[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.