Entirely Serious Star Wars Stack Ranking

29 Sep, 2026

We recently finished a rewatch of all nine mainline Star Wars films. Here's my stack ranking of them plus a few other things I felt like including. Spoilers, obviously.

1. Andor
This is not a bold or controversial statement, and I've already raved about Andor here, so I shan't dwell. Show good. Let Diego Luna caress Jabba's weird crinkly skin as much as he desires.

2. The Empire Strikes Back
Oh, wow, you think Episode V is the best one? Aren't you a brave little boy? Do you also feel like The Shawshank Redemption is criminally underrated?
Sometimes the critical consensus is just correct. Empire has the strongest story of the original trilogy, Luke vs. Vader is an all-time classic duel, Cloud City rules... even the music is probably at its best here. Really, the only thing holding it back is a relative paucity of Weird Dudes.

3. A New Hope
I think it's literally impossible to say anything novel about A New Hope in 2026, so I'll just say that the spaceship design in Star Wars was pretty much perfect from the jump. The TIE fighters' screams, the Star Destroyers' greebly little command towers, the Falcon's cockpit interior... it's all gold. There's a bit of my brain that still lights up every time they lock S-foils, practicality be damned.

4. Saturday Night Live Kylo Ren Undercover Boss Skit
Best performance of Adam Driver's career, and that's not a joke.

5. The Last Jedi
Yeah. Sorry. I'm one of those people. Granted, Canto Bight is a mess, and I'm not touching the Vice-Admiral Holdo Discourse Nexus with a 10-foot laser pole, but I unironically love most of The Last Jedi, and that averages out to liking it as a whole.
Why does Luke's snarky old man demeanour work here when Han's annoyed me so much in TFA? At the risk of being too sentimental about a Product, I think you can genuinely feel Mark Hamill's affection for the role and for Star Wars as a whole (versus Harrison Ford's pissy apathy), and I can't help but be drawn to that. He and Daisy Ridley have great chemistry, and their whole arc absolutely sings as a result.
An underrated cool element of TLJ is how it deconstructs the notion of evil being sustained by a single load-bearing villain. Killing Snoke, on its own, does not matter; there will always be Kylos and Huxes ready and eager to take over his duties. In the same way that Palpatine's death didn't stop the Empire from recovering and becoming the First Order, Snoke's death doesn't stop Kylo from immediately rushing to fill the vacuum. This is the lesson the New Republic didn't learn and the Resistance needs to, and it is, for Star Wars, unexpectedly grounded and plausible.

6. Revenge of the Sith
I am shocked to be putting a prequel this high, but hey, I enjoyed Revenge a lot. I genuinely think it might have the best story in the Skywalker Saga? That's a transparently insane thing to say about any movie that includes "she's lost the will to live", but Anakin and Palpatine's dynamic is seriously compelling - props to Christensen and McDiarmid for managing to sell Lucas' still-questionable dialogue. Order 66 remains chilling even without the force multiplier (har har) of Pumped Up Kicks. I also really appreciate how Revenge expands on Obi-Wan's weaknesses and how his stubbornness and incuriosity contributed to Anakin's downfall. If this had come out 10-15 years later, I expect fans would be complaining about it "ruining" Obi-Wan the way TLJ "ruined" Luke.
I'm not sure how much of my goodwill towards this movie comes from the memes. The high ground, powers some consider unnatural, "hello there!", etc. I'm a sucker for them, I'm afraid.

7. Spaceballs
Stupid fun. It's nowhere close to Mel Brooks' best (Blazing Saddles is an all-time favourite of mine), and I don't think it's as potent and enduring a send-up as Galaxy Quest, the best Star Trek movie. Spaceballs has definitely aged in places, but I had a good time with it regardless. Rick Moranis hard-carries this one, really; his scenes are consistently like 50% funnier than the rest.

8. Rogue One
I kind of regret not watching this before Andor, because it was always going to be a let-down after that. It's a competently assembled war movie with some good set pieces, and I do have to commend it for feeling more like a war than most of the films that get the actual Star Wars supertitle; the large-scale fights are actually kind of coherent and possible to follow (compare and contrast Geonosis or Kashyyyk from the prequels, or Starkiller Base from TFA). I do still think Jyn was a weak lead without much of an arc, but again, I was probably spoiled by Cassian.
I think this one could use a rewatch, maybe with a couple of months' space.

9. Return of the Jedi
Very much a film of two halves. The whole first act in Jabba's court is maybe not Star Wars at its best, but it's definitely Star Wars at its most Star Wars: pure unapologetic pulp with an astronomically high Weird Dude quotient.
The rest of Return was a lot weaker than I remembered. The Ewoks get a lot of well-deserved flak, but I think the broader issue is pacing. Somehow it feels like there's both too much talking and too much protracted action, and several sequences feel like they go on forever. The speeder chase. The Emperor taunting Luke before he decides to fight. I think Han and Leia took about five years to open that door.

10. Crashing my dad's old laptop while playing the Gungan campaign in Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds in 2005
When I was watching A New Hope and heard the specific bantha noise they used for the animal nursery in SWGB, I briefly became Charles Swann eating the madeleine.

