'It's felt like homework': Why Star Wars went so wrong

Star Wars movies were rarely well-written. As Harrison Ford said "George, you can type this s**, but you can't say it".

Or something like that. I've been unable to fully authenticate the quote, or even find a definitive version of it. Certainly Alec Guinness felt that way; he hated every minute of it.

ESB is generally recognized as the best written film, and Lucas notably did not write that. My personal favorite is still A New Hope, but I certainly don't deny that the writing is as dumb as a sack of hammers.

At one time it was pretty much universally recognized that the prequels were abysmally written. For some reason that opinion is less unanimous now (I think it has to do with the somewhat-better-written Clone Wars series), but they are still just chock full of really bad writing.

Dave Filoni writes very well, even when the end result isn't a great product.

A lot of things have changed about Star Wars, and there are lots of reasons to think it used to be better. But "the writing was good and now it's bad" just doesn't hold up.