• BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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    11 hours ago

    Hot take: A New Hope was groundbreaking at the time (and is ordinary by today’s standards), Empire Strikes Back is all-around great, and every other Star Wars piece of media exists simply because of those two reasons.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      2 hours ago

      Yeah, Star Wars peaked with ESB. That’s not to say it’s all complete shit since then, but nothing in Star Wars has risen to the height it was at 44 years ago.

      • BalooWasWahoo@links.hackliberty.org
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        1 hour ago

        Two rejoinders to that: the video games and the books. Rogue Squadron, Shadows of the Empire, and even that one game in the arcade (that was so frustrating) were amazing. I personally wasn’t as much of a fan of the Thrawn trilogy as some, but the books about the kids of the movies’ characters were pretty fun to get through.

        I think the majority of the X and millennial fans fell in love through those just as much as from the original movies.

    • Baggie
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      3 hours ago

      Same. I know a lot of things get blamed on the prequels and sequels, but the issues with the series do set in as early as rotj.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      4 hours ago

      Yeah, watching them all a couple of years ago I came to a similar conclusion. The first is important, if not necessarily great. The second is a classic.

      After that it’s mostly toy adverts and money grubbing. I like Rogue One, some of the Mandalorian and Andor. It really opens up some decent fiction once you get away from the boring Jedi. Even the games have better stories than most of the movies.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      The prequels were also pretty groundbreaking in CGI use for the time, but primitive by today’s standards.

      • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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        8 hours ago

        I’d say that’s the problem with CGI. It’s never going to look better in the future, whereas practical effects almost always leaving me wondering how they managed to make something look as good as it does

        • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          It really depends on what the CGI is used for. Having 100 clones on screen without 100 extras still looks good. Having a pure CGI character delivering dialog is going to age badly.

          • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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            2 hours ago

            Having 100 clones on screen without 100 extras still looks good.

            Better than having 100 extras in storm trooper costumes? I’d rather see just a dozen storm troopers over 100 CGI troopers. Quality over quantity.

      • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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        8 hours ago

        Uhhh. Sure? I haven’t watched the whole video but it seems like he’s talking about episodes 7, 8, and 9. I mean to say that I think if you introduced someone to all of the core Star Wars movies today, 8/9 movies are practically nothing special. Reducing that information quite a bit, we can derive that Star Wars is 88% mediocre. Of course, time, nostalgia, and art don’t work that way so there’s obviously a whole lot more value and love in the series than “it’s only 11% good” conveys, but I just wanted to put my hot reductive take out there to be inflammatory