11. The Force Awakens
Cards on the table, declaring my biases early: I cannot stand J.J. Abrams. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but his values as a filmmaker are very different from mine as a viewer.
If you told me in 2013 that your best pitch for a new Star Wars movie was "Death Star again, but bigger", I'd think you were joking. The Force Awakens does have good ideas, but it almost feels scared of having too many. Jakku is beautiful, though I wish it wasn't yet another desert. A Stormtrooper defector as a lead is great. Kylo Ren is conceptually inspired as a villain. But then obviously we need our own Mos Eisley Cantina, and Han Solo is still here, because Star Wars is when there are only like twelve guys in the whole galaxy, and then we're back to infiltrating the planet-killing megabase and blowing it up, with an X-wing, no less. It wants to be a loving homage, but it feels more like lazy fanfiction.¹

12. The Phantom Menace
Come on, you don't need me to tell you that The Phantom Menace isn't very good. I remembered enjoying the podrace, at least, but it didn't really hold up beyond an admittedly great roster of Weird Dudes. (Kurt Maloney and Jacob Wysocki's dub elevates it hugely, though.) Even Ewan McGregor, whom I usually think of as the most consistently enjoyable element of the prequels, hasn't really found his feet yet. Duel of the Fates is of course a certified jock jam, but it can't hold up the rest.
Also, I know 1999 was a while ago, but I am genuinely kind of surprised that Jar Jar, Watto, and Nute Gunray all made it into the final version. Did anyone actually think about the implications of Jar Jar declaring himself the "humble servant" of two white guys in his very first appearance?

13. Attack of the Clones
There is more good in Attack of the Clones than there is in The Phantom Menace, mostly in Obi-Wan's investigation arc. Dexter's Diner is adorable. Kamino is legitimately one of my favourite planets in the series, just vibes-wise. I even like the fight with Jango Fett, jumpkicks be damned.
But Christ, the bad stuff is so much worse. The first half is boring, the second half is boring and loud and stupid. Everything from the droid factory onwards is just homogeneous directionless Action Scene slurry,² an endless chain of what I believe the kids are calling "aura moments" without any sort of comprehensible through line. Jedi Battle was my favourite level in Lego Star Wars because it was close to a sandbox, you could just run around mashing attack and cause chaos, but that doesn't make a very good climax for a movie.
And it's not even the real climax. Clones tries to have three climaxes in a row - Jedi arena battle, clones vs. Trade Federation field battle, Count Dooku (you know you're in trouble when even Christopher Lee can't save you) - and the energy is already spent before even the first one is over. Ending fatigue is a problem even in Return of the King, and Return of the King is good!

14. The Rise of Skywalker
Rian Johnson has apparently said he was fine with the creative choices in The Rise of Skywalker and didn't feel it was an insult to or refutation of The Last Jedi. I disagree. TRoS is such a violent rejection of TLJ that it almost feels spiteful. There's the cowardly swerve on Rey's parentage, of course, but that's not even the U-turn I hate the most. Remember how TLJ questions the idea of the load-bearing villain? TRoS looks at that and says, no. Nuh-uh. Wrong. In my Star Wars, in the real Star Wars, there's always a load-bearing villain. The same one, even. He just didn't get killed hard enough last time. Idiot.
The dialogue feels very... MCU-ish. Too quippy, too polished. Does that make sense? I don't even necessarily mind the style but it does not work here.
You know that old joke about how, whenever there's a racing scene in a movie, the protagonist can win just by deciding to go faster? I'm pretty sure that's how Rey defeated Palpatine here. Two reflecty things do not mean twice the reflection. I feel stupid even talking about it.
The creative team behind TRoS has insisted that the deemphasis on Rose, and to a lesser extent Finn, was not a response to racist fan backlash and instead caused by intractable production issues with Carrie Fisher's archive footage and Jannah's role being constantly rewritten, etc., etc. Maybe that's true. But it's also very convenient.

Bonus: Unsorted Ideas For Star Wars Movies That Would Be Cool But Will Definitely Never Get Made

• Star Wars mob movie. Organised crime is a huge and kind of underexplored element of the setting. Set it before or during the Clone Wars in Separatist-contested space, maybe give Runa from Zero Company a cameo. Absolutely nuclear Weird Dudes potential here - hell, you could even have a Hutt protagonist.

• A black comedy set immediately after Death Star 2 gets blown up, following the remnants of Imperial high command as they squabble over the sudden power vacuum, or just try to cash out and run. Tone somewhere between Succession and Dr. Strangelove.

• Canon Star Wars space combat has generally focused on individual dogfights and heroic flyboys, but the exploration of serious capital ship combat was one of the things I really enjoyed about Rogue One. Is there scope within the setting for a Star Wars-ified Master and Commander, a heroic frigate or cruiser captain with a crew of hardened, eccentric officers, on a mission against unthinkable odds?

• A buddy cop movie but with High Republic-era Jedi. Obi-Wan and Anakin sort of had this dynamic in the prequels, but they spent too much time separated for us to see it much in action. Switching up the roles a bit, and following a principled but disreputable Knight and her horrified uptight padawan, could be a lot of fun.

• A history of the setting, in vignettes, through the eyes of a single long-lived character on a single tumultuous world. Sure, most species seem to cluster around human-ish lifespans, but Chewbacca is over 200 years old by the sequel trilogy, and there are surely others.

• Coruscant noir. Daniel Kaluuya. Enough said.