Every Star Wars Movie's Worst Character, From Jar Jar Binks to Emperor Palpatine

Star Wars has given us some of the most iconic characters in movie history. It has also given us characters who are the opposite of iconic. I went through all 12 theatrically released Star Wars movies and picked the single worst character from each one. Some of these are obvious, some will probably get me criticized, and one beloved character is about to catch a completely unnecessary stray.

The Phantom Menace: Jar Jar Binks Falls Upward Into a General's Rank

This was the easiest decision on the entire list. Jar Jar walks into The Phantom Menace like somebody accidentally dropped a rejected Saturday morning cartoon character into a billion dollar space opera. "He steps in poop. He gets farted on. He destroys everything he touches and then somehow falls upward until he becomes a general."

The basic idea of Jar Jar is not terrible. A clumsy outcast helping two Jedi navigate Naboo could have worked. The problem is that every annoying personality trait got cranked to the extreme, so every serious moment gets interrupted by Jar Jar screaming, tripping, or trying to eat something with his tongue. Then the Gungans make him a military leader despite him showing zero leadership skills, which means the guy commanding the army the day of battle is the same one who spent the day before getting his tongue zapped by an energy beam. The Darth Jar Jar theory is fun, but it does not retroactively make the character good.

Attack of the Clones: Anakin Skywalker Becomes the Galaxy's Creepiest Boyfriend

It hurts to say this because Anakin should be one of the most fascinating characters in the prequel trilogy. Instead, Attack of the Clones turns the future Darth Vader into the galaxy's creepiest boyfriend. He spends half the movie staring at Padme like he is trying to read her search history, complains about Obi-Wan, talks about sand, gives speeches that would get anybody else blocked immediately, and then admits to slaughtering an entire Tusken village. Padme hears all of that and apparently decides she should secretly marry him.

Hayden Christensen proved in Revenge of the Sith, and especially much later, that he could play Anakin well. The problem is the writing. The film was supposed to show two people falling desperately in love, but Padme repeatedly tells Anakin a relationship would be a terrible idea and he keeps looking at her like the security cameras stopped working. The movie needed to make us understand why Padme loved him. Instead, it made me wonder whether Naboo had a restraining order process.

The Clone Wars: Rotta the Hutt Is a Noisy Plot Device Disguised as a Baby

The entire 2008 Clone Wars movie revolves around rescuing Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son, Rotta, also known as Stinky. An entire theatrical Star Wars movie was built around returning a sick baby Hutt to a gigantic crime lord. This was the introduction to what eventually became one of the best animated Star Wars series ever made, but before we got Darth Maul's return, Mandalore, the mortis gods, and the siege of Mandalore, we had Anakin and Ahsoka carrying around a coughing backpack full of slime.

Rotta is not really a character. He is a noisy plot device designed to get sick and remind us that even disgusting space gangsters apparently need daycare. The craziest part is that The Clone Wars eventually became incredible television. If you only watched this movie, you would not believe that, and you would think I was trying to trick you into watching six more seasons of Skywalker babysitting Jabba's kid. That is not the case, but this movie alone does not sell it.

Revenge of the Sith: General Grievous Turns Into a Coughing Track Athlete

I am going to get hammered for this one. Revenge of the Sith is easily the strongest prequel, which makes picking its worst character harder, but General Grievous gets it because the movie introduces a giant cyborg with four lightsabers and somehow turns him into a coughing, fleeing figure. Every time Grievous appears he either threatens somebody, coughs in their face, or runs away. This is a character who collected lightsabers from dead Jedi, commanded the entire Separatist droid army, and was supposed to be one of the most terrifying Jedi hunters in the galaxy.

Instead, Obi-Wan pulls open his chest and discovers the galaxy's deadliest cyborg is powered by just organs. The animated shows, especially the 2003 Clone Wars series, did a much better job with him, making him feel like a genuine monster. The movie version feels more like someone who challenges you to a fight and then immediately climbs onto a unicycle and leaves once you accept. He looks and sounds incredible. His actual contribution is coughing and twirling lightsabers on the way to another clean victory for Obi-Wan.

