10 Underrated Movies Everyone Loved At First (But Now Dislikes)

2. Return Of The Jedi

The Awesome Movie: It's Star Wars. And really good Star Wars. The opening sequence is an excellent honouring of the saga's Flash Gordon origins with stellar creature design to boot, while the multi-layered final conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire, with constant twists and battles of varying levels of intensity playing out concurrently, is a tour de force. Culminating in the end of Darth Vader's surprisingly-effecting redemption arc, Return Of The Jedi is a great trilogy ender and a great movie.

Is it the best Star Wars movie? No, but when you're stacking up against giants of cinema that isn't a slight. In fact, in comparison to the previous movies, Episode VI actually had a pretty positive reaction, its outside financial success not cheapening the accolades. Return Of The Jedi is Star Wars. And really good Star Wars at that.

What Happened? I really don't know here, but in the three decades since release, while love for The Empire Strikes Back has only increased, the second sequel has deeply fallen in estimation. When The Force Awakens hit, some overzealous fans even placed Episode VII well above Jedi, as if it had at some point been decided the movie Randall Graves declared was "Blasphemy" to not call the best sequel was actually a bad movie.

You can lay some of the blame at the stubby feet of the ewoks, and it must be said that Episode VI is the most commercially minded of the original trilogy, but the teddy bears and what they represent in the transformation of George Lucas from desperate auteur to shrewd business tyrant is hardly ruinous to the film; the ewoks make up a slight part of the runtime and do, in isolation, provide an expansion of the galaxy. There, I said it.