We already spend far too much time thinking about Star Wars as it is, and that ratchets up to 11 around May the 4th, a silly pun meme that was turned into a fake holiday devoted to everybody's favorite space fantasy franchise. Naturally, there's no better time of year to argue about which pieces of the incredibly expansive Star Wars franchise are the best.
It can certainly be easy to forget the full breadth of the Star Wars franchise, since there are so many old chunks that very few people care about anymore. But since the franchise remains one of the biggest ever, it's all been preserved and is available on Disney+. Except, of course, the original versions of the original Star Wars trilogy--only the updated, worse versions of those films are available to stream legally.
So if you've forgotten what all there is to watch in this franchise, we've assembled a ranked list of every Star Wars movie and TV show that's ever been released, from the ones you know (like the three movie trilogies) to ones you've forgotten ever happened (like the Ewoks and Droids cartoons from the 1980s). Except the Lego Star Wars specials. You're on your own with those.
You're gonna wanna strap in, because this journey is not going to be a short one.
27. The Ewok Adventures
This pair of TV movies from the 1980s about some kids who get marooned on Endor are quite bad and don't really fit with the rest of the franchise. These days it just seems weird that these even got made, but that does add some novelty value as a strange vision of what Star Wars might have become had these movies been a success.
25. The Book of Boba Fett
There were a couple decent episodes in that first season (like the one that Boba Fett wasn't in), but otherwise the Book of Boba Fett was like a vision of what Star Wars would look like on The CW. And that's not great, Bob.
24. Ewoks
An animated TV show that followed up the live-action Ewok Adventure TV movies, Ewoks was pretty generic and not all that entertaining most of the time. And it's just so bizarre to see them speaking English. They obviously had to do that--you can't do an entire show for 6-year-olds in a fake language. But it remains super weird.
23. Droids
It's better than the Ewoks animated series--though that sentiment may be more a comment on the choice of subject matter than it is on the quality of the show. In other words: I'd rather watch a 1980s children's TV cartoon about C-3PO and R2-D2 than one about Ewoks. Does that mean Droids was a good show? Not really.
22. The Rise of Skywalker
All three Disney sequels were terrible in their own ways, but Rise of Skywalker managed to achieve a new level of egregious thoughtlessness. We're talking about a movie where they literally resurrected the Emperor offscreen, after neither of the previous two movies had foreshadowed that in any way. It's the nadir of Star Wars.
21. Star Wars Holiday Special
A TV special that originally aired during the 1978 holiday season, the Star Wars Holiday Special--in which Han and Chewbacca bring the whole gang back to Chewie's home planet to celebrate the in-universe Life Day holiday--is a strange and hokey relic of the past that's impossible to critically evaluate at this point. It may not be "good," but it remains an adorable and amusing novelty.
20. Solo
Coming off the rather bizarre Clone Wars theatrical movie, I don't know how high anybody's hopes were for this computer-animated series back then. But it was surprisingly enjoyable, and it tapped into something very important that the prequel movies had mostly glossed over: how this war led to Anakin's fall to the dark side. It felt like a necessary piece of the story, which has not really been the case with more recent animated series.
19. Resistance
All the Star Wars animated series are at least partially geared specifically toward children. It's just the nature of these things. But while shows like Clone Wars and Rebels also have things to offer those of us who aren't children, Star Wars: Resistance doesn't, really.
18. The Bad Batch
The most recent animated series is a strange mixed bag. It's got quite a compelling focus, dealing with rogue clone soldiers trying to make their way through the universe well after the Clone Wars have ended. But, frankly, the animation is obnoxiously stiff, and it's pretty distracting.
17. Obi-Wan Kenobi
This felt like a show at war with itself. With its overreliance on low-quality CGI, it was impossible to take the Obi-Wan show as seriously as its story wanted us to. Whereas with Andor, the Star Wars-ness of the whole thing took a backseat to the story being told, Obi-Wan Kenobi was more focused on delivering a Star Wars aesthetic that comes with a story attached to it.
16. The Force Awakens
JJ Abrams' first bad Star Wars movie had the exact opposite problem the prequels had: It nails the aesthetic of Star Wars, but its storytelling is as thoroughly incompetent as it could have been. Remember the rathtar scene? No? That's what I thought. Yeah, this movie is worse than you think.
15. Rebels
There were times on this animated series where it felt like it was about to move itself beyond its cartoon niche. But there would always be something--like the Inquisitors using their lightsabers as helicopter blades so they could fly--that prevented it from quite getting there.
14. Attack of the Clones
Every scene looks like digital vomit, and it's so badly edited that it made Natalie Portman seem like she's bad at acting. In terms of sheer filmmaking craft, it doesn't get any worse than this.
