Best Star Wars film(s)?

[Darren Dirt]

I was --finally-- watching SW4:ANH and SW5:TESB with my 11 year old son last night (i.e. me=ubertired today as we went to sleep at 1 freakin' 30 cuz we started at like 8pm and he refused to wait until the next day to watch Empire )

During our inter-movie-mission, I was pondering and realizaed I had forgotten how well-written and complex the *story* in ANH was -- so now I'm tossing around the possibility of changing my vote to it instead of Empire being the best IMHO (which is why the poll allows for TWO choices ).

Just curious what the rest of you think, pick your "top 2" and explain your choices, maybe with a little personal "I remember when I was a kid and saw it in theatres for the first time..." experiences (for those of us over 30, that is )

[Lazybones]

4 and 5 are the only ones that hold up through he whole thing.. I was tempted to add Jedi for the hover bikes, but the Ewoks sort of kill it from an adult perspective, even if they where fun when I was younger.

[Mr. Analog]

A New Hope is good because it is pure film entertainment. The directorial goal of the film was to re-create a Saturday matin?e action/adventure serial experience. The characters are essential to this, they were archetypal stereotypes of heroes and villains. The story is simplistic but it has many interesting ideas that combined fantasy with elements of sci-fi and created something new. You have knights, cowboys, samurai, princesses, robots and aliens playing out a WWII fantasy in space.

I think it helped that there were a lot of create people who worked on the project and that the film makers, to save on budget, went with college students who were playing around with technologies that if they hadn't been given exposure in Star Wars might not have become part of movie-making for another 5 years (such as computer controlled camera movement). A lot of elements go into making Star Wars a great movie experience.

Empire Strikes Back was equally good in my opinion because it expanded the already growing Star Wars universe and it was blessed with a fantastic script which took the two dimensional characters from the first film and made them into real people with real hopes, dreams, problems and faults.

Return of the Jedi is a bit of a disappointment on many levels because there is, in my opinion, much less focus on the characters and too much focus on special effects. RotJ to me represents the tipping point for special effects to function as a means of forwarding a story to being the focus of the story.

Phantom Menace has some great elements but again, lost a lot of focus and just turned into a special effect clip show with some linking segues.

Send in the Clones (har har) was IMHO the best of the new batch, it had a great plot and really kept things going. The battle scenes were relevant and interesting and the structure of the storytelling was more congruent with A New Hope.

Episode III was fun, but ultimately weak. You're trying to tell the story of Darth Vader for crying out loud. DARTH FRIGGIN' VADER. Weak, better than Episode I but weaker than II.

[Darren Dirt]

LOL, am I strange for being annoyed by the fact that I opened up the poll with the ability to choose *two* and right now the total is "7" votes!?

PS: I also enabled the "let users change their votes" option, so feel free to add your Choice #2, Whoever You Are...