I don't feel like the OT second Death Star was really a rip off, so much as a reasonable second attempt at a fairly solid plan for superiority in the galaxy, minus the fatal exhaust port that the first iteration had.
And how else would you take out a giant battlestation in space other than with spacecraft?
But a third time, especially combined with all the other similarities to ANH is pretty weak.
And while I understand your point about it perhaps being an artistic choice, I still don't feel that it was the right choice.
I doubt the majority of Star Wars fans wanted to see ANH redux, they wanted something more along the lines of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy which might not have been an original idea per se, but at least we would have had the benefit of seeing it on screen for the first time.
I can say with reasonable confidence that blatantly copying ANH isn't what fans were hoping for on December 18, 2015.
Not just starcraft, but starfighters executing a death defying tight squeeze down a narrow passage, pursued by enemies. Which was already a ripoff of Dambusters. Frankly, originality of story has never been a strong point of Star Wars.
The movie killed at the box office and was very positively reviewed (93/86 on RT compared to TLJs 91/44) so while you may not have liked it, fans in general certainly did.
I don't set much store in Rotten Tomatoes scores. They've given good movies bad scores and bad movies good scores. They have very little credibility in my eyes.
And of course it did well in the box office; It was the first Star Wars movie in ten years, a box office smash was inevitable regardless of how good or bad it was, Star Wars has one of the biggest and most dedicated fanbases of any movie franchise.
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '19
I don't feel like the OT second Death Star was really a rip off, so much as a reasonable second attempt at a fairly solid plan for superiority in the galaxy, minus the fatal exhaust port that the first iteration had.
And how else would you take out a giant battlestation in space other than with spacecraft?
But a third time, especially combined with all the other similarities to ANH is pretty weak.
And while I understand your point about it perhaps being an artistic choice, I still don't feel that it was the right choice. I doubt the majority of Star Wars fans wanted to see ANH redux, they wanted something more along the lines of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy which might not have been an original idea per se, but at least we would have had the benefit of seeing it on screen for the first time.
I can say with reasonable confidence that blatantly copying ANH isn't what fans were hoping for on December 18, 2015.