Flickering Myth ranks the Star Wars Universe…
This article is dedicated to the memories of Carrie Fisher and Kenny Baker.
May the Force be with you both.
For 40 years, we’ve enjoyed the adventures and battles between the Jedi and Sith, in a galaxy far, far away. We’ve seen the fall of the Jedi Order, the rise and fall of the Empire, and the rise of the New Order. We’ve even now seen, thanks to Disney’s $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm, how the Rebels got their hands on the plans to the Death Star prior to Luke Skywalker blowing it up (with the help of Han Solo).
Just as we had done previously with Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we here at Flickering Myth felt it was time we began ranking the Star Wars Universe seen as though new movies are going to be added each year. This is the 2016 edition, ranking Star Wars: Episode VI – A New Hope through to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Let’s begin.
9. Star Wars: The Clone Wars (26 points)
I’ll be honest, when we began doing the voting I had actually forgotten about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the 2008 movie that was the stepping stone into the Clone Wars TV series. Although, I would argue, I did forget about it for good reason. Although the idea of a movie taking place during the fabled Clone Wars spoken about by Obi-Wan Kenobi during his first meetings with Luke Skywalker, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a cinematic dud of epicly boring preparations. There is so little worthy of note, as one dull scene moves into another. Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman put it best when he noted, “It’s hard to tell the droids from the Jedi drones in this robotic animated dud, in which the George Lucas Empire Strikes Back – at the audience.”
It says a lot when a Star Wars movie – during a period when everyone was sort of still talking about the franchise following the 2005 release of Revenge of the Sith – only opened to $14 million behind The Dark Knight and the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder. Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a forgotten part of the Star Wars Universe, and quite rightly so.
8. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (57 points)
Well, people may not have liked Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace when it was released in 1999, but the Flickering Myth writing staff believe its follow up, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, is actually worse. Attack of the Clones‘ biggest problem is that its a boring movie. At least The Phantom Menace introduced us to Anakin and gave us a cool villain in Darth Maul, but Attack of the Clones has absolutely nothing to offer. I wrote an article detailing this last year, arguing that it was easily the worst film in Star Wars cannon (forgetting about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, of course).
So did Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones really give us nothing worthy of note? Well, it did give us the cinematic presence of Hayden Christensen, a man who would soon bear the nickname Mannequin Skywalker due to his utterly bland and lifeless performance as Anakin. It’s still hard to know, fourteen years later, whether Christensen is a victim of Lucas’s bad script or his dreadful direction. And it’s not like Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson fared better. I mean, it’s hard to make this sound good: “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.” Or how about, “They’re like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals!”?
Having said that, the John Williams subtle Imperial March cue in the soundtrack there is pretty great.
7. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (72 points)
And so here it is, a film that many consider to be the worst of the entire saga is seventh on our list and nearly twenty points ahead of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
Many of you reading this will remember the summer of 1999. A couple of years previously we’d had another taste of the Star Wars Universe via the 1997 special edition re-releases and the announcement we were getting a brand new Star Wars movie was almost too much to bear. We were finally going back to the beginning and find out just how Anakin fell to the Dark Side of the Force and become Darth Vader. You could taste the excitement as people queued around the corner to get into the movie theatre.
And what we got was Jar Jar Binks acting like a twat. At least Darth Maul was cool (as was the Podracing) and John William’s score is sublime. It’s also funny to note that Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace got so many video games spin-offs. It had a main video game tie-in, Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo, Star Wars Starfighter, Star Wars Racer, Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles, Star Wars: Super Bombad Racing and many more.
On a personal note, I saw Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace five or six times in the cinema because I was trying to convince myself it was good. I’ve heard many stories from others who did the exact same thing.
6. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (98 points)
It will probably come to no surprise that the Prequel Trilogy has made up the bottom half of this list, and that Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is seen as the best one of the three. In reality, looking back on it eleven years later, it’s still a bad movie – it’s just comparatively not as bad as the other two.
This was it for the Star Wars Universe at the time, and in fact we thought it might be the last time we ever see the galaxy far, far away on the big screen. What did we take away from it? An even moppier Mannequin Skywalker featuring a worse performance from Hayden Christensen, Padme losing the will to live in a laughably bad scene, and Darth Vader screaming “NOOOOOOOOO” as the camera pans away. Still, the fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan was pretty good.
And there is good stuff to be found in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, it just wasn’t the end to the trilogy we all wanted. Really, it wasn’t the Prequel Trilogy we wanted at all. But now that the Prequels are done and dusted in this list, let’s see what was ranked above it.
5. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (127 points)
In at number five is the first Anthology movie in the Star Wars Universe (unless Star Wars: The Clone Wars counts as one?) in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
It was a film that was slightly overshadowed by some potential behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt, with sources claiming director Gareth Edwards had lost control and the entire end of the movie was changed in re-shoots, and if you watch the final product compared to some of the earlier marketing material it’s clear and evident that something had gone array somewhere. Whatever the case, we got a Star Wars movie that many felt was a bit muddled in the first half, and utterly brilliant in the second. Everyone – even those who didn’t like it – have praised the final act on Scarif and Darth Vader’s final moments, but the CGI Tarken and Leia put a few people off. When we reviewed it on the Flickering Myth Podcast, Oli and I criticised its characters, who were mostly bland. Apart from Donnie Yen, of course. He was great.
While its fifth on our list, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story did top one of our writer’s lists. So it can claim that.
Click next to see which Star Wars movie we ranked as the best…
