George Lucas could've hardly imagined it back in 1977, but Star Wars has steadily become one of the biggest — if not the biggest — media franchises in the world. There is just so much Star Wars nowadays. To half-borrow a well-memed metaphor used by Anakin Skywalker in Attack of the Clones, it's a bit like sand. It's not rough and coarse, but it does get everywhere. Sometimes you'll be in the shower and you'll find Star Wars in between your fingernails, or you'll brush it out of your arse crack.
There are Star Wars movies (though not for a couple of years — we really do need another Star Wars flick on the big screen at some point). There's even Star Wars telly. Five different shows since 2019, in fact — with diminishing returns, for the most part, though we'll never not be Andor stans. Here, then, is our definitive ranking of the lot.
16. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
This is a lot of fun but doesn’t really go beyond that. Donald Glover is terrific as Lando Calrissian and since I’ve decided Chewbacca is my favourite character – and the best actor of the lot (I do know he’s not real, right?) – then the more of the walking carpet there is the better. The downside is that origin stories can kill the mystique and so deconstructing Han Solo inevitably takes some of the sheen off the most enigmatic and essential character of them all.
15. The Book of Boba Fett (2021)
The only thing I can really remember from this are Temuera Morrison's delightfully committed line-reads ("like a Bantha!", proper meme-fodder that) and that cowboy alien with the massive red insect eyes, like Clint Eastwood if he was in A Bug's Life. Fun action sequences, generally speaking, and I suppose it was cool for Star Wars fanatics to see their life-long favourite action figure brought to life for more than all of the five minutes he got in Return of the Jedi.
14. Attack Of The Clones (2002)
This has one good scene when the Jedi all appear in the arena on Geonosis, something most fans had always fantasised about, but the rest of the film is a mess. Hayden Christensen’s limitations as Anakin Skywalker are rather painfully exposed and viewers are left unsettled by a Princess falling in love with the teenage Christensen, whom she first met when he was nine. This is the film in which the lack of forethought into how the prequels speak to the original films really kicks in, with some of the worst continuity errors ever committed to celluloid (if such a thing still existed).
13. The Rise Of Skywalker (2019)
A somewhat futile attempt to bring all the strands of the Skywalker narrative together. It looks and sounds great, but ends the final trilogy with the same problems that had hamstrung it since its inception: dull characters, flat attempts at humour and a universe that could not live within its own rules. The return of Emperor Palpatine should have been a welcome showstopper, but alas.
12. Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022)
Who among us wasn't super excited to see Ewan McGregor return as the greatest Star Wars character not called Luke Skywalker or Han Solo (maybe Vader's on par, but they're the indisputable top four). He killed it! Left no crumbs, etc. But Obi-Wan missed out on a couple of crucial things. One, it needed more Hayden Christensen (we were so ready for that redemption arc). Two, the Star Wars nerds in the know promised us a welcome return from an apparently not-dead Darth Maul. Where was he!? Docked points.
11. Ahsoka (2023)
We're only a couple of episodes into Ahsoka, sure, and it's one of the better Disney+ Star Wars' of recent — it looks properly cinematic, for one, with staggeringly impressive sets, galaxy-sized shots, and richly imagined worlds that harken back to the oldies. Rosario Dawson puts in a great shift as the titular lead, too. But watching a Star Wars show in 2023, four years since the last film went to cinemas, only serves to reinforce what such a big and operatic sci-fi franchise loses on the small screen. Put them back in the cinema where they belong, dammit!
10. The Phantom Menace (1999)
More a record of George Lucas’ brain farts than a movie, it was the biggest let down since the Munich Agreement. There’s casual (if unintended) racism, Jar Jar Binks, midi-chlorians (the single most self-defeating idea Lucas ever came up with), an overcomplicated plot about the trade guild and the awful casting of Anakin, who resembled a character from a Nickelodeon family sitcom rather than the chosen one who would bring balance to the Force. Despite everything, there are a few good moments and Liam Neeson is a very convincing Jedi who saves several scenes singlehandedly. The lightsaber battle at the end is tremendous fun and John Williams’ score added something fresh and memorable to his famous leitmotifs.
9. The Force Awakens (2015)
It looked like “real” Star Wars, which was a promising start after the ever-decreasing circles of the prequels. It introduced Rey, the one really decent character in the newer films, but it also introduced a whole load of other pointless ones (Finn, Poe, Captain Phasma, General Hux etc), all of whom begin their journeys down narrative dead ends that span the lives of the next two films. Han Solo’s death and Chewbacca’s crazed response is the most moving moment, which rather demonstrates the problems it has reaching beyond the original characters.
