Listen, Big Deal.

Sometime last week, I re-watched Solo as the next film in my reverse-chronological journey through the Star Wars saga. Surprisingly, I didn't find myself with much to say about it. Even more than Rogue One, it's very much its own thing, and felt more distinct from the other films than any that came before it in this current rewatch.

Tonight, though, it did occur to me that when Han Solo tells Finn, "Women always figure out the truth," in The Force Awakens, he was talking at least in part about Qi'ra seeing through his self-image as a scoundrel and telling him he was the Good Guy.

What Is It They've Sent Us?

I've really been slacking on my reverse-order Star Wars rewatch, but I finally got to Rogue One this week, and wow, what a movie! It never ceases to amaze me that there are Star Wars fans who don't like this film.

Watching it in proximity to A New Hope and the subsequent films really shows off the artistry of Rogue One, both visually and as a singularly constructed story that's entirely its own thing (except for what's essentially an epilogue that serves as a bridge to the next movie). We meet a set of six terrific protagonists, learn who they are in brief by the various tastes of tragic history we get for them, and see them each complete a growth arc within the framework of an action-packed, aesthetically gorgeous quest for redemption and purpose. The music and cinematography soar and dance together, the villain is uniquely banal in his petty, empty quest to prove himself, and despite the fact that everyone dies, it manages to be great fun for almost its entire length.

New impressions from this viewing:

Everybody goes on about Darth Vader being so much more dynamic and intense in this movie compared to the OT, especially his presentation in Episode IV, but honestly, the most athletic thing he does is twirl his lightsaber in a circle one-handed to deflect blaster bolts. He Force-pushes a guy to the ceiling, which is no more drastic than tossing around the heavy machinery the throws at Luke in ESB. Aside from that, he's just walking down a hallway. Yes, he kills a fair number of guys in a very compressed time-frame, but really, it's downright mild compared to the things we see him do in Rebels.

The Threepio/Artoo cameo stuck out as a bit more forced to me this time ... while simultaneously making more dramatic sense as a bit of foreshadowing that we'd end the film on the Tantive IV heading right into the opening scene of ANH. It was an odd moment of contradiction to recognize both of those things at once.

Another complaint I've seen is that there's no explanation of how Vader followed Leia's ship to Tatooine from Scarif, and the answer was obvious to me this time around. In ESB, Vader orders his underlings to calculate all possible destinations along the Falcon's last known trajectory when it disappears from the fleet's screens. If he used the same trick after the last scene in Rogue One, one of those destinations would clearly have been Tatooine, and he certainly wouldn't discard that as a mere coincidence. Just as his intuition convinced him the rebels were on Hoth in ESB, it would have told him to head for his own homeworld as soon as he found out it lay along the hyperspace routes accessible from the point Leia's ship went to lightspeed.

The context of The Clone Wars and Rebels series makes Saw Gerrera immensely more compelling in this film. If you watch TCW, then Rebels, then Rogue One, you see his entire journey as a lifelong insurgent fighting the Empire, and you see how diminished his chosen path of extremism has left him.

CGI Leia remains the single worst thing in the film for me, and even as such, I really don't mind her.

Having now gone through 4 of the 5 Disney films bracketing the OT, I can honestly say, the people who think Disney has somehow ruined Star Wars are hopelessly out of touch with the things I value in Star Wars. All taste is subjective, and my opinion is certainly worth no more than theirs. But it's crystal clear to me that those people just like Star Wars for reasons other than the ones that attract me to the SW universe.

On to Solo!

You Were Supposed to Bring Balance to the Force, not Leave it in Darkness!

Taking a break from my series on watching the SW saga backwards ... I wrote this bit as a thread on Twitter and got enough positive response on it that I figured I'd post it here too. The context is the contention by some in fandom that Palpatine's return in The Rise of Skywalker ruins Anakin's fulfillment (in Return of the Jedi) of the Prequel-era prophecy of the Chosen One.

The importance of the Chosen One prophecy in the PT is that the Jedi simultaneously place too much importance on it and don't take it seriously enough. That exactly parallels how a lot of fans treat the prophecy.

The Jedi believe in the prophecy, but instead of saying, "We're going to trust in this prophecy and see where it goes," they say, "The boy is too old," and "He's too dangerous to be trained." Instead of trusting their Chosen One's instincts to be right, they tell him to repress his emotional attachments and ignore his awful premonitions. They train him and tell him he's incredibly important, but they refuse to trust him. And that leads to their downfall. Their fear leads to his anger and hatred, which leads to mass suffering.

