction basically but officially licensed) comic where old Obi fights Maul. Old Wounds, 2005.
Star Wars works because it's peak fantasy (as in imagination), our heroes walk across worlds that are alive, they feels they have their own history, dynamics etc.
I still hate that Maul came back. The guy dying anti-climatically was the point. Too bad the fandom just ate it up.
By that metric, realistic is what happens when you can identify something from real life in fiction; Star Wars is all about that.
