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on 27 May 2011 11:14

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Best Trilogies I've Seen!

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Vengeance Trilogy

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Oldboy
Lady Vengeance.

From the dark humor of Mr. Vengeance, to the violent grittiness of Oldboy, to the ultra-stylish look of Lady Vengeance, this trilogy has a lot of variety. The movies are all consistent in quality, and despite Oldboy being the most popular, you can make a solid argument for any one of them being the best of the three.

Three Colors Trilogy

Blue
White
Red

The Polish Krzysztof Kieslowski made this trilogy to honor his adopted country, France. Amazingly the films are not only a reflection of the French identity - as the titles corresponding to the French flag suggests - but also a dissection of humanity itself. This trilogy was visually stunning, but I was even more impressed how so many themes tied together in each individual movie, as well as the trilogy as a whole. A must see.

The Apu Trilogy

Pather Panchali
Aparajito
Apur Sansar

Satyajit Ray's trilogy about Apu's life is a monster achievement in film. The brilliantly executed neo-realist style allows the viewer to be transported to India and be a part of a culture and lifestyle that many of us would never know.

Dark Knight Trilogy

Batman Begins
The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight Rises

Financially and artistically this trilogy is a colossus! Chris Nolan gave us a minimal CGI, non-digital, realistic Batman. Realistic in the sense that there are no actual super powers or radioactive spiders, like the typical comic book movie. However the 3 films are still set in a surreal, neo-noir, movie world. Much like the ideas Nolan examined in Inception, Gotham City is like a dream version of New York City, and the characters are metaphors for our beliefs about good vs evil, and order vs chaos. This is one of the rare film trilogies that actually got better with each part.

Star Wars (Original Trilogy)

A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi

The pure fun of A New Hope and the brilliance of The Empire Strikes Back, more than make up for the embarrassing sellout nature of Return of the Jedi.

BRD Trilogy

The Marriage of Maria Braun
Veronica Voss
Lola

Fassbinder's examination of three different women in postwar Germany is a solid collection of films. The stories are interesting, the acting is solid and the directing is some of Fassbinder's finest work.

Lord of the Rings

LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
Return of the King

Despite the fanboy worship, LOTR is not perfect cinema, and I believe The Hobbit will surpass these films. The slower moving extended versions are slightly better than the theatrical ones. As an adaptation of a popular book series, Peter Jackson was efficient in what he chose to film and yet respectful of the source material. Quite an achievement.

Man with no Name

A Fistful of Dollars
A Few Dollars More
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Fistful of Dollars is less exciting than Yojimbo but still an interesting interpretation. The second film is just an average, forgettable western. The third film in the trilogy is widely viewed as a classic of the Western Genre.

Alien(s)

Alien
Aliens
Alien 3

This trilogy is famous for its genre jump from horror to action. Then along came the much hated Alien 3. As much as the third part worked as a decent low budget suspense film, the original production was supposed to be a massive epic about the Aliens finally invading a futuristic earth! Too bad, the franchise just continued downhill from there...

Back to the Future

Back to the Future I, II and III

A solid comedy trilogy is a rare animal. Not only is each film somewhat funny, but the sequels are not even lazy remakes of the first film (like Hangover 2 is for example). Because of the huge number of big action comedy failures, we can forgive the lame story of film number two, since it is just a transition for the other films. This is an example of a trilogy that is better than any of its separate parts.

This is it: the best trilogies I've seen... The best things that come in threes! Why? Because I love movies and yet my only publicly viewed list is the "Movie Fails" list. This positive list is more how I feel about movies (although it is honestly more fun to trash the really bad ones).

If they made a fourth movie or beyond, I ignored those extra sequels and only counted the first three (as in Indiana Jones). If I haven't seen all three (or at least most of each one), I couldn't really list them (so my apologies to fans of The Jetsons trilogy).

The rankings are based on my opinion of the trilogy as a whole, and not based on how great only one of the particular movies is. So in this scenario, one really bad movie drags down the ranking of the whole trilogy.

Brief explanations about my choices are included.