It's the same with fans. They seize upon Anakin's importance, but they refuse to have enough faith in that importance to trust the Sequels and look for all the ways the ST provides closure to the prophecy.

The balance needed by the Force was never about defeating a particular bad guy. It was always about undoing the misguided Jedi insistence on repressing certain emotions. As guardians of the Force, the Jedi had decided that they should avoid mistakes at all costs ... even at the cost of shutting themselves off from normal human relationships. Luke's triumph in ROTJ showed that they were wrong about the Dark Side being a path from which one could never return. But his training still focused on fear and anger being emotions one should avoid.

It took the hard lesson of losing Ben Solo and retreating into ineffective solitude for Luke to understand the truth that he conveys to Rey in her final lesson in TROS: Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi. Not avoiding or suppressing it, but facing it and recognizing that through mistakes, we grow -- if we choose to learn from them.

The people who cling to Anakin being the Chosen One as a key message of the PT/OT sequence miss the point entirely, because in our daily lives, we don't have a Chosen One walking around doing stuff. There's no lesson in that aspect of the narrative for us to learn from. But we *can* learn to confront our fears, forgive our mistakes and the mistakes of others, and grow as people by taking in the lessons of those mistakes.

That's what Star Wars is about. That's why it's important.

Not because some fictional Chosen One prophecy was or wasn't completely fulfilled when a hero tossed a villain over a guard-rail.

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong and there's somebody out there who has been in that precise circumstance and, thanks to Return of the Jedi, was able to voluntarily disarm themselves so their dad would chuck an evil emperor down a hole.

Old Data

Holy *bleep*, how has it taken me 43 years to realize that when Artoo shows Luke that part of Leia's message it's not an accidental glitch? He deliberately baits the poor sap with just the most enticing part of the recording to trick him into removing the restraining bolt.

I've finally gotten to Episode IV in my reverse-chronology viewing of the Star Wars films, and wow, there's so much to see here.

Of course, since Artoo's memory was never wiped, he knows exactly where he is when the Jawas drop the droids off at the Lars homestead. So he uses the message both to tempt Luke into freeing him and to name-drop Obi-wan Kenobi in hopes of gaining more information on how to find him. Luke helpfully tells him Obi-wan lives out beyond the Dune Sea, so Artoo heads that direction the instant he's able to, which explains why Old Ben is so close when Luke catches up and encounters the sandpeople.

Somewhat more sinisterly ... Artoo tells Luke and Threepio about the life forms approaching from the south, doesn't object when Luke goes to investigate, and doesn't warn Luke about how close one of those life forms is getting. Is he deliberately setting Luke up in order to get back to business? Or does he simply hang back out of easy warning range because he thinks Luke is doing something foolish that might endanger his mission? Hmm.

People have made a lot out of the fact that Ben doesn't acknowledge Artoo even though he surely would have recognized Anakin's faithful droid, but there's an easy explanation for that: admitting he has a history with Artoo would open Ben up to questions about that history from Luke -- or even from Artoo, through Threepio -- and it's extremely obvious from the ensuing dialogue that Ben wants to tightly control what Luke knows about the Jedi, his father, and what happened between them twenty years earlier.

There's also a richer context for Ben telling Luke that his uncle didn't hold with his father's ideals and thought he "should have stayed here." If we think of Anakin as the teenage Jedi whom Owen met in Episode II, the quote doesn't make sense -- why would Owen think some guy he'd never seen before ought to stay on Tatooine? But if we consider that Owen knew Shmi Skywalker for years and understood how important her son was to her, along with how hard it was for her when he left, the picture becomes totally different. If Anakin had stayed, Owen might literally have had him for a brother while growing up, and his step-mother would certainly have been much happier in all the years he knew her.

It's worth noting as well how deliberately restrained Obi-wan is in this film, and how intensely Alec Guinness's expressions imply that there's a greater context to virtually everything he sees in and says to Luke. In the wake of the prequels, I found Obi-wan's character much darker in A New Hope -- an idealistic but now somewhat bitter man who's been in hiding for decades and seems perhaps a bit out-of touch and over-zealous when he says, "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you are to come with me to Alderaan." But with the much wider view of his character as portrayed in The Clone Wars and Rebels, his devotion to Anakin and to Luke brightens those expressions with more of their long-ago nobility for me. And it's now clear that he learned a lesson about trying too hard to dictate to Anakin how a Jedi should behave and what the right path was.