Solo: L3-37's Fight for Droid Rights Becomes a Punchline

I understand what the filmmakers were trying to do with L3-37: an independent droid fighting for droid rights, with history with Lando, meant to be loud and rebellious and different from any droid we had seen. But the execution is exhausting. L3 enters almost every scene at maximum volume, announces the movie's theme directly to the audience, and starts a droid revolution that gets treated like a goofy action sequence.

Star Wars introduces the genuinely disturbing idea that droids may be fully conscious beings trapped in permanent servitude, then basically turns it into a joke. L3 then dies and her mind is uploaded into the Millennium Falcon, so the character who spent her whole life demanding freedom ends up trapped inside a ship owned by somebody else. The movie barely pauses long enough to reckon with how disturbing that is. She could have added a fascinating layer to the Star Wars universe. Instead she becomes a collection of jokes attached to an idea the movie was not prepared to explore.

Rogue One: Saw Gerrera's Potential Gets Lost in a Performance That Belongs Elsewhere

Rogue One is one of my favorite movies, and Saw Gerrera has a ton of potential as a radical rebel who has fought the Empire so long that the war has physically and mentally destroyed him. That could have been an amazing character. Instead, Saw spends most of his screen time breathing heavily, interrogates Bodhi Rook with a tentacle creature that is supposedly capable of damaging people's minds even though Bodhi seems basically fine ten minutes later, captures Jyn, gives her a speech, watches the Death Star attack Jedha, and then decides he is tired of running while everyone else escapes.

Forest Whitaker gives this performance everything he has, but it felt like Saw belonged in a completely different movie. He shouts, he whispers, he gasps for air, and changes accents halfway through his own sentences. I think the concept behind the character is good and the character is important, but Rogue One simply did not find a good delivery system for him.

A New Hope: Biggs Darklighter's Friendship With Luke Was Never Shown

Biggs is not offensive, annoying, or actively destructive to the movie, and I want to be clear about that. He makes this list because the theatrical cut barely gives us enough time to understand why we should care about him. Luke arrives at the rebel base, sees Biggs, and suddenly acts like his best friend has returned from the dead, and if you have only watched the theatrical movie you might wonder whether you skipped a chapter, because their earlier scenes together on Tatooine were removed.

Biggs walks into the final act carrying an emotional connection that the finished film never actually established, then dies during the Death Star attack while Luke is understandably devastated. The problem is the audience never got to know him, so he is essentially Luke's childhood friend because the screenplay tells us he is, not because the theatrical version let us experience the friendship. He looks cool, he has a great mustache, and the deleted scenes make him far more interesting, but facial hair cannot replace character development.

The Empire Strikes Back: Lobot Gets a Striking Design and Almost No Purpose

This is my hottest take, or maybe the coldest one. Lobot is Lando's silent assistant on Cloud City who walks around wearing a cybernetic headset and stares intensely at walls, and the design makes you believe he must be incredibly important. Then the movie gives him nothing. He receives a silent command from Lando, helps coordinate the evacuation, and disappears. "He's basically Cloud City's human Wi-Fi router."

The Empire Strikes Back does not really have any bad characters, so Lobot wins this by being the least developed, beating out even the bounty hunters who stood around for thirty seconds and still went on to inspire decades of toys, comics, and fan theories. I am sure somebody has read a very long novel explaining how Lobot secretly saved the galaxy, but in this movie he just looks serious. That is what he does.

Return of the Jedi: Boba Fett Loses to a Man Who Cannot See Him

I warned you somebody was going to catch a stray. Boba Fett is one of the coolest looking characters in Star Wars history, with the armor, the jetpack, the helmet, the flamethrower, the ship, and the reputation. The Empire Strikes Back presents him as a bounty hunter dangerous enough to try something the entire Imperial fleet had failed to do. Then Return of the Jedi turns him into slapstick, having him stand in the background at Jabba's palace, nod at a dancer, and eventually join the battle above the Sarlacc pit.

