Star Wars was better.
There's probably no blade runner without star wars but it's just childish/shallow if you don't buy into George Lucas.
The originals are good movies but only empire is truly great and even then it's just a good flick. It asks almost no questions of the audience.
Star Wars (as in, "Episode IV: A New Hope") gets a lot of points on the greatness scale for basically inventing the multi-genre pastiche film, and for being a pretty good example of the practice. Empire's a better movie in a lot of ways, but less ground-breaking as far as the storytelling goes.
But yeah, no Star Wars films are high art. The first two, especially, though, get a lot of basic stuff right and have fairly straightforward plots, so they make for excellent examples for illustrating many of aspects of film story-telling: mood, plotting, characterization, foreshadowing, setup/payoff in general, et c.
Because in the same vein you could call LOTR science fiction too because the fantasy elements are just natural properties of the created world. The "magic" can technically be technology as well.
LOTR is explicitly a fantasy story in a fantasy aesthetic. Magic can be technology but it doesn't try to be in either of the stories you mention.
The aesthetic is what defines the genre. There's tons of garbage technology in other sci-fi works that are beyond what's even speculative. Star wars is not the only art work that does this.
Midi chloreans (The technical/scientific explanation for the force) are way less speculative then alot of the sci fi that's out there.
Lucas in 1981 said being a jedi was like doing yoga - anyone can do it, but only people who work at it get good. see the citation here:
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Midi-chlorian#cite_note-The...
The story of star wars is a fantasy story complete with magic. You can shift the entire thing to ancient china and adjust all the set pieces for the time and it would still work.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep started as speculative fiction and is still speculative fiction after its transition to the screen.
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/is-star-wars-science-f...
Just kidding, but it's equivalent to what I would've wrote.
>You can shift the entire thing to ancient china and adjust all the set pieces for the time and it would still work.
Bro, I'm chinese. Ancient China is neither Fantasy or Sci-Fi. It's a whole different genre called Wuxia. Fantasy and wuxia are not compatible.
Ya, but he's wrong. It's like a library putting a fiction book in the non fiction, and because its popular, redefining non fiction because the fiction book is popular. He's got an opinion, and I disagree, and we're equally valid.
>Bro, I'm chinese. Ancient China is neither Fantasy or Sci-Fi. It's a whole different genre called Wuxia. Fantasy and wuxia are not compatible.
That's not an argument, that's a conclusion without any supporting arguments. Dismissed as nonsense as easily as posited without effort.
By your arguments if it got popular it would redefine wuxia and now wuxia would include it.
This is HN not nature. It's not a scientific debtate, just a general conversation so the level of proof is not super high.
You just have to trust me that I'm born in China, and Fantasy is not Wuxia. Just like you would have to trust a black person when he says he's not white. Don't go calling a black person white and don't go around saying you can move fucking star wars into Ancient China to a Chinese person who knows the culture and the genre.
Actually don't listen to me. Go ahead and say whatever you want to people. When a black person tells you he's not white, demand a scientific inquiry to prove he's black.
Either way agree to disagree. I think star wars if sci-fi. You don't.
But I will say, if you ask most people, most people will say star wars is sci-fi. At least we can agree on that point.
> Fantasy is distinguished from the genres of science fiction and horror by the respective absence of scientific or macabre themes, although these genres overlap
So perhaps I was overly dismissive. Narratively, it seems to me that star wars shares more in common with fantasy stories than sci-fi (chosen one, magic, battle between good and evil, sword that is your birthright, etc), but the setting is a sci-fi one (interplanetary war, clones, androids, space fleets). As wikipedia say “these genres overlap”.
The magic stuff actually has (or had) sort of a background explanation based in "science" so overall I would say it's more sci-fi.
In many cases I would even argue genres like sci-fi and fantasy don't involve the plot at all. These genres exclusively refer to the setting.