[Crimson Elephant]

ALL the Star Wars movies are bad....they basically are just bad Spaghetti Westerns in Space.

[fwdude]

The first two (IV & V, that is) at least didn’t try so hard. They were light-hearted enough that you could enjoy them for what they are. There is something freeing in that.

[ebshumidors]

Firefly and Sereneiy are much better space spaghetti westerns.

[Celerity]

“ALL the Star Wars movies are bad....”

Here here.

I’ll still watch them because it’s neat to see all the CGI junk flying into each other. And I’m entertained. My brain isn’t stretched and worked by plots. It’s just eye candy.

But at this point, all of the movies are like this. Some of our brainy sci-fi movies run for a single movie and that’s it. Although I, like everyone, totally love Firefly.

[Exeter]

Instead of wasting your time watching those God-awful sequels (the original three being the exception) rent a copy of The Hidden Castle by the master Akira Kurosawa and see Lucas’ inspiration for his franchise.
BTW, I think the whole series started to go downhill when they insisted on sticking as many unnecessary but marketable characters as possible into the movies. Plot and dialogue be damned as long as next Christmas’ gotta-have toy has the Lucasfilm copyright.

[JoeFromSidney]

ALL the Star Wars movies are bad....they basically are just bad Spaghetti Westerns in Space.

True, but I really enjoyed the first one. The rest stunk!

[Rockingham]

The story in Star Wars had deeper sources and was based largely on Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a highly regarded comparative analysis of the hero figure in mythology. Appearing after a long run of grim crime drama movies laden with antiheroes and during a period of national economic and military decline, the escapism of Star Wars was deeply appealing. And unlike prior science fiction movies, the bad guys had the bright shiny stuff and big weapons, while the good guys were a bedraggled odd lot with inferior old equipment long past shininess. For a country that felt itself on the downslope in the Cold War, Star Wars provided a lift like Olivier's Henry V did for the British during WW II.