That should have been his moment, since Luke Skywalker against Boba Fett sounds like the easiest action figure commercial ever made. Instead, a temporarily blind Han Solo accidentally hits Boba's jetpack with a stick, Boba screams, crashes into the side of the barge, and falls into the Sarlacc's mouth. The most famous bounty hunter in the galaxy gets defeated by a man who literally cannot see him. "Boba Fett survived because later writers understood that his original ending was just too embarrassing to accept."

The Force Awakens: Maz Kanata Explains Everything Except the One Thing That Matters

Maz Kanata is more than a thousand years old, knows everybody in the galaxy, and apparently has access to some of the most important lost artifacts in Star Wars history. That sounds great until her primary job turns out to be explaining the plot while refusing to explain the most interesting part of it. She has Luke Skywalker's lightsaber locked in a box beneath her castle, and when Han asks how she got it, she basically says, "That is a good question for another time."

She tells Rey to accept the Force, gives Finn a lecture, hands Leia the lightsaber, and then becomes almost completely irrelevant to the rest of the trilogy. Her castle is destroyed five minutes after we meet her, and she seems remarkably relaxed about losing her home along with everyone who might have been living inside it. She felt less like a character and more like a movie that needed its own version of Yoda but did not have enough time to actually write one.

The Last Jedi: Vice Admiral Holdo's Silence Manufactures the Movie's Conflict

Holdo is not the worst because she disagrees with Poe. I want to be clear that Poe absolutely needed someone to challenge him, since he had ignored Leia's orders, gotten pilots killed, and shown he was willing to launch a mutiny when he did not get his way. The problem is that Holdo creates most of the movie's conflict by refusing to communicate anything. She does not need to reveal every classified detail to the resistance, but Poe is a respected commander with the support of a significant part of the crew, so telling him there is a plan, or that the secrecy is necessary, or having Leia back her up would have gone a long way. Instead she stares at him like a substitute teacher watching a kid who needs the bathroom.

Her secrecy drives Poe, Finn, and Rose into a plan that accidentally exposes the resistance transports to the First Order. The movie wants us to learn that Poe should trust leadership, but it accidentally demonstrates that leadership should communicate before half the crew starts a rebellion. Her hyperspace sacrifice is visually incredible, one of the most beautiful shots in Star Wars, but one amazing exit does not erase the manufactured conflict required to get her there.

The Rise of Skywalker: Emperor Palpatine's Return Undoes His Own Legacy

The worst character in The Rise of Skywalker is somehow one of the greatest villains in Star Wars history. Palpatine was perfect in the original trilogy, and the prequels made him even better by showing how he manipulated the Republic, created the Clone Wars, and destroyed the Jedi from inside their own government. His defeat in Return of the Jedi completed Darth Vader's redemption and fulfilled Anakin's story. Then The Rise of Skywalker brought him back because the trilogy apparently forgot to prepare a final villain.

The explanation for his return amounts to almost nothing: he has been hiding on Exegol, building thousands of Death Star scale destroyers underground, and somehow broadcasting messages instead of contacting any of the characters inside the actual movie. Then we discover Rey is his granddaughter, apparently because the cleanest way to finish a trilogy about finding your identity was to connect everybody by blood again. Bringing Palpatine back did not just hurt this movie. It weakened Anakin's sacrifice, made the ending of Return of the Jedi temporary, and revealed that the Emperor's master plan depended on repeatedly announcing his plans before ever completing them. "His return represents everything wrong with The Rise of Skywalker. No setup, no restraint, absolutely no point."

So those are my picks for the worst character in every one of the 12 theatrically released Star Wars movies. Some were annoying, some were wasted, and one was a legendary villain dragged out of the grave because nobody seemed to know how to end the trilogy. Who did I get right, and which pick made you want to argue with me?