13. The Last Jedi
Director Rian Johnson managed to put together a Star Wars movie that was full of really cool visuals that felt legitimately like I was seeing something new in Star Wars for the first time in a long time. Unfortunately, the story is nothing more than a subversion of The Force Awakens that is simultaneously remixing The Empire Strikes Back. It's braindead, and two and a half hours is far too long for a movie that has nothing going for it other than being nice to look at.
12. Revenge of the Sith
It might be that kids today aren't as alarmed and disgusted by horrendously awful CGI now that movie and TV studios use bad visual effects like a crutch. But for me, it's hard to find any meaningful drama in the clash between Anakin and Obi-Wan when it's taking place in a comically abysmal-looking digital lava field.
11. 3D Clone Wars
Coming off the rather bizarre Clone Wars theatrical movie, I don't know how high anybody's hopes were for this computer-animated series back then. But it was surprisingly enjoyable, and it tapped into something very important that the prequel movies had mostly glossed over: how this war led to Anakin's fall to the dark side. It felt like a necessary piece of the story, which has not really been the case with more recent animated series.
10. The Mandalorian
Sometimes, the first live-action Star Wars show takes itself seriously, and when that happens, it's sublime. But most of the time it's just a 1990s-quality network adventure show like Hercules or Xena, that's primarily focused on making references to other Star Wars things. Unfortunately, it's not the '90s anymore, so it's bad that it's like that.
9. Rogue One
It's a weird, incoherent, hacked-together piece of nonsense that was primarily advertised with scenes that aren't in it--such as the one pictured above, which was the centerpiece of the ad campaign even after the movie had been released. There may have been a decent movie in here at some point, but it got lost when they reshot half of it after director Gareth Edwards delivered his first rough cut.
8. The Phantom Menace
It's hard to tell if it's actually any better than Attack of the Clone or Revenge of the Sith--it's got way more Jar Jar, so that's not a point in its favor unless you're into that sort of thing. But it's the only one of those three movies that was shot on film--making it the best by default because it's the only prequel that managed to mostly match the aesthetic of the rest of the franchise.
7. Tales of the Jedi
An anthology series with half-length, 12-to-15-minute episodes, Tales of the Jedi hits the sweet spot for Star Wars animation with stories that simply don't have enough time to get bogged down in, well, anything. These episodes get to the point and contain some actual substance that could give you a better understanding of the Star Wars universe.
6. 2D Clone Wars
Genndy Tartakovsky's original 2D Clone Wars series was made up of bite-sized episodes that now form an oddly structured two-part mini-series on Disney+. And it's aged surprisingly well in this form--Tartakovsky's animation style is still a trip, and watching this show all together like this instead of in small chunks is frankly a pretty unique experience for this franchise. There's nothing else like it under the Star Wars label.
5. Visions
Lucasfilm let a bunch of Japanese animation studios do Star Wars their way--the idea here was for these studios to "reimagine" existing Star Wars ideas and stories in inventive new ways--and it turned out to be the best collection of Star Wars animation ever. There might be a lesson there.
4. Return of the Jedi
Some people think one or more of the prequels is better than Return of the Jedi, and I'm going to very generously say that those people are, at best, misguided. Every Star Wars movie made since 1983 has had at least ten things dumber than Ewoks, and not a single one of them had anything as great as the whole Jabba's Palace sequence.
3. A New Hope
Being the originator of a franchise as sprawling as Star Wars will inevitably be awkward--nothing about it is that well fleshed out, and stylistically it's pretty different from any Star Wars stuff of the past decade. But considering how most of the Star Wars franchise has been essentially just ripping this movie off instead of trying to advance the plot in any way--and how truly, deeply good A New Hope is by contrast--the original remains really tough to beat. That said, nearly every change that George Lucas made to this movie from the 1997 Special Edition to the Blu-ray release made it meaningfully worse. It's a joke that there is no current official release of the original version of this movie.
2. Andor
This Disney+ series is the first live-action Star Wars thing since the original trilogy that's simply a story being told that happens to be taking place in the Star Wars galaxy. It wasn't constructed to intrusively remind you in every scene that it's Star Wars, and it doesn't feel like the product of an algorithm designed to appeal to Star Wars nerds. That it's actually great is a really nice bonus.
One note, though: Andor would be behind A New Hope and Return of the Jedi in these rankings if the original cuts of those movies were readily available.
1. The Empire Strikes Back
It's been the best Star Wars movie since the day it was released in theaters in 1980, and it remains so today because it's just that well-made. Director Irvin Kirshner is a forgotten figure at this point since everybody associates the originals with Lucas, but credit where it's due. Kirshner, who also directed the great RoboCop 2, really defined the big screen vibe of Star Wars in a big way with this film.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.