I’ve been rewatching the prequel and sequel trilogies. My answer is Revenge of the Sith. Ian McDiarmid’s portrayal of Palpatine is what makes the movie better than the other 5, especially the scene at the opera house when he tells the story of Darth Plageis.
Tossup between The Last Jedi and Rogue One, in my opinion. TLJ is more creative/original, but R1 might be more fun.
Since this zombie has been Force-animated, and I don’t think I weighed in the first time:
Rogue One.
By a parsec.
The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi had strong points, but both also had serious flaws. Rogue One was just good.
The prequels were, well, I don’t think I need to re-hash those. Solo was…ok. As just a side-story heist movie in the Star Wars universe, it was decent, but still not nearly as good as Rogue One. As Han Solo’s origin story, I thought it was just plain bad. And The Rise of Skywalker was a train-wreck.
By the way, I also think you can take pretty much any episode of The Mandalorian, and it would be a better Star Wars movie than half of the Star Wars movies.
Yeah, I go back and forth as to whether Revenge of the Sith is better than Return of the Jedi as the 3rd best film of the main storyline (I do think Rogue One is probably better than both though).;
I am with you. Ian McDiarmid’s performance as Palpatine holds the prequel trilogy together more than anything else. And I would rather watch that than anything else on the list.
I’ll think I’ll go with Rogue One as well, but I will also stan for The Last Jedi and think it’s one of the better Star Wars movies.
As for Solo, I think it got hurt by the fact it was in the Star Wars Universe. If the movie were just SpaceFighter Joe and His Alien Friend it would have been received better as a fun sci-fi romp.
I know we have had a lot of science fiction films over the past 40 years, but Rogue 1 is the best cinematic encapsulation of everything I love about space opera.
While I assume this is a typo, it is so apt I had to remark on it. “And then everybody gets hit by a truck. THE END.”
I would vote Rogue One. That said I have a lot of friends who took up watching Star Wars when the sequels came out and overwhelmingly they all think Revenge of the Sith is if not the best then right up there with the OT.
That’s what I intended.
All the characters in the movie were run over by a truck, essentially. And just to prevent fannish questions that would arise about why they didn’t show up in the original trilogy.
So, you like what you like, and if you didn’t particularly care for Rogue One, that’s fine, of course, but my take on it was very different.
While it used the “hidden flaw” as a plot element, I didn’t think explaining that was the point of the movie. I thought the point of the movie was a different view of the Rebellion, and the price paid by all of those background extras that get gunned down behind Our Heroes, or who die off-screen with just a line mentioning them, like the “many Bothans.” The “hidden flaw” was just a McGuffin. It also allowed them to tie a side story into the main storyline, to give the heroes of this story something epic to do that doesn’t contradict the established continuity.
I also thought the “truck ending” was of a piece with the rest of the movie, and practically demanded by the story they were telling. I didn’t think everyone dying was specifically scripted to avoid questions about where they were in the Original Trilogy, but because that’s what needed to happen, dramatically. I thought the ending was exactly the ending which that story demanded, and would have found them surviving to be a feel-good cop-out.
Of course, YMMV.
QFT…
[Looks at avatar]
Well, you would want to see all the Rebels die, wouldn’t you? 
Well, I can’t agree. The point of the movie was to fix what people mistakenly thought was a flaw in the original film. The entire movie is set up with the rather silly conceit that the weakness in the death star was programmed into it. No explanation for the flaw was necessary at all.
You didn’t have to kill off the entire cast to show there were casualties, and it was handled in such a way that it looked like someone was trying to be tragic without having any understanding of what tragedy is. When you end up killing everybody in the movie, it devolves into farce.
I will agree it’s probably the fourth-best SW film, but that’s a pretty low bar.
I really, really don’t think the point of the movie was “to fix what people mistakenly thought was a flaw in the original film”. I think the point of the movie was sacrifice, which I certainly picked up on all the way back in December of 2016–that, for the Rebel Alliance to win at Yavin (and to go on and ultimately defeat the forces of Evil…well, until the sequel “trilogy”, anyway) a lot of poor bastards we’d never even heard of before had to sacrifice, and die. Some of them were characters who’d gotten screen time and been given a name and whom we’d been watching for the last two-and-a-quarter hours. And a bunch of them were just “third Rebel guy in that corridor”.