As for the original movie's place in the nine-episode arc, now that it's complete ... I think my key takeaway is that Star Wars was always, from the very start, a story about people much more than a story about war amongst the stars. Despite the much flashier special effects of the space battles in subsequent movies (even just one movie later in ESB), the attack on the Death Star in A New Hope remains riveting because everything about it focuses on making the participants feel real. The scene of the Rebels preparing their ships for takeoff is a masterpiece of staging, composition, and editing that immerses the viewer in the intricate mechanics of the effort these people are going through, and the pilots' actions within their cockpits, especially as they start experiencing malfunctions and damage to their fighters, makes it clear that flying one of these contraptions is really hard. The whole movie works like crazy to make its people feel real, even the least-important of the extras, and the result is a film that we as human beings can connect to on a level science fiction rarely achieves.

You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned

Number five in my reverse-order rewatch of all the Star Wars movies!

I'm not sure I actually have all that much to share about this one. For a very long time, Empire was my favorite movie and the asteroid field scene my favorite scene in all of cinema. It would sometimes switch places with A New Hope at the top of my SW rankings depending mostly on mood or whim, but as one of six films, it stood out pretty powerfully as the most successful combination of substance and entertainment in the saga.

The Disney era has undermined that to a certain extent -- not by presenting any singular film that achieves a greater degree of success, but by evolving Star Wars into hundreds of hours of richly varied storytelling with dozens of triumphant arcs that make it harder and harder for me to justify calling one particular chapter the best.

I will say that watching ESB right after ROTJ showcases Episode V's strengths a lot better than watching it as the follow-on to the chronological threesome of Solo, Rogue One, and ANH. Filmically, it's head-and-shoulders above ROTJ for me, whereas ANH has always been strong competition, and both Solo and Rogue One are so visually gorgeous that the more dated aspects of ESB's production values suffer in proximity.

Thematically, the biggest realization I had this time around is the need for Yoda to listen to his own messaging. He and Ben repeatedly tell Luke that there's no coming back from the Dark Side, both in this film and in ROTJ, and their insistence on that point is the perfect example of two of Yoda's best ESB quotes. One of them is the title for this post. The other is, "That is why you fail." As with his Episode II complaints about the Jedi becoming overconfident, these are powerful examples of Yoda being so close to the truth that the moment desperately needs, but not quite grasping it.

The contrast with his wonderful scene in TLJ, in which he pushes Luke to solve things not as the Jedi would have solved them, but by treading a path informed by their mistakes and his own, creates a terrific through-line stretching between all three middle-of-the-trilogy films.

That Bad, Huh?

Okay, folks, here we are at the fourth entry in my reverse-order rewatch of the eleven Star Wars movies: Return of the Jedi. To give a little context, 16-year-old me left the theater in 1983 extremely disappointed with this one on opening day. Luke and Leia are siblings? Darth Vader is a weird-looking bald guy under his mask, in heavy pancake makeup? Han Solo basically does nothing right in the entire movie? Teddy bears? Are you fucking kidding me -- teddy bears?!?

In the years since then, I've come to consider Luke's moment of triumph in this film to be one of the greatest scenes in movie history. And the line, "I am a Jedi, like my father before me," may be my favorite piece of dialogue in any movie ever. But wow, do I still squirm at some of the stuff in this film.

So how is it as a follow-on to the next three episodes in the saga?

Let me tell you, maybe it's just me, but I don't think ROTJ benefits from being viewed directly after The Force Awakens and the other two Disney sequels. And it's not just that virtually every aspect of filmmaking advanced so significantly in the 30 years between the end of the OT and the debut of the ST. The plain fact is, the Disney films are simply better structured than this one is, and all three of the OT leads put in better, more nuanced performances in the later movies than they did in ROTJ -- and were given better dialogue to deliver as well.

Whew. Well, with that said, here are some interesting things I noticed or had reconfirmed this time around.

