What’s your favorite Star Wars film? Anyone?
Am I right in guessing that most people on Hive would choose one of the originals? For me it’s really just A New Hope and Empire. Jedi has its moments, but it’s also the signpost of everything that went wrong later. I mean… teddy-bear insurgency? The idea that the Empire’s elite forces get wrecked by sticks, rocks, and rope traps is… well, let’s call it “foreshadowing.” Not of narrative brilliance, but of the shift from mythic space opera to toy-driven marketing.
The script decisions didn’t help. Han shouldn’t have come back. His “death” in Empire is perfect. It’s narratively clean, emotionally sharp, and thematically consistent. Harrison Ford knew it too. He spent years complaining about the character being kept alive just to move plastic off shelves, and privately pushed Lucas to either kill him or write him out. As the last trilogy materialized, he started bad-mouthing Star Wars itself and only agreed to do the movie if they finally agreed to kill him.
Anyway, he did not want to do Jedi and had to be talked into it. And why? He comes back neutered, declawed, and basically irrelevant. The character who comes back has absolutely nothing in common with the Han of the first two movies. The early drafts left him dead; the merchandising department resurrected him. Lucas didn’t hide the fact that he needed a live Han to better sell Han action figures.
Lando should also have died. He betrays Han, betrays Leia, betrays everyone, and then redeems himself by blowing up the Death Star. Perfect arc. Perfect conclusion. Test audiences disliked it, so they rewrote his ending so he could survive and… what? Show up smiling at the bonfire? It adds nothing except another sellable face. Yeah, the action figures thing again.
And the sibling twist… that’s its own mess. Leia wasn’t Luke’s sister in A New Hope. Vader wasn’t his father. None of it existed in the early drafts of Empire, either. In fact, in early drafts, Anakin — still a separate character — appeared to Luke instead of Obi-wan, urging him to visit Yoda. The “I am your father” reveal was a late attempt to craft a shocking second-act climax. It works in Empire, but it traps Jedi into a corner that the story never climbs out of.
Lucas once planned a very different ending: Luke alone, wandering off like a ronin. It was quiet, ambiguous, and honest to the Kurosawa DNA at the heart of the series. But it didn’t test well. So instead we get the musical-number kumbaya finale we have now, with the story bent around broad smiles and marketing strategy. Mel Brooks didn’t exaggerate much with the Spaceballs bit about “Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made." It was already true by 1983.
So there we go: A New Hope is close to a perfect Flash Gordon adventure blended with samurai movie. Empire somehow improves on it. And Jedi, despite its problems, still manages to wrap things up in a way that’s enjoyable if you don’t think too hard.
The prequels? You already know where I stand.
Episodes 7–9? They have their highs, but “somehow Palpatine returned” tells you everything you need to know about the mindset behind them: spectacle over sense, retcon over story, and a fundamental misunderstanding of who Luke Skywalker was and what he represented.
But I digress.
What about you guys? Best Star Wars movie and why?
By the way, here is a great YouTube video from someone who thinks the same way I do:
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |
For me the best films was "Empire" and I still enjoy watching it to this day. I was really let down by the prequels and thought 7-9 were just fine until they got a bit too crazy with the side missions and that modern-day politics being thrown in there. Things like light speed warping through another ship was the nail in the coffin to me... well, that and grafity bombers (in space, where there is no gravity) and running out of fuel maintaining speed in space which everyone over 8 years old knows isn't necessary. We never discussed things like financing and fuel EVER in Star Wars so when they started doing that I started rolling my eyes like mad over and over again.
Anyway, as far as merch is concerned, I had a ton of it as a kid. It was really cheap back then too. The other day I saw an x-wing Lego set and was thinking "oh that's awesome" until I saw that this model, which was really small, was going to be over $100. What happened? I used to go to the store and be able to get figurines for something like $1.50 in the 80's.
I bet they sold a ton of Baby Yoda dolls.