Your top 3 Star Wars movies

Having already shot my three favorite, I suppose I should now follow up in detail, discussion being the purpose of this thread.

A NEW HOPE

It remains the biggest dare, whose rusty financial/technological/first-timer limitations only accentuate that much more the high-conceptual approach to virtually every facet of its core being: thematic structure, cognitive imagery, visual/editing language, arcane tonal/stylistic appropriations etc. It's self-contained, standalone. It's the one Star Wars movie that, more than any other, can simply be (1977) Star Wars. A one-and-done. Its narrative proceeds here casually and there briskly with equal ease, and where the emotional content of its story & characters is cleanly conveyed with a kind of universal shorthand still unmatched. It's the most comical Star Wars movie; not innocently puerile humor (PT) nor forced, hyperextension gimme-laughs (ahem, ST) but that distinctly documented, unchecked sense of wry tomfoolery carried over from the shit-talking teenagers of American Graffiti. The whole pitch of the movie is very in-camera in that respect, from the candid three-take limit performances to much of the broadcast news B-roll footage of its sci-fi venues/passersby and even down to its recorded audio; I'd wager it bears the least amount of foley work and ADR from the saga. It almost plays like one prolonged gaffe of a Star Wars movie that not only manages to stick the landing, regardless, but is strangely all the better for it.

At the very least, such rough edges befits the storied circumstances that bring into a shared journey Edo period peasant droids, a Mojave Desert rural kid who knows engines, an aged David-Lean-alumni wizard from the wastelands, a v-necked ace smuggler -- introduced with surroundings just shy of a wartime Moroccan speakeasy and all her illicit goings-on -- along with his Himalayan Yeti expatriate, and a freedom fighter "Princes" in name only; in practice, no more regally poised than some fast-talking flapper storming her way into a downtown police station on a Saturday night to cause a ruckus. Hell, even Darth Vader, in every other installment an obsidian black totem of solemn cool, is here comparatively smudged under harsh light and volcanic in temper: "Commander, tear this ship apart until you've found those plans, and bring me the passengers! I WANT THEM ALIVE!" ...as if, for the right occasion, he still enjoyed being a visibly pissed off Wehrmacht general, in from the cold, before Episode V forever relegated his stature to that of the monastic 'dark father'. The original title, Star Wars, has long since been stripped of its verve and in place anchored with franchise and fandom legacy, but upon its initial release was the perfect monosyllabic connotation for a hotdogging ride through backworlds and a tech-brutalist space station where characters exist almost indifferent to the script, not as special snowflakes, but motley meteoroids—lawless, undecorative, spontaneous. Every installment that came after is more controlled or, unfortunately, overproduced to a numbing effect. But with this 1977 dirt bike of a Star Wars movie, the movieverse in question is (barely) held together only by the rafter of Lucas' aforementioned craft.      

ATTACK OF THE CLONES

The rarest artifact of all the Star Wars movies. The most "George Lucas" of all the Star Wars movies. It's as if the real George Lucas was a struggling filmmaker back in 1938 with flights of fancy yet stuck fast working for peanuts under Republic Pictures, who somehow astral-projected himself into modern day, circa 2002, appropriated digital filmmaking technology only to then craft a number of space opera serial chapters into a 2-hour-plus epic 'wonder tale', maximizing what were of his time popular (or at least perfectly acceptable) sophistications in pulp-serial melodrama with the highest of artistry, cinematic scope and 'movie magic' ambitions shared by the likes of Fritz Lang and James Whale—now finally realized! The film is beautifully, elegantly Radiopunk distilled, replete with all manner of shimmering, Art Deco-like chromium surfaces, World's Fair futurism, Buck Rogersesque displays of gravity-defying thrills (this is a distinctly aerial, rocketeering action film: jetpacks, flying cars, flying droids, free-falling Jedis ...Yoda), Errol Flynn swashbuckling heroics and weird planetary romance nonetheless fixedly slanted with a hint of Rockwellian quaintness. It's the Star Wars movie that, more than any other, stepped out from another time, or from the boyish headspace of such times wherein impossible realities promised in earnest adventure-romance and gumshoe mystery amidst exotic alien worlds. The movie's now dated digital embrace, both with photographic medium and CGI, is dated in the best ways. Odd, too, as just about everything commercial and spectacle driven these days across cinema is so ubiquitously digital, often uniform in its generic perfection; Attack of the Clones by contrast feels as crudely avant garde at present as it did opening day 18 years ago, only to an inverted effect. It still feels exhibitional, now more than ever, perhaps, as a novelty at once from the past and of a retro-future that never was.

