Recently rewatched ANH and Empire over xmas break and the older I get the more I prefer ANH. Empire benefits from being a far more polished movie with a much higher budget, but ANH has this raw, manic, experimental energy that Empire lacks. ANH opens with 15 minutes of a man in a painfully obvious black body suit play a gay robot who bitches about everything and it's amazing. The movie itself feels like it could fall apart at enough moment, but instead it builds into one of the greatest plot and character arcs in film history and went on to redefine cinema as a whole. In a vacuum I'd still have to call Empire the better movie, but within the context of it's affect on culture and what a mad-cap movie it was to actually make, I have to go with ANH.
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