Actually, before reading your comment I've never even seen any major similarities between A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. They always seemed like two completely different movies.
While watching The Force Awakens on another hand, I felt like I was watching a remake of A New Hope. If there is something that kinda fulfilled me with The Last Jedi, is that I didn't have the feeling to watch Empire Strikes Back again. It did have this darker passing like ESB, but the plot was completely different.
"Lots of movies share the same basic plot thread. There are a ton of action movies you could compare point-for-point."
Yes you have a point here. But in my defense, sometimes it just works for the best. Back to the Future and first two Home Alone movies are prime examples. The problem with Star Wars is that they actually always wanted to progress the story and made each movies different from the others.
"Does anyone go around slamming Peter Jackson's King Kong for LITERALLY copying an older movie?"
Yeah... I actually do. Peter Jackson pretty much copied an older movie, and made it almost two times longer by adding boring, never ending and quite useless material. This is what Peter Jackson's King Kong is for me.
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I doubt you'd even accept that Star Wars is a ripoff of old Flash Gordon stories... Even though Lucas tried to secure the Flash Gordon license in the early 70's, failed to do so, and then altered the setting and characters SLIGHTLY and called it Star Wars.
The Flash Gordon story he was going for (yes this is a real Flash story): Flash, a naive young man from Earth (Tatooine), joins Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkov (Leia and Kenobi) to fly off toward the weaponized planet Mongo (Death Star), run by Emperor Ming (Emperor Palpatine), which is approaching Earth (Yavin IV) to destroy it."
And? Pretty much everything you see is inspired by something that came before. Only the thing here is that despite the fact he "ripped-off" an older idea, he made his success out of the "Star Wars" name without anything with the same title preceding it.
The Force Awakens on another hand made its success using a very successful title, and didn't really bring anything new to the table.
Of course, TFA and ANH are not 100% similar, but enough for me to feel like I was "tricked" to believe that I was gonna watch a brand new movie... But ended up with a feeling of rewatching another movie FROM THE SAME FRANCHISE.
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