Actors are choreographed to their marks in a constant waltz and emote with teleplay formality to an extent that surgically underscores every little inflection or nuance of the storied moment. In conjunction there is a lateral emphasis via Lucas' anamorphic framing in line with the comic-strip art logic of Flash Gordon, Secrete Agent X-9 and particularly the courtly tableaux of Prince Valiant in that you could break down his shots, or any aggregate thereof constituting a scene, and lay it out across a newspaper page resulting comfortably in a left-to-right visual reading. The advantage of 2nd acts or middle chapters lies within their noncommittal natures and Attack of the Clones is by no means the exception. Sprawled but leisurely, in no real hurry to get anywhere. You can't really lose yourself in Revenge of the Sith, what with its dramatic focus zeroing in like a pressure cooker on main characters and story arcs as they approach ever closer the trilogy's precipice, and while The Phantom Menace certainly offers up an exploratorium of world-building, the presentation is often equally rehearsed, like a tour guide following script as they lead a field trip of middle-schoolers from one exhibit to the next to a rigid schedule. Serving as an umbilical chord between Episodes I and III, this movie has about it narratively, dramatically and atmospherically a curious state of matter; thinking of a plasma lamp, if Episode I was the inner electrode and Episode III the palm of your hand then Episode II is the filament of softly luminous, charged neon gas: brilliant and dreamlike yet faraway within its insulated glass orb, truly the stuff of another realm. Tesla Star Wars.  

RETURN OF THE JEDI

The reserve. The clutch player. I'll hazard: borderline unquantifiably better than all the others...? How could this be, you ask? Return of the Jedi is no one insisting upon the idea of a Star Wars movie—the most unaffected of all the Star Wars movies, neither theoretical nor precocious; neither stoically abstract (PT) nor cheaply, desperately vying for our affections (ahem, ST). It is the one Star Wars movie that isn't trying to substantiate itself, existing rather in complete utilitarian fashion in service to simply telling the story ...and yet no less devoted to the craft; here, almost thankless in its execution. Artless. The first two installments of the OT caught in their sails the wind of novelty. The PT is the stuff of idiosyncratic pop-auteur infamy. The ST proved an elaborate, nebulous feint (arguably, in ways that can be appreciated) and the spinoffs are nonpartisan ventures; one as a personalized DeviantArt Star Wars movie, the other gestured thoroughly as an 'easy come, easy go' lite affair in heart of a career-long friendship with Lucas—to that end, a spiritual followup to Willow, and really no better or worse.

Episode VI, then, compared to all the above is (cue oxymoron) uniquely-stock.

Sure, everyone fawns over Skyfall for its chic arrangement and weighty pronouncements, which is fine and all. But there's something to be admired about, say, For Your Eyes Only as a Bond film that proceeds courtesy of its early '80s era with an equitable hands-off commission of plot, stunts and locations at face value. The movie is aboveboard visually and toneless akin to any network TV movie of that time, or an episode of Magnum P.I., yet budgeted to a level that affords scenic big screen spectacle and handsome production values. I raise this analogy in part because the DP for all three '80s Bond films, as a matter of fact (including Octopussy and A View to A Kill), in succession starring Moore was Alan Hume, the same cinematographer here for Return of the Jedi, and in all instances employed the most time-honored techniques in natural, unmixed color palettes and three-point lighting setups, though Star Wars certainly required of him some exacting low-light shadow work. Director Richard Marquand for his part also epitomized the journeyman sensibility. A documentary filmmaker who would eventually helm a couple three mid-range British-American productions in traditional genres such as horror and wartime melodrama/suspense, he came into Star Wars whetted but none too mannered. In his previous films Marquand acquired the no-fuss aptitude for staging/shooting squared and calling upon his actors a workshop pedigree in performances in order to facilitate traditional psychological drama and character-driven scenes; tasked, then, with appropriating Lucas' epic fantasy panorama, the matching communicated Star Wars in the most plainspoken dramatic language.

