[nseggs]

I always thought part of what made Tarantino films so fun is that he’s basically doing the film equivalent of what the audio world calls sampling a lot of the time. Not just doing it but really nailing it. Watch Lady Snowblood and then Kill Bill or Django Unchained back to back. Some shots are basically identical but the context is very different. As in music, (and many other areas I’m sure) a knowledge of the base material really adds to the enjoyment of newer work.

[brimble]

Tarantino's whole thing goes back to Star Wars, which cribbed heavily from films from ~4 genres—sci-fi serials, samurai films, war (mainly WWII) films, and westerns. Its great innovation and enduring legacy in film isn't just its groundbreaking special effects, but the assembly of a film almost entirely from pastiche.

[EDIT] Incidentally, when later Star Wars media gets this fundamental aspect of Star Wars and leans into it, is when it's at its best IMO. You could practically play "spot the rip-off" with The Mandalorian, it borrowed so heavily from other film and TV—and, though perhaps overrated, it's certainly one of the best Star Wars things since the original trilogy. The Last Jedi stood out to me among the Disney-era films for doing a lot more cribbing from sources of the kind that Star Wars used, rather than cribbing just from... Star Wars itself (though it also did that, heavily re-mixing Empire, especially).

[aidenn0]

Rogue One got this as well; it had a strong The Dirty Dozen feel, but also borrowed from several other genres liberally.

[brimble]

Yep, which is why it holds the position of "worst Star Wars movie that's still maybe worth watching" in my personal ranking :-)

It's not higher up because I think they botched the execution pretty badly (though not entirely! Parts of the movie are quite good!) but the core idea is excellent and is exactly the sort of thing that should be done with the Star Wars IP. The space fight at the end also holds the distinction of being the only one outside the original trilogy that's given me a hard-to-define "Star Wars feeling" that I associate with the original movies (a few of the video games have achieved it, but none of the other films since ROTJ, for me personally, anyway).

[aidenn0]

> The space fight at the end also holds the distinction of being the only one outside the original trilogy that's given me a hard-to-define "Star Wars feeling" that I associate with the original movies (a few of the video games have achieved it, but none of the other films since ROTJ, for me personally, anyway).

I know the feeling you are talking about; the pod-racing scene in TPM gave me that feeling as well. There is so much to hate about TPM, but it's (IMO) the least-bad of the prequels, and by a fairly large degree.

[brimble]

Strongly agree with that assessment. I swore off watching any more after the astonishingly-bad garbage that was Episode II, but got lured back by reports from other fans that "no, really, they finally made a good one" with III. No. Wrong. Those people tricked me. Admittedly, it didn't help that I hadn't kept up with outside-the-films media so had no idea WTF was going on.

Episode I is the best of the prequels by a long shot, even though it's not very good. II's definitely the worst of them, though (maybe the worst overall? I dunno, Ep. IX might be even more broken on a technical level than II is, but it managed to fall into a "so bad it's... not good, but entertaining" sweet spot for me where at least I could laugh at it, while II is both badly-made and painfully boring), so at least I didn't get tricked back into the theater for another failure of quite that level.

Episodes I and VII are the two I'd put in their own special category, recommendation-wise. Like, if you've watched IV, V, VI, VIII (maybe skip it I guess since it's the middle of a trilogy? That one's hard to recommend just because of that, especially with IX being so very bad) and Rogue One, and are truly desperate for some more Star Wars, consider those. One's fairly bad and the other's a typical irritatingly-lazily-written Abrams script (do let him cast, direct, and punch up dialog, he's excellent at all of those, masterful at times, even—do not let him touch plotting), but they're by far the best of the lesser set of the films in the franchise IMO.