In addition to dying, there were a lot of moral sacrifices–e.g., Cassian Andor killing his own informant–a point that was made very explicitly. And then a lot of people just straight up died. Galen Erso dies. The whole Rogue One team dies. The Rebel space forces also take heavy casualties. Finally, the poor bloody infantry in that corridor get mowed down. But, in every single case, they manage to do their part to get the vital data that much further along–including the guy who literally goes from yelling “Help us!” and trying to get the door open, to yelling “Take it!” and handing off the data tape…just before Darth Vader kills him. They all died, but they didn’t lose. They sacrificed their lives for the cause, and those sacrifices were not in vain.
Seriously though, I think you and @MEBuckner are dead on here. It’s a film about sacrifice. My go-to line about Rogue 1 is that it was the first Star Wars movie that’s actually a WAR movie. War is messy and people die (even people we know and like), but how they die makes all the difference.
Again, I’m not trying to say that your reaction to a piece of entertainment is wrong, and I’m not going to try to retroactively convince you to have bought into the movie and enjoyed it more, but…
There is a fundamental issue with setting a new story in the Star Wars universe, which I’ve personally run into in a very different context. Hardcore fans may clamor for more stories in the Old Republic era or other times and places, but casual fans know the Rebellion era - to them, that is Star Wars. Setting your story elsewhen requires a lot of heavy lifting to get audience buy-in, and casual fans may not bother, or like the result. So, Rebellion era it is.
But then you run into the problem of, what do your protagonists do? You can have your protagonists do small stuff on the margins, but for a lot of fans, and creators, the whole point of Star Wars is telling big, epic stories. But the Heroes of the Original Trilogy have already done all of the big, epic stuff. What can your protagonists do that feels big and epic and Star Wars-y, in the Rebellion era, that fits into the established canon? For me, in another context, the obvious answer was the Death Star plans. They’re a key plot point in Star Wars, but we have no idea how Leia got them. Having your protagonists be the ones who got them just seems like the most obvious way to get another big, epic Star Wars story into the continuity.
Now, having the flaw being deliberately inserted isn’t strictly speaking necessary (I didn’t even think of it), but I think it is actually necessary for this movie. The plans for the Death Star are obviously important, but without knowing there’s a flaw, the characters would be disobeying orders, sacrificing their lives, and, for the fleet officers who join them, sacrificing half of the Rebel fleet on the off-chance that the plans might reveal an exploitable weakness. Knowing (or at least believing Jan Erso) that there’s a flaw buried somewhere in the design makes everyone’s motivations to sacrifice everything make sense.
And the way it’s set up, so that they know there’s a flaw somewhere in the plans, but don’t know what exactly it is or where in the plans it is makes getting the complete plans vital. Otherwise, there’s really not a very good reason not to cut and run with partial plans, if the alternative is certain death.
As to everyone dying, I do think that’s a dramatic necessity. If some of the heroes survive and escape with the plans, then it’s just another movie about Big Damn Heroes with Plot Armor. Which is Star Wars, sure, but its a Star Wars story we’ve already seen told a number of times. If everyone dies, then, as MEBuckner so eloquently puts it, it becomes a movie about sacrifice, and for me, personally, a lot more powerful.
But, of course, YMMV.
You know, while I thought that corridor scene was powerful, I didn’t really think of it like that. But looking back, it really is the entire movie in capsule form - everyone doing their small part, knowing they’re going to die, but also knowing that their sacrifice moves the mission forward, and brings their side that one small but vital step closer to victory.
I loved Rogue One, but you’ve given me even more appreciation for just how well they told their story. Thank you.
Episode III is my third favorite Star Wars movie so I think I have to say that one. Then Rogue One, then probably The Force Awakens ,
Rouge One by far, then Revenge of the Sith.
Solo was fun.
The final 3 were an incoherent mess with The force Awakens the best of a bunch, it’s the only one I bothered to rewatch . I almost think The Phantom Menace is better as a story.