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.
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 Gollum still looks pretty damn good,and those movies are just as old (give or take a year? two? who remembers...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both are true
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.
Meanwhile:
It was Disney all along.
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.
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.
Hello there. Somehow, Star Wars memes have returned. It's not a trap, this is where the fun begins.
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Other universes to visit:
Separatist systems:
Oh hey some real SW content for a change (perhaps):
!starwarstelevision@lemmy.world
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Please do not post the "good friend" or similar copypasta
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