I think that I just got lucky and am a little too young to be fooled by Empire in to thinking it’s the best.
The last hour+ of Rogue One is SO much better written and acted. Empire is an easy 2, and the OG is an easy 3, but the second half of Rogue One is so easily the best it’s not funny. And that’s including all the drama/nonsense that @moriarty referenced earlier.
You’re correct, but a Star Wars Nerd never deals in absolutes.
“Too young to be ‘fooled’ by Empire?”
I declare shenanigans.
I love Empire, don’t get me wrong.
But the last hour of Rogue One is so far and away better than anything else in the Star Wars movie universe, it’s not even fair.
Rogue One is the most re-watchable Star Wars movie.
It’s a shame how much they fucked up Return of the Jedi with the Ewoks and whatnot
The battle scenes from the Rebel fleet dropping in from hyperspace to the end of the movie are just so damn good.
shouldabeen a planet of Chewbaccas instead of fucking ewoks
(siiiiiiiiiiigh)
Yeah, you know.
Where does “Star Wars” fit into the hierarchy?
Clearly, he doesn’t like sand.
At the top, for me.
The problem is that there’s the other half of the movie you have to consider. If you just get to carve out parts then I’d be putting Phantom Menace near the top for Duel of the Fates.
Empire has zero fat. Not a thing to change. That’s why it’s at the top.
Also, while I love the last hour of Rogue One, it owes a lot to A New Hope in how Rogue connects so seamlessly to it.
The Battle of Scariff is a phenomenal set piece, but I have no idea how much of my enjoyment is down to how good it is and how much is down to Hope nostalgia. I was out of my seat when Red and Gold Leaders showed up, and taking it all the way to the start of the run for Tatooine by Tantive IV was a shit-ton of lagniappe.
I’d say the fact that it evokes those feelings so well is a sign of quality in itself.
And, Andor, which nearly rivals the first season of Mandalorian, as my favorite Star Wars series, will connect seamlessly with Rogue One at the very end of its (final) season 2.
While a lot is said - much of it being appropriate - about how Disney has fucked up Star Wars, this ignores a lot of the good things done on their watch, like Rogue One, Andor, Mando and (hopefully) Ahsoka, and a lot of the bad things done on Lucas’ watch, like the prequel trilogy and plastering 1990s CGI all over the Oscar-winning special effects of the OT, trampling the story arc of one of the main protagonists in the process.
How Rogue One melded into A New Hope, retconning plot holes along the way without creating new ones*, was done with surgical precision. Meanwhile, the entire prequel trilogy took three movies to build to “Nooooooooo” and Padme dying of a broken heart when she’d just had two babies and, according to Lucas’ narrative in Jedi, had lived long enough for Leia to remember her. He couldn’t spend a few minutes to figure that shit out?
Here’s an example of just how perfectly the end of Rogue One connects to A New Hope. At the start of Hope, we see Rebel soldiers lining the corridors of Tantive IV; they’re clearly determined but, at the same time, completely shitting themselves. Then a bunch of Storm Troopers burst through the door and start shooting the walls and ceiling. I know they lost the battle, but it wasn’t like the Troopers were notably deadly.
It’s only later that we see the ominous figure of Vader, who we know to be a bad guy because of the music and his outfit, but we have - at that time - absolutely no idea of what he can do. Rogue One gives us the hallway fight where Vader slices (literally) through a dozen or so Rebel troops, all while holding the door closed with the Force. Now we know why those Rebels were so scared.
There are also tiny details like there being a file in the Scariff vault on “Hyperspace Tracking”, which was something invented out of whole cloth for Last Jedi but now, thanks to Rogue One, has been retconned into a technology that the Empire had been working on for decades.
Nerds!!!
Fairly easily explained if you consider Tantive IV left Yavin not docked with Home One.
Here’s why this is so fucked up. Vader’s cry was because he’d been told that Padme and the kids had died. He didn’t see it, so you could leave that part as is (as bad as that scream is), and have Padme and the babies smuggled away.
So what? Well, what Lucas killed was the possibility of a Padme spin-off which follows her and a young Leia on adventures that lead up to Padme’s untimely - and presumably heroic - death, at which point Leia becomes the ward of the Organas.
If Disney had somehow managed to retcon Padme’s death in to being an elaborate ruse to throw Vader off the scent, I would’ve been on board. Unfortunately, they’ve wasted that opportunity by closing it off in the pointless “Kenobi”.