Star Wars upheaval?
"You must be crazy..."
Episode 7 was just a shameless rip-off of the original film, which is exactly what episode 1 was.
I wouldn't call it a rip off. I would say it's mostly an origin story for Rey in a similar vein to Luke's origin story for ANH. I like origin stories. I went to see TFA in the theater and came away pretty excited with the direction of the sequel trilogy. Clearly Johnson sheet all over that with Ep 8. The movie on it's own as a space fantasy flick was fine, but as a story in the sequel, it was terrible. 9 could have been good, but had no real direction after the mess with 8.
Episode 8 was a disaster, with minor rip-offs of Episode 5 included in the train wreck. It seemed to me Rian Johnson had a mission to wreck the entire enterprise of the "final trilogy."
Agreed.
I'll agree about episodes 2 and 9, though. Episode 9 was a complete train wreck, but I think it was largely caused by what Johnson did to the overall plot in Episode 8 (which is the fault of higher Disney management for not having an overall plan for the trilogy).
They clearly had a plan, but it didn't work because they had different directors who were given entirely too much license to do their own thing. I'll never understand using 2 different directors, who had completely different approaches to the SW story telling.
The only one one of the lot of "prequels" worth watching was Episode 3, and it was fraught with problems.
As I mentioned, I recently watched the entire saga from start to finish and I haven't done that in several years. I enjoyed it. I think my strategy with watching it is not nit picking details too much and enjoy each sorta like a standalone film. Each is it's own story. So I wouldn't say they were bad, I just didn't spend time worrying about the "bad" stuff I hadn't liked in the past and I found myself just enjoying them for what they are. Set expectations and proceed accordingly.
The rest were just bad, but the "sequel trilogy" was much worse. & had some minor promise despite its complete ripoff plot, but 8 and 9 took the few promising moments of 7 and gleefully threw them in the trash can.
Agreed, although I can still watch them. Honestly, the last couple of times I've watched the saga, I've quite enjoyed the whole thing. I don't know if it's nostalgia, the SW universe or what, but it's all fun to me.
I will say I'm really into Lego and in particular Lego Star Wars, so I think that sort of colors my view of the franchise.