#the only thing I’ve ever written on here that could qualify as an effortpost

[this-is-getting-silly]

It feels very cosmically appropriate that the biggest pillars of the sci-fi and fantasy genres in the 20th century, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, are both trilogies that have a superior second installment, in both cases mainly because the middle film/book has all the good fights.

The battle on Hoth is easily the best in the series, though honestly it’s partly because there aren’t that many other good contenders. The Death Star trench run is cool, but kind of… linear (literally), and the battle against the second Death Star in ROTJ is like, barely an afterthought. The only thing anybody remembers about that part of the movie is Lando’s copilot being a racist caricature.

More importantly, you have Luke versus Vader on Cloud City, which is… kind of the only real lightsaber fight in the entire original trilogy. Technically they fight again in ROTJ but neither of them really have their hearts in it, and the ‘fight’ in ANH barely even qualifies as such. Not only that, the Cloud City fight is just really great in general, and happens to include the most iconic line in the entire franchise. Plus it’s brave enough to have the protagonist get comprehensively owned by the bad guy, which is a genuinely bold choice in a franchise that’s otherwise chock full of cliches.

Then in Two Towers, you have Helm’s Deep, which is the best sequence in the entire trilogy, plus the battle at Isengard. Compared to that, Fellowship has what, the fight in the mines? A chase sequence with the ringwraiths? The battle at the very end? Nothing terribly exciting overall. And ROTK (I was today years old when I realized how weird it is those two very nearly share a name) lacks a particularly satisfying climax, which is kind of a weak point of the trilogy as a whole. Sauron shoulda manifested his scary armor form and had a duel with Aragorn or something, the Mount Doom stuff just doesn’t get the blood pumping.

Actually, while I’m on the topic of edits I’d make, I have two big ones. The first is that I’d give Boba Fett at least one good scene in Empire. He’s kind of pointless in that whole movie, except to fly away with Han towards the end, which is clearly meant to set him up as a future antagonist (which Return follows up on rather lamely). You could cut that totally pointless sequence with the Falcon crew on that asteroid and instead give them a cool fight with Boba that would set him up as a threatening antagonist whose presence forces them to flee to Cloud City.

As for the other edit, it’s less specific- I just feel like it would have been nice to see what the One Ring can actually *do* once or twice. Like, yes, I get it, it’s a metaphor, it represents power as an abstract concept, and only Frodo can carry it because he’s a goody good boy. But actually showing what its power *is* wouldn’t hurt the metaphor at all. Yeah, it can turn people invisible, and that has some practical uses, but nobody wants it because it would make them the perfect assassin, they want it because it represents power incarnate, and making Frodo sneaky (which he never even gets to use for most of the trilogy) doesn’t really sell that, IMO.

And yes, for the record, I’m aware nothing I ever write will be as good (or, perhaps more importantly, as commercially successful) as either of those two. But I don’t think they’re above criticism either. (Star Wars especially, lol)