Star Wars
For the new movie coming out I foolishly booked a TRIPLE bill of the new trilogy in IMAX, starting at 6pm straight after work and the new movie starting at midnight. I also had work the next day! (it went about as well as you'd expect.. 🙃)
So! what I also did was watch Episodes 1 - 6 plus Solo and Rogue One, he's what I thought.
1 - The Phantom Menance
I had always liked this one despite all the hate it got, when I watched it when it came out I actually went back several times to watch it again. Watching it again this year, even though all these other movies had come out since... it's still one of the best and it actually feels like Star Wars? It's still got lots of practical effects (despite the CGI characters) and the green screen parts still have sets, the podracing part was excellent!
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2 - Attack of the Clones
What the fuck 😂 I didn't dislike this so much originally but this might actually be my least favourite one now, there's plenty of stuff I like like Yoda fighting and Ewan McGregor's scenes, Samuel L Jackson with a purple lightsaber etc etc but there's so much I didn't like and the weird green screen backgrounds??
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3 - Revenge of the Sith
Originally I DID NOT LIKE THIS FILM at all, I watched it once only and I was having a bad day where someone at college I thought was a friend ignored me in front of others and ended up crying in the street about it after the film (I know... I know..)
But it was just so sad and depressing, all the characters I liked dying or the child murder or the main character being set on fire, etc etc. This time I could see that it actually was good and was a good set up for the rest of the story and Chewbacca was in it
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Solo
This was definitely better the second time around.. but! I can kind of see why this flopped, it's one of the ones where it doesn't feel especially Star Wars, more like something else, plus the new guy definitely isn't Harrison Ford, but Donald Glover as Lando was fantastic, maybe even better than old Lando in the new one haha. More Chewbacca is always good, plus I'm sure people think this is his first movie but it's his 2nd, he's pretty old!
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Rogue One
I wasn't so sure about this one when it came out but I really really enjoyed this one on a second viewing, it's among the best of the non original movies and manages to feel a lot like Star Wars despite not having George Lucas anywhere near it. This is the movie I wish Solo was, or that it was the same quality so we could get a Obi-Wan movie instead of a series.
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4 - Star Wars
Just FYI the versions of the OG trilogy I'm watching are the 1st DVD set, made right after the prequels, so the transition was actually pretty great with a 2 seconds before lead in from Rogue One. So it was pretty different watching these after 5 other movies right before, I've never seen this one in the cinema and on TV it wasn't on as much as the other 2 so I don't have as many memories tied up with this one, however it was a lot easier this time to relate to old characters like Darth Vader and Obi Wan being the same people from the older movies (maybe Solo helped) plus this is the third Chewbacca movie who kind of became my fav character of this whole thing.
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5 - Empire Strikes Back
Everyone's favourite! but it's not mine, haha I've always really liked it though, and my all time fav part of all of Star Wars is the Millenium Falcon in the asteroid field.
Another thing I noticed is how much more expressive the Yoda puppet was compared to the CGI version (even the new one)
This was a real good cliffhanger that the Last Jedi could have learned from, fantastic though, love this movie.
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6 - Return of The Jedi
This is 100% still my favourite one of the series, I have the most childhood memories tied up with this and I liked the Ewoks and there was more Chewbacca stuff so yeahhh \o/
HOWEVER I feel like watching this severely impacted my enjoyment of The Rise of Skywalker because there was so many similar parts and I literally watched it less than 24 hours before I saw it so.. hahaha more on that later.
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7 - The Force Awakens
So, after finishing Return of the Jedi at like 3am and working all day I come in to this at 6pm in the IMAX cinema for this in 3D... which is actually the 3rd time I saw this in this format and I saw it in 2D a bunch of times too, I just love Rey and Daisy Ridley so much plus this is really the only movie of the trilogy where the 3 mains have chemistry like the original trio, in the others they're split up or bad things are happening and it's just not the same. Speaking of the original trio it's the beginning of them all getting killed off (which I still don't agree with) but yeah I fell asleep a little, the glasses didn't help much, but I'd seen it that many times I didn't care. Chewbacca though :( poor guy.
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8 - The Last Jedi
This movie was a bit disappointing to me, much like Sith I only watched it once and didn't want to see it again. But I guess my obvious love for Force Awakens probably clouded my judgement (I saw it in a double IMAX originally) so, second time around I do like it better after all! with watching the originals before this I didn't really want a vaguely similar version of Empire and they didn't make one. However, despite the changes it made that were good and could have lead to something really interesting in movie 9, this film is probably the reason why the new trilogy is such a complete mess. In changing things up they cut off so many things from Force Awakens and it ended in pretty much a dead end, what do these characters even do now?
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9 - The Rise of Skywalker
What a mess.
Okay it was a really entertaining mess but there are some problems here hahaha. Now I can really understand why they overreacted and tried to walk back some of the stuff from The Last Jedi but I feel like, that stuff was done so they should have stuck with it and made something new. Much like Rogue One this seems to have been changed and we'll never know what happened before. The Emperor coming back seems to have been the big fix, and Rose especially has been swept under the rug??? why?? And a lot of stuff or even actors are there for 5 minutes then they're gone, so silly.. and then again and again there was more Return of the Jedi moments that I felt like I was noticing even more because I just watched it, so instead of any nostalgia I just felt kind of annoyed haha Anyway, I wasn't sure at all if I even liked it and I guess I do... but will I watch this one again? ... uuu.. probably XD
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Thanks if you read all this! after the movie was done it was 2:30am and I had to work early, I ended up walking around because I was too shy to go into a McDonalds and work was really awful and I just kept passing out... whoops
Here's my personal ranking, or..
TLDR:
01 - Return of the Jedi ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
02 - Empire Strikes Back ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
03 - The Force Awakens ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
04 - Rogue One ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
05 - A New Hope ⭐⭐⭐⭐
06 - The Phantom Menace ⭐⭐⭐⭐
07 - The Rise of Skywalker ⭐⭐⭐⭐
08 - Solo ⭐⭐⭐⭐
09 - Revenge of the Sith ⭐⭐⭐
10 - The Last Jedi ⭐⭐⭐
11 - Attack of the Clones ⭐⭐