Star Wars is and has always been a shitty series. - Even the original trilogy.

Carrie Fisher is just everything. I like what Mark said once about how people tell him every day that Star Wars helped them with bullying problems or feeling good in their own skin or helped them accept their sexuality or helping them get over losing a loved one. That's what I like.

I feel awful for Jake Lloyd, Ahmed Best, Hayden Christiansen...tho it seems the latter two are now accepting of their Star Wars roles (especially Ahmed) I fear for Jake. Not only is he schizophrenic but his sister died last year. I think hes in North Carolina? Anyone know how he is doing?
 
millais said:
Supposedly one of the major reasons for the initial popularity was the timing. They were coming out at the tail end of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era of the 1970s when all the big movies were very cynical and bitter in tone for an entire decade, and the original Star Wars film was like the total opposite of that, a kind of palate cleanser. Apparently the timing was right, as the people were tired of the political/societal cynicism in movies and were hungry for fantastical escapism and simplistic fairy tale of good against evil.
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It was also the big pop culture introduction to the Monomyth - the Hero's Journey. Other than the Wizard of Oz, and LOTR (which was written before Star Wars but not made into a movie until the 2000's) nearly all Hero's Journey movies were made post Star Wars. It was a winning formula so of course, Hollywood jumped on it and spammed the shit out of it.
 
OP has a point, (even if he is seemingly trolling.) Star Wars mostly bad. (Especially if we're only counting the stuff currently considered "canon")

The original Star Wars film (retroactively titled: "A New Hope") is formulaic as fuck. (Lucas literally copied old WW2 films frame for frame, and has never even tried to hide that fact... I've seen special features where they explicitly pointed it out and claimed it as a positive.) That isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world, A New Hope is an enjoyable enough (if over-rated) movie in its own right, but many other films have done what it did, and many of those have actually done it better.

The Empire Strikes Back is substantially better than the first, I don't even think it's a particularly unpopular opinion to call it the *best* Star Wars movie.. (No surprise, it wasn't directed by Lucas, though you can see his fingerprints if you look.. then again other SW films weren't directed by him and it's all downhill from here.)

With that said, and most people won't even admit this, Return of the Jedi is "Prequel Trilogy" bad (but still far better than "Disney" bad.). I honestly don't get why it gets a pass. To be fair, the opening scenes are actually pretty good, but it quickly devolves into bullshit after that... I heard Lucas wanted to make the film a reference to Vietnam... but he made his "viet cong" a bunch of fucking teddy bears who can inexplicably overcome actual mechs with sharpened tree trunks.. It was SOOO bad.

The films are all downhill after ROTJ. There have been some amazing games, and even more amazing books in the Star Wars Universe previously, but after Disney bought the franchise, they unilaterally declared it all non-canon. And then proceeded to dump out the worst films in the series history to boot. Yeah, Star Wars is (canonically) mostly bad.
 
UnKillFill said:
OP has a point, (even if he is seemingly trolling.) Star Wars mostly bad. (Especially if we're only counting the stuff currently considered "canon")

The original Star Wars film (retroactively titled: "A New Hope") is formulaic as fuck. (Lucas literally copied old WW2 films frame for frame, and has never even tried to hide that fact... I've seen special features where they explicitly pointed it out and claimed it as a positive.) That isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world, A New Hope is an enjoyable enough (if over-rated) movie in its own right, but many other films have done what it did, and many of those have actually done it better.

The Empire Strikes Back is substantially better than the first, I don't even think it's a particularly unpopular opinion to call it the *best* Star Wars movie.. (No surprise, it wasn't directed by Lucas, though you can see his fingerprints if you look.. then again other SW films weren't directed by him and it's all downhill from here.)

With that said, and most people won't even admit this, Return of the Jedi is "Prequel Trilogy" bad (but still far better than "Disney" bad.). I honestly don't get why it gets a pass. To be fair, the opening scenes are actually pretty good, but it quickly devolves into bullshit after that... I heard Lucas wanted to make the film a reference to Vietnam... but he made his "viet cong" a bunch of fucking teddy bears who can inexplicably overcome actual mechs with sharpened tree trunks.. It was SOOO bad.

The films are all downhill after ROTJ. There have been some amazing games, and even more amazing books in the Star Wars Universe previously, but after Disney bought the franchise, they unilaterally declared it all non-canon. And then proceeded to dump out the worst films in the series history to boot. Yeah, Star Wars is (canonically) mostly bad.
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From what I heard, they copied that WWII footage because they wasted their effects budget and the results came out looking like utter shit before they did that.

ROTJ is just... well it gave us Jabba and his crew, but that's really the only praise I can give it beyond "It has good effects". Endor drags on too long and the stuff with the second Death Star comes off as redundant. I'd put it abopve the prequels, but only just barely because at least the Ewoks could fight, unlike Jar Jar.
 
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KOTOR (both honestly, but especially the first) are the only slightly decent things coming from Star Wars. I like the questionable values and the fact that you end up rooting for the bad guys half of the time. The movies tried to hard to make the Jedis (and the republic) seem like the good guys, even when they clearly weren't.
 
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Pokemonquistador2 said:
It was also the big pop culture introduction to the Monomyth - the Hero's Journey. Other than the Wizard of Oz, and LOTR (which was written before Star Wars but not made into a movie until the 2000's) nearly all Hero's Journey movies were made post Star Wars. It was a winning formula so of course, Hollywood jumped on it and spammed the shit out of it.
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Nah. There's plenty of earlier examples in cinema such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Ten Commandments or Ulysses to name a few.
 
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Wikipedia says Alec Guinness couldn't stand even one movie of the series, which is why Kenobi was killed off towards the end of the first film. Also he detested fan mail about his Kenobi role, and told at least one Star Wars geek to stop watching it.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Wikipedia says Alec Guinness couldn't stand even one movie of the series, which is why Kenobi was killed off towards the end of the first film. Also he detested fan mail about his Kenobi role, and told at least one Star Wars geek to stop watching it.
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Alec Guinness was a theater Britfag who thought he was too good for the "shitty" (?) sci-fi movie he was forced to act in. He was technically correct, but he would have said the exact same if he had been cast in an actually good Sci-Fi film released back then.

Tasty Tatty said:
It ain't really original. It's the Hero's Journey. The only original of it it's how it was told (in space) and the cinematic process.

That, to me, doesn't make it bad, though.
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Yes, but RotJ is kind of bad though...
 
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