Scoring Star Wars

I recently completed a project of rewatching and “scoring” every Star Wars movie to come up with a definitive personal ranking. It is something I’ve always wanted to do but never had the time. Thanks quarantine!

The inspiration for this exercise comes from one of my favorite podcasts : Star Wars Minute, which always asks guests to rank the Star Wars films in order from favorite to least favorite.

The show always made me consider my own rankings, which always ended up something like this:

V > IV > VI > VIII > VII > RO > Solo > III > II > I

As someone who grew up in the 1980s, the original trilogy is always held in high esteem. The prequels were a jarring disappointment and the recent films have all had highs and lows.

After seeing — and enjoying — Rise of Skywalker twice in theaters, I still had no sense of where I would rank it, so this exercise proved helpful. Furthermore, it gave me a better sense of why I like certain films above others. A couple of my rankings actually changed, which I did not expect.

I went in with very few “rules”. The idea is to give each film a point for everything that generates a positive response and deduct a point for everything that generates a negative response.

A point could be gained or lost by a line of dialogue, a costume, a character, a setting, a prop …. almost anything.

I did not give films points for bringing back stuff from previous movies, unless it is done in an imaginative or thrilling way. No easy points just for bringing back the Millennium Falcon in subsequent films.

I watched the films in release order and did not deduct points for anything that would eventually be contradicted or proven incorrect. I attempted as best I could to judge each movie as if I had never seen the future films.

Here goes nothing….