No scene in the movie, the entire franchise, stresses this point better than the first dialogue encounter between Luke and Vader in the catwalk of the landing platform base on Endor. The story content here in its presentation abstains from every extreme end of the spectrum --  impromptu versus heightened theatrics versus bold ellipses -- and is simply, quietly purposeful. It is not even about formalism or the movie as a knowing work of artifice; just the two characters submitting their opposed (yet longing) dispositions. The writing, costuming and art-direction is reasoned but so too is the mise-en-scène direction that manages to summarize the thematic elements at play using only two actors and the contained width of the set, and especially how one is framed alongside the other, facing or with his back to. And notice how either one or both of the characters remain largely center framed for the duration, the two etched out of black either by Luke's 'face of truth' or Vader's spectral-lit 'mask of tragedy'. The shot of Vader igniting Luke's saber makes for one of my favorite binary compositions, both visually and dramatically, as an angular glowing-green bar of light calls Luke to attention before swiping clockwise over the frame; a beat that cuts through the first ritual of their meeting and ups the tension, but more so in broader implications concerning how these two will eventually resolve their arcs. And I appreciate the economy of the scene with just over a minute and 1/2 of interaction between the two. It's measured but it doesn't drag.

     

Even where some of the action staging is nondescript in its coverage (i.e., Jabba's sail barge or the pew-pew! exchanges between Storm-and-Rebel troopers) such naivete in an odd way frees the saga to exist as serial thrills mounted chiefly upon editing momentum and the joys of Williams' Mickey-Mousing score. But I maintain that Marquand's contribution to the final duel in the Emperor's throne room, to whatever degree it was, helped distinguish as much, for no other saber duel yields more transparently to its given storied juncture, and thus is yet another illustration of the movie as a whole. The ST duels were blow-outs of ratcheted up pretense or Anime-like indulgence (nods to Pyro). The PT duels were a pageantry of Peking dance and/or winding tone poems. Old Ben Kenobi against Vader was a chess game diversion appetizer while Luke and Vader's first clash in The Empire Strikes Back, most consistent to the one in question, was still orientated separately for a more beeline sense of peril and immediate anxieties, in turn staged coldly and technologically—Luke timidly creeping his way around corners and down corridors, as a knight would pursue a dragon deep within the latter's lair, or a vampire slayer would pursue Dracula deep within the latter's castle. But that phase of their conflict is long over by the time they cross swords again before the Emperor.

The setting here is not that of menace but resolution in the cloak of starfields, shadows and void, and where the martial combat itself, for the sake of choreography, is all but immaterial. I actually dig how the fight is boxed at length with medium-masters to an effect that pairs everything down to Luke simply as a character, as the hero, and therefore highlights it as a thing not of spectacle but of folklore. Even when Luke does cool shit like holding Vader off at a wide stance, kicking him down the stairs or back flipping onto a walkway, at this point it's fairly evident that he's superior in ability, so its really all just an extension of him negotiating the threat of the Dark Side while trying to redeem his father in the process. Again, I aim to articulate the modest yet canny utility with which this was all realized, from Lucas having found himself a comfortable position between creative author and on-set ghost director (to say nothing of his post-production command) to Marquand steadily ballasting the movie with his aforementioned masonry of docudrama and genre practices.   

I love Return of the Jedi because a) it's just the stuff, and b) as such, it delivers in spades old pirate movies, pulp Orientalism, WWII 'adventure mission' plots, woodsy fantasy featuring wise spirits and fury little Indians and the last leg of our hero's journey leading all the way up to the final stage of evil space sorcery plus the ultimate existential mirror ...armed only with chivalry and his mind's eye.