04-05-2025
Star Wars Day 2025: Ranking the 10 best ‘Star Wars' stories ever told
For a franchise born in a desert under a binary sunset and raised among myth, merchandise, and cultural liturgy, Star Wars has aged into something oddly baroque. Across nearly five decades, it has produced a sprawling mosaic of stories — some sublime, some embarrassing, and some both at once. Sorting through the rubble and relics of that galaxy far, far away is no small task, but if there's a throughline to be found, it lies in the franchise's unshakable belief in the redemptive power of story: that good and evil can be felt in orchestral swells, that the past is worth fighting, and that somewhere in the light of twin suns or the sparks of rebellion, someone is always choosing to be better. Here, then, are the ten finest expressions of that belief — films and series that expanded the myth, sharpened it, and in the best cases, even challenged it.
10. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
For a film tasked with closing the most operatic of space operas, Return of the Jedi wears its destiny with a lightness of heart. It's a strange brew of Ewok showboating and existential redemption, and while its tonal shifts occasionally buckle under the weight of trilogy-ending expectations, the final confrontation between father and son is pure mythological gold. Few films allow a villain in a black mask to die so tenderly.
9. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
Rian Johnson's provocation-in-sheep-clothing is perhaps the most literary of the Star Wars entries. It is philosophical, bristling with contradiction, and unwilling to kneel before the altar of nostalgia. Here, Luke Skywalker is no longer the familiar Joseph Campbell-ian boy-hero, but a weary monk who milks sea cows and shames legends. The film fractured the fandom, as true revolutions must, but in doing so, it dared to question what happens when myths age, and whether burning them down might be the truest way to preserve them.
8. The Mandalorian
What began as a spaghetti western in a galaxy far, far away has evolved into a gentle meditation on fatherhood, loyalty, and the unlikely warmth of a faceless man and a 50-year-old green toddler. The Mandalorian succeeded by polishing the wheels of reinvention with a reverence for genre and an eye for simplicity. Each episode is a love letter to the serialised adventures of yore, shot through with space dogfights, sand-swept vistas, and the occasional Werner Herzog cameo. That it also reintroduced Boba Fett and gave us Grogu is just sweetened blue milk.
7. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Initially dismissed as a babysitter for younglings and the chronically online, The Clone Wars grew — seven seasons deep — into one of the most emotionally intricate and narratively generous pieces of Star Wars storytelling. It gave flesh to the clone troopers, enhanced Anakin's tragedy, and turned Ahsoka Tano into a paradigm. The show embroidered the gaps with consequence, character, and lightsaber choreography that often outshone its cinematic siblings.
6. Star Wars Rebels
If Clone Wars was the war epic, Rebels is the poem of resistance that's smaller in scale but richer in heart. Set between the fall of the Republic and the rise of rebellion, the show chronicles the coming-of-age of Ezra Bridger, a scrappy Force-sensitive orphan, and a makeshift family of freedom fighters aboard the Ghost. It takes Star Wars' most sacred texts of the Force, legacy, and sacrifice, and wrestles with them in meaningful ways. By the time it also introduces time travel, it somehow well and truly earns it.
5. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
There is a childlike sincerity in A New Hope that has, with time, become the stuff of legend. It is both artefact and origin story, a cosmic pastiche of Kurosawa and Flash Gordon, spliced together with model glue and instinct. Its world-building is tactile and its stakes, though galactic, are deeply personal. Watching it now is like revisiting the hopeful, clumsy and luminous relics of a distant childhood you never had but somehow remember.
4. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
No Jedi, no Skywalkers — just the desperate logistics of rebellion. Rogue One is a war film smuggled inside a Star Wars shell, in which heroism is earned, not inherited, and hope is something passed hand to hand like contraband. Its ending is a self-destructive masterclass, as [SPOILERS] every major character is extinguished so that a single line of dialogue in A New Hope might blaze with retroactive glory. It is the franchise's most self-contained elegy, and one of its most stirring.
3. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
This is where the mask fits, finally. After two films of cringeworthy galactic soap and awkward courtship, Revenge of the Sith plunges into operatic tragedy, embracing the inherent doom of the prequels. It is Shakespeare by way of volcanic lightsaber confrontations, brimming with heartbreak and political cynicism. Palpatine becomes the devil in bureaucrat's robes, and Anakin finally fulfils his destiny as the cautionary tale writ forged in fire and betrayal. Say what you will about its sometimes wooden (but endlessly meme-able) dialogue — this is the fall of Rome with a John Williams score.
2. Andor
In a franchise built on chosen ones, Andor turns its lens to the unchosen, the invisible, the desperate, and the morally ambiguous. Tony Gilroy's radical masterpiece frees itself from the shackles of space operatics and refines itself as a riveting socio-political descent into fascism, and the many forms resistance must take. Through dystopian prison floors that hum with dread, banal ISB boardrooms that chill the blood, and piercing monologues that border on scripture, the show reframes heroism as a daily, often joyless act of defiance. No lightsabers, and certainly no Force. Just ordinary people teetering on the edge of an extraordinary, inextinguishable belief.
1. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
There is a reason this is the Rosetta Stone of sequels. The Empire Strikes Back takes the brash optimism of its predecessor and coats it in frost — literally, on Hoth, and figuratively, through betrayal, failure, and one of the most iconic paternity reveals in cinematic history. It is a film that deepens the myth without resolving it, to split its heroes and leave them suspended in narrative limbo. Irvin Kershner directs with moody gravitas, and suddenly Star Wars becomes an immortal saga.
Happy May 4th to all, and May the Force be with you, always.
