It's Only Space Opera or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Star Wars I've been enjoying Star Wars for about 43 years now, since the first movie appeared on the screen at the Everett Theater in Everett, Washington when I was 15 years old. Over the years my enthusiasm has had it's ups and downs, and had waned to nearly nothing in the early 90's. What happened? Had I changed? Had Star Wars changed? Turns out it was me. Star Wars was, and still is what it's always been – a Saturday-morning movie serial writ large with bigger budgets and better special effects than Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon could have ever hoped for in the 1930's. But I had lost sight of that, I think. I was trying to apply real-world rules to a totally fictional reality. I was trying to apply hard sci-fi rules and physics to a sci-fantasy universe. Spoiler alert: it doesn't work. Also, IMO over the years there has been too much energy spent trying to justify the Star Wars approach to story-telling and how it portrays it's events and characters. People try to apply everything from Joseph Campbell's anthropology of myth-making, to convoluted arguments amongst fans to try and wash away the various inconsistencies and outright contradictions that have arose over the decades. And I was totally caught-up in this mid-set. It seemed that to be an adult Star Wars fan, everything needed to be firmly delineated and cataloged and explained in meticulous detail. The gown-up were desperately trying to justify the fantasy to themselves and somehow make it seem legitimate to the rest of the world. Turns out it doesn't need to be that way, after all. You just have to sit back and accept Star Wars for what it is – that direct-descendant of the Saturday-morning Flash Gordon movie serial. In fact, if George Lucas had gotten his way in the early 70's and wangled the rights from King Features, Stars would have never happened and he would have made a revival of Flash Gordon, but that's a whole 'nother story. Bottom line – quit over-analyzing everything! There are supposed to be improbable plot-twists, and impossible character arcs. Relax, already. This is how the move serials worked. The bad guys lose, the good guys win, and you really shouldn't try to figure out how the hero survived falling off the eight-mile high cliff in the last episode. The main bad guy not only came back from the dead, but turns out to be related to one of the heroes? Just accept it and enjoy the ride. I no longer care how scientifically accurate the spaceships or aliens are, or how insanely improbable or contrived some of the plot turns are. It's fun. That's all it's supposed to be, after all. If you want or expect more from Star Wars, you're barking up the wrong tree.
Never have I thought it or wanted it, scientifically accurate. It's sure had its ups and downs. The OT actors really had a verve to them. But even ep 6 was a plot retread: megaweapon about to come online. The convoluted PT had moribund acting and horrible dialog. But super cheesiness in the Jedi v Darkness battling. Fun. The ST? 7 and 9 are retreads, plotwise and 9 undid the coolness of jaded Luke 8 with a plot abour a SUPER bad guy Rey had no history with and MORE megaweapons about to come online, and really demoted Kylo. But whatevs. Big, cheesy fun if you want big, cheesy fun.
3/4 of this particular comment is factually inaccurate. The only accurate point made is that TFA is a rehash of ANH. On-topic, what has always drawn me to Star Wars has been the sense of "modern Myth", archetypal storytelling, and visual poetry and cyclical rhyming that Lucas imbued the Original and Prequel Trilogies with and that is present in the Sequel Trilogy as well (although not to the uniform degree that I would have preferred), and so, at the end of the day, I can look at the full Skywalker Saga and say that it is one of my favorite film franchises of all time even if it didn't completely shake out exactly how I, as a long-time fan, wanted it to.
6 was a huge retread. Not as complete as 7 was, but 6 had a new death star and with a weakness that's largely the same as the original... there are some great scenes in this movie that further the lore, which make up for YADS (Yet Another Death Star). Added strikethrough. Ep III struggled, and I never saw it in the theater because I and II were (censored). Only because a copy was given to me... Yet of the PT, III is easily the best. And even then... 7 is so by-the-numbers and such a bigger retread... the saving grace were the new characters and archetypes. 8 dared to do something different, even if it has the occasional TESB vibe, it's clearly doing its own thing. If they wanted the ST to have its own story they shouldn't have switched writers; even before its release articles were saying it would be different. TLJ needed a little honing but it's nowhere near as bad as people it make it out to be. 9 seems to be largely a shell game that has Rey finding herself just like how Luke did in ROTJ. complete with more exposition-puking than an alcoholic in bar just after saying they have no problem with booze. And so many fake-out non-deaths that, had I bothered with this in the theater I would laugh and the audience would finally emote at something involving the movie... by applauding me and anyone else laughing. (I'm impressed in a way; having death star super-zaptacular weaponry mounted on (way too many to be anything less than laughable) Star Destroyers was actually a decent move. ROTJ didn't even think of doing that.