Copying surprise, I thought 3 was the only watchable one of the prequels (Clones was especially abysmal, I'd definitely shuffle that to the end). This isn't to say it's great, because there are still huge, glaring problems, but at least I felt I could walk out of it afterward and honestly be able to say, "Something actually happened in that movie." And yeah, I'm pretty sure McDiarmid was the only person on that set having any degree of fun.
I waffle on New Hope vs. Return of the Jedi, but Empire's clearly best. Jedi has a lot of truly outstanding moments, but the Ewok assault is tonally off with the rest of the finale. Rewatching the original trilogy myself this weekend, just because it's been a couple years. Still amazed at the stark originality of the set design and how suggestive it is of its broader universe from pretty much the first minutes of A New Hope--everything looks battered and lived-in in all its low-fi glory, in ways that the sterile CGI of the prequels never for a second managed to recapture (this is in spite or because of that great sixties/seventies sci-fi tradition of "Just put blinking lights everywhere on every console, that means science is happening.") It's still astonishing to me that the person responsible for these movies could so completely forget over time what originally made them fun.
I actually find myself vaguely interested in Rogue One, because just from trailers, it looks like more of what I'd want from a Star Wars movie than The Force Awakens was (even though it's technically a prequel, and prequels are fundamentally almost always a bad idea). Was not a fan of Force Awakens on pretty much any level, but I'm also just consistently left cold by J. J. Abrams's movies.
Actually, I guess this is related, after watching Star Trek: Beyond with the parents a couple weeks ago (it was okay I guess), I decided to finally bite the bullet and watch Into Darkness. I expected this to be hard because Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite movies and I did not relish the prospect of seeing it remade by a director that I dislike. I was actually surprised to find that it addressed one of the key points that irked me about the Star Trek reboot, though: this time, the guy who's driven entirely by gut instinct and impulsive intuition is actually allowed to be wrong. This bothered me tremendously in 2009 Star Trek--that movie went out of its way to make the logic-driven character's judgment always wrong whenever it clashed with the guy who just followed whatever course his unchecked emotions told him to at any given moment*. But Into Darkness actually built its entire plot around what can happen when we let our basest instincts of fear and revenge dictate our actions, so color me pleasantly surprised that it managed to put together a story that didn't violently clash with my sensibilities. Zachary Quinto can also be a great Spock when he wants to be. "I am a Vulcan, we believe in technicalities." "I am capable of expressing multiple attitudes at once, that is one of them." So these will probably still never be my Star Trek movies, but it at least looks like they're getting better about balancing the validity of both captain's and first officer's views. I think it also warrants some respect that this time, the reason a villain is doing something is of greater consequence to the plot than is whatever doohickey McGuffin he needs in order to do that thing.
(*In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised about that approach, because "Emotions will triumph over reason, and it is good and right that this should be so" is also pretty much exactly how the end of Lost went down. Beyond this mindset being entirely incompatible with my view of the world, I feel I need only point to real-life developments of this year to highlight the grievous cost of an emphasis on emotional security over facts.)
Playing Khan as totally uncharismatic was an odd choice on Cumberbatch's part, though. I guess Ricardo Montalban's performance maybe isn't the kind that would fly in a movie made in the 2010's, but man did I miss his screen presence. Nice to see Peter Weller's still working, though.
