I love many fantasy films -- Lord of the Rings, Pan's Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, Chronicles of Narnia, etc., are all very engaging and rewatchable in my eyes.
What I don't like is putting an outer-space, futuristic looking setting in a fantasy film. It works occasionally for quirky films like Heavy Metal, but I always found the laser sword fights in Star Wars to be silly.
And I REALLY don't like ridiculous fantasy films being marketed as "sci-fi", which Star Wars has always been falsely sold as. The science in Star Wars is ridiculous. C3PO is not a "cyborg", he is an android. R2D2 is not a "droid", he is a robot:
Cyborg - Part organic lifeform and part machine (Robocop, Terminator, Cybermen, etc.)
Android - Robot built/designed to look like a human being (Data from Star Trek, Vicki from Small Wonder, Gunslinger from Westworld, etc.)
Lucas throws sci-fi terminology into his fantasy film but can't grasp the basic concepts.
I like both but got into Star Wars before Trek. I don’t see need for rivalry between the 2. Trek has better science but still has some major problems with fake science and I don’t think either universe is a logical progression of technology.
The original Trilogy WAS epic, imo. Which is why people expected the prequels to be as well.
I’m unaware of anyone actually calling C3P-0 a “cyborg”. He says he’s in “human-cyborg relations”, whatever the hell that means. I only know of 1 “cyborg” in Star Wars, some Bounty Hunter who stood around in Ep 5, but anyway 3p0 never claims to be a cyborg. Lucas did make some silly mistakes, “12 parsecs”.
Both he and R2 are called “droids”. Which is just their own unique in universe term for robots in the movie. I’m fine with that even though it doesn’t make much sense etymologically speaking as it’s an improper back-formation of “android”. “Oid” means “likeness of”, needs a prefix, and the “d” comes from the “andros” part, man. But whatever I don’t have a problem with it, the unique name seems to have been good for the franchise.
Lightsabers are uber cool so I’m fine with that too. They can block blaster fire so they don’t not make sense as weapons for Jedi. Normal people wouldn’t be able to block shi* and would probably slice their own arms off, hence they don’t use them. The fight choreography is crappy though like most movie sword fights. Best fight is Luke/Vader in EST.
I can take some fantasy films in small doses, but LOTR to me was boring as can be. I started watching the first film and I just gave up. The famous scene in “Clerks 2” summarized my feelings for it.
I didn’t mind “Legend” (though Mia Sara and Tim Curry were what made it watchable).
“Heavy Metal” remains one of my favorites, the mix of fantasy/sci-fi and an excellent rock score all in a cartoon.
The weakness of the “swordfights” in the Star Wars film is that in an era of that level of technology, you’d more than likely dispatch your enemies from afar. Otherwise, it’s just a tool to get your heroes and villains together.