imo A New Hope is by and large the best Star Wars film. It contains by and far the most iconic scenes (Obi Wan talking about the force, Leia's distress call, the Cantina seen, introduction of Han Solo, the sewer pit scene on the imperial ship, the final battle over the death star, etc. etc. etc.). I'd argue it easily has the best pacing, is by far the best 'full package' film of the series (in terms of being able to watch it by itself as a contained film), that it has the most balance in terms of drama, humor, action.

I would also argue that A New Hope has the best effects of any Star Wars film, with things like "Rogue One" seemingly unrealistically flashy for the eyes to accept, the prequels awful with over abundance of CGI, and both 'Empire' and "Jedi' including parts with weak effects (the AT-ATs and Sky City in Empire aging poorly, and the eewoks among other things in Jedi never looking great to begin with).

The iconic lines in 1977 "Star Wars" are just unbelievably cultural significant, again, unmatched by 'Empire' imo. "The Force is All Around us", "These Aren't the droids you're looking for", "Aren't You A little short to be a Stormtrooper?", etc. etc. etc.

I just don't think anything comes close. "Empire" is great but in my opinion the pacing is reallyyyy thrown off when they reach Sky City, something that is often ignored.

I'd put the order :

1: Star Wars (1977, revised to "A New Hope"

2. Empire 

3. Jedi

4. The Force Awakens

5. Revenge of the Sith

6. The Phantom Menace

7. Rogue One (sorry, not sorry, but this one just doesn't have the Star Wars magic. The characters are like cardboard cutouts)

8. Attack of the Clones (abysmally bad and like a 10 year old wrote it, i.e. 100 jedi running off into battle with robots in an arena)

Even if you look beyond just its merits as a great film, the reality is that Star Wars 1977 had such an insane impact on culture. It was a phenomenon and none of the other entries have had the same impact. I also want to point out that a house is only as strong as the foundation. What is great in 'Empire' is really only great because of how near perfectly A New Hope set everything up. Whether you're expanding with Yoda and the Force, or Han Solo and Leia's relationship, or Darth Vader and Luke.... everything in Empire relies so heavily on the practicaly perfection of execution in explanation of the original film. I would argue Empire had it EASY because it doesn't need to do a lot of explaining and can float more heavily on being a popcorn action romp. Beyond the Yoda sequences and the dramatic freezing of Han Solo, I don't really feel like Empire has the level of magic from the original film.

At any rate just had to speak my piece because I feel like so many people put Empire as their #1 Star Wars pick and I do find it flawed in comparison to the original. A New Hope in my opinion has practically no scenes that feel out of place or poor. I'm not sure the same can be said about Empire, as great as it is

At least for me "A New Hope" feels somewhat magical by the end. Like all of the components and ingredients put together just right

Slow decent? Wasn't one of the first things he does in this "slow decent" is kill Jedi younglings? Not really a slow decent...

Interesting lists. Nice to see so many people ranking Episode II where it belongs. Although, even as the Star Wars movie I like the least, it still has it's moments. Slightly off topic. I feel the best episodes of The Clone Wars TV series are better than any of the movies. There, I said it. The series of Clone Wars shorts from the Samurai Jack studio kicked MAJOR ass as well.

I like your list, but the only change I would do is to put Return of the Jedi in third place, followed by the Force Awakens. Also, I hate the prequels, but I think Phantom Menace is the least horrible of them all and Revenge of the Sith is slightly less horrible than Attack of the Clones.

But those are the worst 3 movies ever made to me, because they had endless resources and made the most disgusting movies ever, I mean, nauseatingly bad.

I agree with the bottom of the list because the prequels were pretty damn bad. Thank god Lucas finally gave up but at least his last one wasn't as shitty as the first two prequels.

Jar Jar pretty much killed the movie for me.  I probably would have liked it more if they just cut him out or at least killed him.

Agree 100%, it would be much more tolerable without that idiot Jarjar, what a crappy character!

NH - 5/5
ES - 5/5
RJ - 5/5
PM - 2.5/5
AC - 2.5/5
RS - 2.5/5
FA - 4/5

I'm pretty good with this list overall, I'd only swap TFA and Jedi. While Jedi is my personal fav in the series, I can understand why people usually put it 3rd in the original trilogy, mainly due to the Ewoks grinding the movie to a halt halfway through.

Haven't seen Rogue One yet, but just from what I've been hearing and the clips I've seen, it's the best of the prequels (lol). I'd actually put Phantom Menace ahead of the other two prequels (yes, even Sith!) because while the movie was disappointing when I first saw it and yes Jar Jar is annoying as all hell, today I actually find it to be the most watchable of the 3 for some reason, probably because 2 and 3 are so mindnumbingly bland and boring.

Thank you for the compliment. :) It's true enough to say that I'm one of those people who has many unorthodox views.

As to your critique, I think that, in judging the quality of all movies by the exact same set of criteria, you (and a lot of other people as well) fail to appreciate what this movie actually sets out to do. You're taking what is essentially a humanist approach to analyzing the quality of movies: one which argues that there is a single criteria with which we can judge the quality of all movies, and perhaps all art in general for that matter, and that it is character development. I disagree with that simplistic, formulaic way of thinking. For example, Carol is a much more character-driven movie than is Mad Max: Fury Road, but does that necessarily make the one film better than the other? Is Fury Road setting out to be a primarily character-driven movie? You see what I'm getting at? Art is best appreciated on its own terms. It's quality is best judged then based on the extent to which the given work achieves what it sets out to do.