8. The Mandalorian (2019—)
.jpg)
Look, those of us outside the Star Wars fandom proper are a little less au fait with this talk of “Mandalorians,” hyper-religious space mercenaries, and such. We just saw the helmet and thought: “Wow, cool! And he looks like Boba Fett! And that clone of Boba Fett from the Prequel Trilogy!” Each season has brought with it diminishing returns (with some truly cringe episodes in the third season, featuring, er, Jack Black and Lizzo as space aristocrats) but we, nevertheless, remain fans of the Pedro Pascal-starring, rootin' tootin', laser shootin' actioner.
7. Revenge Of The Sith (2005)
This is the most enjoyable of the prequels because it’s a pantomime, lacking any subtlety and nuance, but somehow, because it is leading us back to the original films, it grows into something resembling entertainment. The ending manages to convey a little of the melancholy that saves the better films from galactic schmaltz. However, it does contain a jump-the-shark moment for Yoda when he says, “Not if anything to do with it, I have.”
6. Return Of The Jedi (1983)
Flawed but underappreciated and forever tainted by the Ewoks, the first hour of the film builds nicely towards something it never quite delivers. If, as has been rumoured for years, the original treatment had Wookiees instead of Ewoks, the film would have been inestimably better and made a whole lot more sense. In the end, though, the teddy bears kind of killed it for everyone. The final space battle is beautifully choreographed and Luke’s tussle with the Emperor brings that particular narrative to a satisfying end. The remastered version further tarnished the experience by making the unfathomable decision to end the film with a redeemed Hayden Christensen rather than the aged Anakin.
5. Rogue One (2016)
Everyone dies, which is much more in the spirit of “Empire” than “Jedi”. It has great casting, especially Felicity Jones, Diego Luna and Forest Whitaker. The reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO is a neat idea and the kind of deftness lacking in both the prequels and the newer films, while the simple and pacy plot provides a really smart link to A New Hope. The sense of inevitable doom gives the audience a serious dosage of angst, which is obviously a good thing. Because it’s so well balanced between the Skywalker films and can live as a standalone story and it feels like proper Star Wars, that makes it pretty much a total success. Led to Andor, so who can complain?
4. Andor (2022—)
“Finally,” we all said when the first episodes of Andor dropped at the end of last year, “some good fucking food.” Andor is a prequel to Star Wars: Rogue One, nestled on the Star Wars timeline between the rise of the Empire (Revenge of the Sith) and emergence of a certain galaxy-saving Skywalker (A New Hope), and finds a galaxy in flux. The common people are oppressed under the boot of the new Sith-led space autocracy; dissidents are hunted down by the Empire's Gestapo with cold efficiency. Meet Diego Luna's Cassian Andor, then, who we know will meet a heroic death to the Death Star in Rogue One — his titular TV show is about how he went from ambivalent loner to revolutionary radical, and features some of the franchise's best action sequences. That chunk of prison episodes? The prison break, specifically? Perfection.
3. The Last Jedi (2017)
The one that angered a bunch of (male) Star Wars geeks for having the sheer temerity to, gasp, try something different! It's no wonder, neverthless, that Rian Johnson's imaginative, excellent entry in the mainline Star Wars movie series was beloved by critics. It's a treat for all of the senses, with gorgeous cinematography and some brilliant action sequences; come on, that lightsaber duel where Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley team up against Snoke's cronies is an all-timer! Who cares, frankly, if Leia's Force-flight through space broke something as brittle as lore? It's funny, isn't it, looking back on it — what Star Wars fans are crying out for, nowadays, is an inventive filmmaker to give the franchise a big screen zhuzh. But look what happened last time…
2. Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
The importance of the original Star Wars was the sheer exhilarating novelty of the thing. The plot is purely archetypal and occasionally clunky. Lucas picked up all sorts of copy and pastes during his film student apprenticeship and proved dialogue was not necessarily his strong point, but almost every idea was memorable: the Jawas and Tusken Raiders in the desert, the canteen scene, the beauty of the Millennium Falcon, the menace of Darth Vader and the stormtroopers, the space battles and lightsabers. It is an unbounded joy and it’s not hard to see why it was such a formative experience for children at the time. If this was part of your life, it just doesn’t leave you.
1. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Virtually flawless. This is the Star Wars equivalent of Casablanca. Directed by Irvine Kirshner, produced by Gary Kurtz with a screenplay in part by Lawrence Kasdan (in other words, not George Lucas), this has the best dialogue, the deepest characterisation, the most compelling story and the best individual moments of the lot: the Millennium Falcon flying into the asteroid field, Han being frozen in carbonite, Luke and Darth Vader fighting amid the industrial gloom of the freezing chamber, Chewbacca roaring at Vader (a big deal). As well as the main plot twist, which need not be repeated here, there is also the sight of Vader kneeling before the previously unseen Emperor (also a big deal). And it has Boba Fett.
