After playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order recently, I found myself in the mood to keep experiencing Star Wars. Having seen eight Star Wars movies at the time, I decided to order the other three that I hadn’t seen and make a marathon of it, watching the eleven films with some friends of mine. Having done so, I thought it’d be interesting to do a ranking of the live-action Star Wars films (the animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars is basically a pilot for the TV series so I decided to exclude it for this list).
11. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
The prequel trilogy gets a bad rap and, as you’ll see in this ranking, I consider the majority of the hate to be unwarranted. However, there is no doubt that some of the bad reputation is well-deserved and, as far as I’m concerned, Star War: Episode II – Attack of the Clones is my least favourite of all the live-action Star Wars films. There are some decent moments in the film such as discovering the world of Kamino, the chase sequence on Coruscant and the Battle of Geonosis (excluding the lightsaber segments) but the film is dragged down by poor dialogue and character interactions and nothing exemplifies this more than the awful execution of the romance between Padmé Amidala and Anakin Skywalker. It comes off as embarrassingly cliché with the worst moment, for me, being where they are literally running through a field which ends with them rolling through the grass in an embrace. Interestingly, unlike the other two prequel films, lightsaber combat is surprisingly uninteresting with poor editing and stiff choreography. It must also be said that Hayden Christensen doesn’t give a particularly good performance in this film, coming off as emotionless for most of the film with any scene requiring emotion from him resulting in a sudden outburst of emotion that has him whining like a child.
10. Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker
I’m sure that my opinions on the other two films in this trilogy will prove to be controversial but I suspect that most will agree with my position on this film. It’s also probably worth noting that this film and the two anthology films were the ones that I saw for the first time as part of this marathon. As we watched the opening crawl, I remember an audible laugh erupting from our group as we were told that Palpatine had returned. I confess that I love Palpatine as a character but his appearance in the sequel trilogy comes completely out of left field and, based on how they executed it, Palpatine should never have been in this film. It would be somewhat ok if the rest of the film made up for it but, while there’s some nice moments, it never manages to due to some off character moments and a deus ex machina in the final battle that I absolutely hated. While The Rise of Skywalker manages to be a little more entertaining than Attack of the Clones, it’s not by much.
9. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
I will confess that The Phantom Menace is a somewhat guilty pleasure of mine. I genuinely really enjoy the pod racing sequence and the lightsaber fight between Darth Maul and Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi is one of the best in the franchise. There is also something to be said for the scale of the film which dwarfed anything we’d seen previously in the franchise and introduced us to many wondrous sights such as the underwater Gungan city or the city planet of Coruscant. However, many of the visual effects, while I’m sure stunning for the time, haven’t held up as gracefully as many of the effects from the original trilogy and the film’s pacing comes off as a bit too slow and meandering. As for Jar Jar Binks, he’s famously, or should I say infamously, annoying and proves to be poor comic relief. However, given how infrequently he’s relevant to the plot, I can usually block him out, although even that isn’t saying much about him as a character.
8. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
I remember the controversy surrounding this film when it first came out with many declaring it to be the best Star Wars film while others called it the worst Star Wars film. As far as I’m aware, I’m one of the few that views it as a middling film. Let’s start with the positives, Mark Hamill gives his best performance in the franchise, the final battle on Crait is genuinely exciting and Rian Johnson plays with audience expectations in some clever ways. However, it can be said that it was this aspect that caused the film to become controversial in the Star Wars fandom and I must admit that not all of his tricks on the audience come off as satisfying. There’s also some plot elements that I would’ve liked to see expanded upon (in a different movie, The Last Jedi was already long enough at 150 minutes) as I thought the glimpse into the shady side of the Star Wars universe was very interesting.
7. Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
The first film in the sequel trilogy is my favourite of the three but it still feels a little lacklustre compared to the best that Star Wars has to offer. By far and away my biggest problem with The Force Awakens, which similarly feeds into my lack of enthusiasm for the sequel trilogy, is how the rise of The First Order feels so jarring coming off of Return of the Jedi. I understand the desire to get to the action sequences, which are great by the way, and to introduce the new cast of these films but I always felt that we could’ve seen a little more of the stagnation of the New Republic and how The First Order took advantage of that before getting to the story that we see in the film. Other than that, we are treated to an enjoyable film that incorporates the characters of the original trilogy although it does come off as a bit same old, same old.
Be sure to check out “My Ranking Of The Live-Action Star Wars Films Part 2“!
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs!