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The Empire Strikes Back, more popularly known as the greatest Star Wars film ever, celebrates its 30th anniversary Friday. Happy birthday, Lucasfilm production not compromised by the presence of Jar Jar Binks!
But as George Lucas’ icy fever dream Force-pushes out its anniversary candles, let us consider the finest installments of other celebrated sci-fi, fantasy and horror film trilogies. Some are soaked in CGI, while others are clad in sadomasochistic bondage. But all of them are stone-cold classics. And probably none of them are in danger of losing their honored seat once the inevitable Iron Man 3 arrives. We’re just saying. Above:
The Empire Strikes Back
Where to begin? Perhaps with the fact that The Empire Strikes Back is one of the only Star Wars films freed from the barren wastes of Tattooine. Or the confusing love triangle between Han Solo and two Skywalker siblings. Or the mind-blowing revelation that Darth Vader is Luke’s father, a disclosure driven home after the Sith Lord chops off his son’s hand without hesitation. The list hyperspeeds onward.
Although Star Wars — or A New Hope, as the revisionists and retconners have decided it is now called — was a once-in-a-lifetime cultural shock wave, The Empire Strikes Back is more hard-hitting, emotionally invested and professionally executed. No Ewoks, Gungans or other merchandise makeouts are in sight. Instead, you get Boba Fett’s cold cunning, Darth Vader’s moral turmoil, Emperor Palpatine’s diseased evil and Lando Calrissian’s selfish double-crossing.
The fellowship of the first Star Wars film has fragmented, and its optimistic tone has been swallowed by darkness. The Empire Strikes Back is so dark, in fact, that Star Wars fans would have to suffer through three more shiny spectacles before the franchise dimmed the lights again.
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The Fellowship of the Ring
Peter Jackson’s epochal cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Return of the King inspired an endless procession of Oscar acceptance speeches, but the subdued yet scarier Fellowship of the Ring remains the trilogy’s high point. That is mostly due to Tolkien’s ceaselessly rich source material: Like the book, the film alternately introduced the terrors of Mordor and the diverse races and regional rivalries of Middle-Earth. And like the book, the film was filled with wonders.
In contrast, Return of the King was mostly a bloated, torrid war movie, strewn with CGI carnage and hastily converging subplots. Its extended ending was abrupt: The film failed to include one of Tolkien’s best chapters, the Scouring of the Shire. Filmgoers probably didn’t want to be subjected to yet another war, but Tolkien’s point of the final battle was that all wars are local. In fact, that is the point of the entire trilogy, a message best delivered in The Fellowship of the Ring. After all, fellowships are always more rewarding than kings.
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The Matrix
The Wachowski Brothers’ technocultural mash of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Disney’s Tron, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and pretty much every other postmodern primitivist source text in existence was a stunning game-changer. The Matrix ‘s bullet-time digitalism went viral throughout popular culture immediately upon impact, birthing a multimedia explosion of peripheral texts and philosophical treatises. Plus, Keanu Reeves redeemed himself after stumbling through Johnny Mnemonic and worse.
Sadly, the still-impressive The Matrix Reloaded and still-underwhelming The Matrix Revolutions failed to capitalize on the first film’s genre-shredding example. While Reeves and co-stars like Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne and even a hammy Hugo Weaving effortlessly inhabited their compelling characters, The Wachowski Brothers couldn’t pull the trilogy’s heady explorations into alignment. That’s a testament to the power of The Matrix ‘s expansive possibility.
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Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Western did more than make a mostly unknown Mel Gibson a worldwide sensation. From its maniacal villains to its kinetic grit, it raised the benchmark for live-action sci-fi films subsisting on an indie budget. And it did it while doling out equally powerful helpings of violence and humor. On top of it all, Gibson’s Max Rockatansky, a peak-oil upgrade of Clint Eastwood’s antiheroic Man With No Name, burned furious and bright.
This was not the case with Miller’s first installment, Mad Max, a similarly harrowing and humorous exercise (but on a much smaller scale), nor with the rancid Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, co-directed by George Ogilvie, which was a blow-dried iteration that bordered on camp.
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Back to the Future
Robert Zemeckis’ mash of mad science and pop-cultural nostalgia became an instant critical and commercial success upon its release in 1985. Unlike previous sci-fi slipstreamers like Planet of the Apes and later ones like The Time Machine, Back to the Future ‘s marriage of personal humor and cultural turmoil proved refreshing and optimistic. Plus, there was that Delorean time machine, which is probably the greatest symbol of the 1980s’ flashy excess and ensuing failure. (The real Delorean DMC-12, after all, was only in production for two years before vanishing from the Earth, except in the movies.)