• When Artoo and Threepio are approaching Jabba's palace, Threepio keeps going on about how scared Artoo would be if he'd heard half the things Threepio has about Jabba. Artoo's response is a series of  quivering, trembling bleeps that I always previously considered a kind of dumb attempt to make Artoo seem skittish and easily spooked by Threepio's greater knowledge. But this time I realized that actually, Artoo knows tons more about Jabba than Threepio. He remembers everything that happened on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace, as well as everything that happened with the Hutts during the Clone Wars series. He's not scared by what Threepio says -- he's mocking him with those beeps. He's basically saying, "Oh no! I'm so frightened, Threepio! What ever will we do???" Threepio is the one who's terrified, and although he tries to get Artoo to agree with him, the astromech has complete faith in Luke's plan from start to finish.
• Rogue One Mon Mothma greatly improves ROTJ Mon Mothma, whom I used to find absolutely insipid.
• With the revelations in the sequels about Leia's Jedi powers, the fact that she has memories of her mother and Luke does not kind of implies that her Force abilities are inherently greater than Luke's. I used to hate the fact that Revenge of the Sith committed the apparent continuity error of having Padmé die without Leia meeting her. Now I think the implications of that are pretty damn awesome.
• Andy Serkis' performance as Snoke in the Throne Room sequence of TLJ is fantastically reminiscent of Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine delivering the same sorts of taunts to Luke at the end of ROTJ.
• Force Ghost Hayden Christensen > Force Ghost Sebastian Shaw. I never felt even a remote connection to the spectral Anakin Skywalker showing up at the end next to Obi-Wan and Yoda,  because I had no investment in Shaw's one-scene portrayal of Anakin before his death. Putting Hayden in the final scene instead does a couple of things for me: first, it brings a much greater sense of resolution relative to the prequels, and second, Anakin's visible youth is a bit of a poke at Old Ben and Yoda, who are now eternally locked in their aged, proven-wrong forms, while Anakin has returned to his true self.

Next up ... The Empire Strikes Back!

The Belonging You Seek Is Not Behind You ... It Is Ahead

Third up in my reverse chronological order viewing of all 11 Star Wars movies: The Force Awakens!

I think I actually noticed more things that sit differently in TFA, after The Rise of Skywalker, than struck me in The Last Jedi. Here are a few of them:

• When BB8 tells Rey that where he comes from is classified, Rey says, "Me too. Big secret." It's a cute, flippant remark on her part -- but now we know that it's also completely true in a huge way.
• The scene where Snoke tells Ren, "There has been an awakening" is made even more similar to the Vader/Palpatine scene in Empire Strikes back by the knowledge that Palpatine was behind Snoke all along. Both have the holo-projected master looking down on the apprentice and warning of a new enemy arising.
• When Finn tells Rey, "I was ashamed of what I was," his resolve to be better than his past is setting her up for finding her own resolve against her origins two movies down the road.
• There's a fresh and dark second meaning to Maz's line, "Whoever you were waiting for on Jakku, they're never coming back. But there's someone who still could."
• When Starkiller Base destroys the Hosnian system, Finn is the first one we see turning to look at the sky. He does so because he hears screams of shock and terror ... but we don't actually see anyone around him screaming or wailing. We do hear almost identical cries on Hosnian Prime as the people there see the blast burning through their atmosphere. Was anyone at Maz's place actually screaming at the lightshow in the sky? Or did Finn hear the people of Hosnian Prime through the Force? Is it possible that when he shouts at Rey in TROS, "I never told you --" the end of the sentence might have been, "-- I felt the destruction of the Republic through the Force"?
• In light of the TROS scene between Ben and Han, a lot of Leia's dialogue sounds eerily prescient: "Luke is a Jedi. You're his father." And, "If you see our son, bring him home." I always previously interpreted those lines as kind of wishful thinking on Leia's part, and thought she kind of screwed Han over by encouraging him to try something that ended up getting him killed. But now we know how that last touch he gave his son, before falling off the bridge, stayed with Ben and really did end up bringing him home.
• Leia's Jedi training also puts a different light on a number of things, like her choice to say, "There's still light in him" rather than "There's still good in him." Likewise, a lot of fuss was made over the fact that Leia didn't acknowledge Chewie when the Falcon returned after Han's death. But we now know that Leia sensed who Rey was almost from the start and knew how critical it was to give her that sense of belonging that she always craved.
• When Rey has Kylo all but beaten in their lightsaber duel and is circling him like a predator, there's something in her movements that hits me as very similar to the scene in ROTS when Palpatine admits to Anakin that he's a Sith, and circles around him trying to sink his lure.

Closing thought: I have no idea how people to this very day insist that TFA is just a beat-for-beat imitation of A New Hope. I mean, the Falcon Flies Again sequence alone is absolute peak Star Wars, and there's nothing in Episode IV that remotely lines up with the duel in the snowy forest at the end -- much less the Rathtar sequence (which I love and will never understand the hatred for). This is a damn good Star Wars film, and I honestly think it's made even better by both TLJ and TROS.