To highlight what I think is an even more directly pertinent contrast, while we cannot imagine character-driven video games like Undertale or Oxenfree working out without a host of especially solid, interesting characters, do titles like Journey or the Portal games set out to achieve that same goal or is the player of the latter titles propelled emotionally instead by the atmosphere those games create; the mood they put you in? I view Rogue One the latter way: as an atmosphere-driven story that is just as much about the Rebellion and the course and feel of their overarching struggle itself as it is about its cast of major characters. Indeed, this elevated concern for the masses themselves is a major part of what separates Rogue One from other Star Wars movies where we more often than not see their struggles and even cataclysmic deaths in anti-septic ways. For example, are we emotionally gripped in any way by the Death Star and Star Killer blasts in A New Hope or The Force Awakens? No, because we never see any of the people on the ground or know anything about them per se! How about the Death Star blasts in this movie, by contrast? You see? The lives of the masses don't actually matter to the creators of the main Star Wars films, but only really those of the superpowered Jedi and those immediately connected to them. They matter to Rogue One director Gareth Edwards though.

And though Rogue One doesn't set out to be a truly character-driven story, it does nonetheless have its moments in connection to its major characters, like the crucial argument between Jyn and Cassian after Jyn's father is killed in a Rebel strike and Chirrut's sacrifice that exposes the closeness of his friendship with Baze, for example. The ending (spoiler: all of the Rebels who participate in the key mission, including all the film's main characters, die) took me a little aback as well. Contextually, I knew that the cost of the battle for the Rebels would be high (based on what was said about it in A New Hope), but I didn't actually expect both Jyn and Cassian to die as part of that. And therein lies another big part of the merit to this being an original, separate story within the overall Star Wars saga: it's not limited by the same predictability. For example, we know that, since the new main trilogy that's begun with The Force Awakens is, in a fundamental sense, narratively similar to that of the original trilogy (Episodes 4-6), it will therefore have a happy ending wherein the main character, Rey, is, for instance, unlikely to die. We likewise knew that the prequel trilogy would have a sad ending from the outset, given that we'd already seen the fourth episode in the series and therefore knew the crux of what was coming, just not how it would come about. But Rogue One's main characters Jyn and Cassian are both original and exclusive to this movie and the storyline is dissimilar from that of other Star Wars movies, so there was no way to really know how their arcs would end in advance, which left us to presume a happier or at least more nuanced ending based simply on the fact that most movies in general have at least one of their main characters live happily ever after.

I also see just a touch of social pertinence to what the major character's arcs are actually about. It bears some resemblance to what many post-apocalyptic films strive to convey thematically. Our major characters (especially the lead) start out as rather untrusting, cynical characters that have been jaded by the course of their lives and instinctively therefore are inclined to focus simply on their own personal well-being until events (typically in the form of a common enemy) overlap their respective well-beings until genuine connections develop between them and they resultantly drop their cynicism and become willing to sacrifice themselves for others in their group and/or the masses themselves. We see that kind of relational arc also conveyed, for example, in post-apocalyptic movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and the Hunger Games novels and films and I see the balance in Rogue One resting somewhere between that in the two examples just mentioned. Mad Max: Fury Road ultimately conveys a positive, trusting view of the masses, while the Hunger Games series suggests that they are more gullible, but that you've got no choice but to trust their judgment anyway for the sake of your own psychological well-being. What Rogue One has in common with the Hunger Games series is that it's very much about the relationship of the actions of the main characters to those of the masses and vice versa, while its overall level of faith in the people is similar to that conveyed by Mad Max: Fury Road's conclusion.

The meaning behind the theme of trust that many if not most post-apocalyptic movies revolve around (trust versus distrust of people or certain groups of people, trust versus distrust of technology and/or the course of science, etc.) lies in the fact that ours, this age of their proliferation, is a very cynical and jaded time where people increasingly distrust everyone and everything. These post-apocalyptic movies have different messages in many ways, but often also share an interest in finding solutions to that cynicism and jadedness. Each suggests a particular take on what the appropriate level of trust in people, places, things, and ideas is while also suggesting a course that can lead to that restoration of the appropriate level of trust. That, in addition to whatever political commentary and whatnot that may be offered, is very much at the heart of post-apocalyptic movies broadly, and Rogue One is, in many ways, a post-apocalyptic movie. I like both the politics (as discussed in my last post on this thread) and broad, if nuanced, faith in humanity conveyed by this movie.

This type of theme stands in contrast to other Star Wars movies in many ways. Other Star Wars movies typically have our protagonists know little about their backgrounds (e.g. have little or no idea who their parents were, etc.); a set-up that results in cataclysmic events like the loss of loved ones (e.g. Luke's it turns out surrogate parents in the original trilogy) resulting in them accepting a role in the larger conflict based upon having nothing left to lose. By contrast, the opposite of that trajectory is true of Jyn and our other protagonists in Rogue One: they all know where they came from (Jyn's arc revolves precisely around the fact that she knows exactly who her father is)  and, as a result, participation in the conflict has jaded them by exposing to nothing but pain and suffering rather than pain and suffering plus curiosity. The issue then becomes that of unjading them, which is rather more pertinent to the psychological state of real world. Most people, after all, know who their parents are or were and are rather cynical these days.

That was my take.