I just finished The Empire Strikes Back...there's nothing in the prequels...

It's not even up for debate it's the best film in the franchise

quote:

---

and how Maz ends up with it...

---

RA'd for SPOILERS you Asswipe

Watched it again last night. You can see it fall at the same time when he falls outside at the bottom of the city.

Near perfect movie. The Muppet kept it from perfection.

It was the first movie my family bought on VHS back then...

It cost $89.99 - when you could only buy movies from video rental stores.

It wore out with so much replay...and tape constantly had to be tightened.

Star Wars (episode 4 for the younger guys) set the table like no other movie. People see it now, and compare it to films like (for example) GOTG, and say, "what's the deal, these other movies were just as fun". Unless you were there at the time, you really just can't grasp how much everything since, is just a development of it.
In a way, it's like John Browning's old 1911 Colt pistol. People now look at pistols and say "well, this does ___ better than the 1911, it's a better gun", and lose sight of the fact that basically every single pistol we see, is clearly just a further development or variation of that original concept.

Before Star Wars, you had Disney. Animation. Because, simply, you could not present certain things in a believable manner with live action, it HAD to be a cartoon. Star Wars gave us epic space fantasy, superheroes with real super powers, serious fantasy movies at the A level instead of B movies.

Empire is the greater dramatic achievement, but not the ground breaker the original was within the medium.

Somebody had to have tracked it down with it's connection to the dark side.

Yeah I don't think anyone would argue that Empire is better in every way than the prequels

I am the outlier but I don't find it to be particularly impressive. My favorite things about Star Wars are:

1. Lightsabers
2. Lore/The universe

These things are both severely lacking in the originals. In fact, if you take away all the supposedly useless knowledge that we gained from the prequels and just look at the OT, we know pretty much jack shite about anything in the Star Wars universe. We know very little alien species, and hardly anything about the ones we do know. We know tons of planet names but nothing about them. We don't understand any of the space travel stuff, nothing about the force besides some tiny tidbits from Yoda, nothing about lightsabers, nothing about any governments or way of life... Etc... You can go on with this. Lucas tried to pack a lot of this into the prequels and it made it extremely watered down and terrible. I get that. But that's just what I like the most: IMO it's what make Star Wars unique. If you just have tons of space battles with very little force usage and almost no lightsabers (I can't believe people defend any of rhe saber fights in the OT: they all suck major balls), you might as well just watch Star Trek because other than these things, it does the rest better.

I think TESB is a fine film, and I adore Star Wars so it's up there for me, but it doesn't do what I personally like in Star Wars so it's not even among my top 3 in the series (ROTS, ROTJ, TFA).

It's kind of corny and is really just a setup for Jedi. Most people I know think it's the third best in the OT.

Star Wars is #13 in the AFI Top 100. Empire isn't even on the list, so that should give you an idea how most people in the business feel about it.

This board seems to like it, though, but the board likes some pretty stupid shite.