The First—and Last—Time We Rank the Star Wars Movies

Or is it? George Lucas’ prequel trilogy did far more than tell the story of the rise of Vader. It also revised the legacy of the Jedi, and therefore the legacy of the franchise itself. The famed Jedi Council was revealed to be not some bastion of wisdom and nobility and truth, but flawed, even corrupt: perfectly capable of manipulation and deceit. In a word, a colossal failure. Yoda failed Dooku, just as Obi-Wan failed Anakin, and the galaxy along with him.

This was world-building—world-remodeling—at its finest. To then go back and rewatch the originals, in light of the prequels, was to gain a deeper appreciation of Luke’s Lightness, his goodness. The only reason he would’ve become an agent of evil, it was now clear, was if he’d listened to Yoda and not saved his friends. On some level, Luke had perceived the failure of the Jedi, their recourse to dogmatism and arrogant all-knowingness, and sought to break the pattern. That’s why this list puts Attack of the Clones near the top and Revenge of the Sith at the very. If a new story in a franchise deepens or expands, rather than limits or undermines, your idea and enjoyment of an original, it’s worthwhile—and can plausibly be considered better.

Not that J.J. Abrams understood this. When he went to make his contribution to the Skywalker Saga—episodes VII–IX, producing all three, directing the first and third—he looked not to the prequels for inspiration, as he should have. He looked to the originals.

The result, some say, were “homages” to Lucas, loving reconstructions that introduced the archetypal storytelling of Star Wars to a new generation. This is hooey. Abrams’ films were, to put it plainly, plagiarizations of the first order, a copy-and-paste made all the more shameful by the implication that having a female lead, in Daisy Ridley’s Rey, was all it took to legitimate the effort. So his films must, in any ranking and certainly in this one, appear nowhere other than dead last. The characters and plot points were so mappable to their original-story counterparts, Abrams’ failure of imagination so total, that the trilogy threatens to destroy, to this day, the legacy of the entire franchise.

That’s, again, why this list hates lists. Because as much as Abrams is to blame for the general worthlessness of Rey’s journey to Jedi-dom—and he really, really is—lists, especially those that serve only to recapitulate norms, are equally, and perhaps even more so, responsible. Lazy, lame, lusterless, lacking, such lists are. In continually propping up the glory of the old, they inflict their own risk-aversion outward, poisoning audiences with a conservatism at fundamental odds with the emancipatory art of storytelling. As a result, fandoms, far from welcoming radical change, demand allegiance, loyalty, to tradition.

Over the years, certain swaths of the Star Wars fandom have revealed themselves to be exactly that: backward-bound in the extreme, and thus unwelcoming of transformation. Not wise, in other words, or noble or true, but flawed, even corrupt—failures of men. How big this sodality is has never been entirely clear. What is clear is this: They’re out there now, and they’re holding us back.

And they are, very probably, many of you: the audience for an article like this one. Ask yourself, as Yoda once asked Luke: Why are you here? Because if it’s to argue and show off and police and hate—and what else would it be?—an agent of evil you already are. To seek out rankings of Star Wars films, to read list after list after bullshit list, is ultimately to justify your obsession with, and nostalgia for, a dying franchise: the infinite hours you’ve spent rehashing its pointless particulars. If only you had friends to escape to. If only you had actual people to save.