The film enticed Amblin Entertainment and Zemeckis to hurriedly fashion two embattled sequels for the film. Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III, filmed back-to-back, were plagued by everything from actor disputes to bad ratings and underwhelming box office performances. They remain uninspired variations on the first film’s inspiring theme. No time machine will ever change that.
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RoboCop
A dizzying mix of unrepentant body horror, gritty police procedural and ambitious cyborg philosophy, Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi flick RoboCop remains one of those rare movies that functions on pretty much any level. As a popcorn crowd-pleaser, it’s a violent good time. As a treatise on the merge of humanity and technology, it’s suitable for intellectual dissection at any university. As a shining example of sci-fi satire, it’s both cerebral and visceral in equal measure.
Its trilogy companions, RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3, are disappointing simulations. Which is surprising, given that RoboCop 2 was helmed by The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner, and both films were co-written by comics visionary Frank Miller (actually, maybe that’s why they failed). The limitless power of Verhoeven’s original makes RoboCop not just the franchise’s finest film, but one of the finest sci-fi movies of all time.
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Starship Troopers
Another Verhoeven classic, this cinematic adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 military sci-fi novel of the same name is an unrepentantly dark satire brazenly exhibiting the carnage of conflict. When humanity declares war against the planet Klendathu’s alien Arachnids, all visceral, violent hell breaks loose, fragmenting a group of high-school friends, including Neil Patrick Harris in a humorously sinister turn.
But the real star of Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is its marriage of mundane militarism and self-absorbed angst, as its soapy, empty-headed teenagers get jammed through the meat grinder on their way to the interstellar battlefield. Shot through with scandalous fake commercials and overt sexual metaphor, Verhoeven’s underrated film delivers the banality of binaries like good and evil, resident and alien, with a bitch-slap to the back of the head.
Anticipating both our War on Terror-ized sociopolitical landscape and the so-called reality television that sustains it, Starship Troopers is a hot mess. The franchise’s straight-to-video follow-ups, Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation and Starship Troopers 3: Marauder paled in comparison.
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Evil Dead II
If there is a cooler horror lead than Bruce Campbell, we have yet to see him. Campbell was an unhinged force to be reckoned with in Sam Raimi’s graphically violent yet utterly hilarious sequel to the director’s banned 1981 classic The Evil Dead. Like Peter Jackson’s similarly transgressive Dead Alive (or Braindead, to the technical nerds), Evil Dead II deliberately injects dark slapstick into its heard-it tale of spirit possession and body horror.
Whether he’s fighting off hellacious demons or even his own deranged hand, Campbell’s Ash Williams is a fantastic protagonist that’s gone viral not just in films but also comics, a musical and even a Universal Orlando haunted house. Rumor is that Raimi still plans to use Ash in a future film, which is why he squashed the character’s appearance in the otherwise lame Freddy vs. Jason. No worries, Raimi: We’re cool with the Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash comic. For now.
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Jurassic Park
Steven Spielberg’s dino-gasm ushered in the era of the seamless CGI and live-action blend. After Jurassic Park ‘s groundbreaking digitalism broke through in 1993, Spielberg started getting calls from Stanley Kubrick to help bring the ailing auteur’s long-shelved project A.I. to life, George Lucas broke ground on the second Star Wars trilogy and Stan Winston teamed up with James Cameron and IBM to form the FX company Digital Domain. And Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film in history, until Cameron’s CGI-soaked Titanic sailed in 1997.
Technical achievements aside, Jurassic Park remains a cinematic thrill ride that ranks highly among Spielberg’s finest like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws. In fact, an actual Jurassic Park thrill ride in Hollywood was conceived alongside the film. But while Spielberg has always been adept at bringing his imagination to life, he hasn’t had similar luck when it comes to his characters. Their flatness in the first film was overshadowed by the stunning CGI, but the trilogy’s subsequent installments — The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III — simply couldn’t bury the blah behind eye-popping effects.
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Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith
We’re not cheating on this one. As we all know, George Lucas made two trilogies (although some early Star Wars adopters consider it heresy to even consider a film from the second one). Revenge of the Sith was the most visually stunning and thematically compelling of the second trilogy’s three installments, in spite of its utterly clumsy stolen moments between Anakin (played by Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman).
Lucas made up for those shortcomings by burning Anakin to a crisp in the end, and biblically killing off nearly every member of the Jedi order to boot. Revenge of the Sith ‘s resiliently dark tone threw the entire second trilogy off-balance: A Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones were mostly benign, user-friendly affairs, but the story line metastasized into a gorgeous nightmare in Revenge of the Sith (which is why it made the cut, although it pales in comparison to The Empire Strikes Back).
Blowback: We Showed You Ours, Now Show Us Yours
Got your own preferred trilogy films? Want to haze us for including Revenge of the Sith? Mad that we didn’t include gravity-defying Asian action classics like A Better Tomorrow? Unload your blessed burdens in the comments section below.
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