Disney Plus launches in the UK today and with it the ability to watch all eleven feature-length Star Wars movies, a phrase that in 1985 would have sounded preposterous. With so many to choose from (and that’s not even including the Holiday Special or the Ewok's Caravan Of Courage), GQ’s resident disgruntled Star Wars superfan offers a helpful, totally objective and definitive list of the best of the original, prequel, sequel and Story films.

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The Empire Strikes Back © Lucasfilm/Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

1. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Virtually flawless. This is the Star Wars equivalent of Casablanca. Directed by Irvine Kirshner, produced by Gary Kurtz with a screenplay in part by Lawrence Kasdan (in other words, not George Lucas), this has the best dialogue, the deepest characterisation, the most compelling story and the best individual moments of the lot: the Millennium Falcon flying into the asteroid field, Han being frozen in carbonite, Luke and Darth Vader fighting amid the industrial gloom of the freezing chamber, Chewbacca roaring at Vader (a big deal). As well as the main plot twist, which need not be repeated here, there is also the sight of Vader kneeling before the previously unseen Emperor (also a big deal). And it has Boba Fett.

Star Wars: A New Hope © Lucasfilm/Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

2. Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)

The importance of the original Star Wars was the sheer exhilarating novelty of the thing. The plot is purely archetypal and occasionally clunky. Lucas picked up all sorts of copy and pastes during his film student apprenticeship and proved dialogue was not necessarily his strong point, but almost every idea was memorable: the Jawas and Tusken Raiders in the desert, the canteen scene, the beauty of the Millennium Falcon, the menace of Darth Vader and the stormtroopers, the space battles and lightsabers. It is an unbounded joy and it’s not hard to see why it was such a formative experience for children at the time. If this was part of your life, it just doesn’t leave you.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story © Giles Keyte/Lucasfilm Ltd/Kobal/Shutterstock

Everyone dies, which is much more in the spirit of “Empire” than “Jedi”. It has great casting, especially Felicity Jones, Diego Luna and Forest Whitaker. The reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO is a neat idea and the kind of deftness lacking in both the prequels and the newer films, while the simple and pacy plot provides a really smart link to A New Hope. The sense of inevitable doom gives the audience a serious dosage of angst, which is obviously a good thing. Because it’s so well balanced between the Skywalker films and can live as a standalone story and it feels like proper Star Wars, that makes it pretty much a total success.

Return Of The Jedi © Lucasfilm/Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

4. Return Of The Jedi (1983)

Flawed but underappreciated and forever tainted by the Ewoks, the first hour of the film builds nicely towards something it never quite delivers. If, as has been rumoured for years, the original treatment had Wookiees instead of Ewoks, the film would have been inestimably better and made a whole lot more sense. In the end, though, the teddy bears kind of killed it for everyone. The final space battle is beautifully choreographed and Luke’s tussle with the Emperor brings that particular narrative to a satisfying end. The remastered version further tarnished the experience by making the unfathomable decision to end the film with a redeemed Hayden Christensen rather than the aged Anakin.

Revenge Of The Sith © Lucasfilm/Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

5. Revenge Of The Sith (2005)

This is the most enjoyable of the prequels because it’s a pantomime, lacking any subtlety and nuance, but somehow, because it is leading us back to the original films, it grows into something resembling entertainment. The ending manages to convey a little of the melancholy that saves the better films from galactic schmaltz. However, it does contain a jump-the-shark moment for Yoda when he says, “Not if anything to do with it, I have.”

The Force Awakens © Lucasfilm/Bad Robot/Walt Disney Studios/Kobal/Shutterstock

6. The Force Awakens (2015)

It looked like “real” Star Wars, which was a promising start after the ever-decreasing circles of the prequels. It introduced Rey, the one really decent character in the newer films, but it also introduced a whole load of other pointless ones (Finn, Poe, Captain Phasma, General Hux etc), all of whom begin their journeys down narrative dead ends that span the lives of the next two films. Han Solo’s death and Chewbacca’s crazed response is the most moving moment, which rather demonstrates the problems it has reaching beyond the original characters.

The Phantom Menace © Lucasfilm/Kobal/Shutterstock

7. The Phantom Menace (1999)

More a record of George Lucas’ brain farts than a movie, it was the biggest let down since the Munich Agreement. There’s casual (if unintended) racism, Jar Jar Binks, midi-chlorians (the single most self-defeating idea Lucas ever came up with), an overcomplicated plot about the trade guild and the awful casting of Anakin, who resembled a character from a Nickelodeon family sitcom rather than the chosen one who would bring balance to the Force. Despite everything, there are a few good moments and Liam Neeson is a very convincing Jedi who saves several scenes singlehandedly. The lightsaber battle at the end is tremendous fun and John Williams’ score added something fresh and memorable to his famous leitmotifs.

The Rise Of Skywalker © J Wilson/Lucasfilm/Disney/Kobal/Shutterstock

8. The Rise Of Skywalker (2019)

A somewhat futile attempt to bring all the strands of the Skywalker narrative together. It looks and sounds great, but ends the final trilogy with the same problems that had hamstrung it since its inception: dull characters, flat attempts at humour and a universe that could not live within its own rules. The return of Emperor Palpatine should have been a welcome showstopper, but you couldn’t help feel it was all part of an attempt to claw back ground lost so conspicuously by The Last Jedi.

Solo: A Star Wars Story © Lucasfilm/Walt Disney Studios/Moviestore/Shutterstock

9. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

This is a lot of fun but doesn’t really go beyond that. Donald Glover is terrific as Lando Calrissian and since I’ve decided Chewbacca is my favourite character – and the best actor of the lot (I do know he’s not real, right?) – then the more of the walking carpet there is the better. The downside is that origin stories can kill the mystique and so deconstructing Han Solo inevitably takes some of the sheen off the most enigmatic and essential character of them all.

Attack Of The Clones © Lucasfilm/Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

10. Attack Of The Clones (2002)

This has one good scene when the Jedi all appear in the arena on Geonosis, something most fans had always fantasised about, but the rest of the film is a mess. Hayden Christensen’s limitations as Anakin Skywalker are rather painfully exposed and viewers are left unsettled by a Princess falling in love with the teenage Christensen, whom she first met when he was nine. This is the film in which the lack of forethought into how the prequels speak to the original films really kicks in, with some of the worst continuity errors ever committed to celluloid (if such a thing still existed).

The Last Jedi © Lucasfilm/Disney/Kobal/Shutterstock

11. The Last Jedi (2017)

Makes no sense, pointless storylines, humourless, meaningless characters... This film – unforgivably – contains flashback scenes and not even Lucas stooped to such a low, lazy trick of bad storytelling. The plot was virtually ignored by the one that followed it, which tells its own story. The biggest disappointment of all (and they were legion) is that it confirmed the producers of the three final films had neither the courage or the wit to come up with any original ideas of their own, but preferred a series of bad photocopies of the early trilogy.

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