First I've Heard of It.

Thursday night, I had no choice but to bifurcate my chronological rewatch of Star Wars, because for the first time in seven years, a new Star Wars film in hit theaters, and I didn't want to break a 27-year streak of being there on opening night.

I enjoyed it ... all right. Good clean fun, lots of action, adorable animatronics, easter eggs galore, humor, a great soundtrack, yadda, yadda, yadda. Very lightweight in the story department, I thought, shaking my head at some obvious mis-steps undermining key sequences in the film.

Over the next day or so, I saw people mostly gushing over what to me had only been a diverting piece of cinema and (coming as it did at the end of a seven-year SW film drought) no big deal. I liked it, sure. But I didn't love it. Wasn't tremendously drawn to watch it again and again in the theater as I have every SW film since -- well, since 1977.

And then:

Someone smacked me in the face with what an idiot I had been.

How? By pointing out that Rotta the Hutt is Stinky from The Clone Wars animated theatrical release.

Had I turned my brain off, just because the film was so removed in sequence from the stories I spent the prior week immersed in? I watched the 2008 movie literally four days earlier. The Mandalorian and Grogu even shows a slightly older Stinky early on in the movie.

Yet I somehow failed to process that Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son in that 18-year-old cartoon and Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son in this brand-new live-action film are, duh, one and the same.

Thankfully, a Threads post brought this home to me and rebooted my Star Wars cognition, by saying how much the poster would love to see Rotta and Ahsoka Tano reunite in the future.

Pieces fell one-by-one into place in my head ... and they wouldn't stop falling.

Rotta the Hutt grew up to be the person he grew up to be, in part, because of the way Ahsoka treated him during one of the most traumatic experiences of his life.

Grogu, too, had his life saved in infancy by the determination and dedication of a Jedi, Kelleran Beq, in one of my favorite sequences of the entire Mandalorian series.

That hermit who helps Grogu in the swamp isn't just an extraneous piece of plot armor to explain how Grogu is able to save Mando from the poison that's killing him. Instead, this is a deliberate example of someone taking the time to help a child in need -- just like Ahsoka and Kelleran, except that no one had to give him the assignment. He just did it.

Continuing on through my Threads feed, I came across other people making other, seemingly unremarkable comments about the film. And with each one, I realized that when I sat in that auditorium and watched The Mandalorian and Grogu, I'd been watching it as a standalone film and authored story that just happened to be set in the Star Wars universe, rather than watching it as a work grounded in the massively greater story that is Star Wars as a whole. 

I had been alert to the possibility that it might just be a long episode of The Mandalorian TV series, and when a portion of the plot reached what appeared to be almost full resolution, I thought, "Oh, this is where an episode break would have been."

I watched the sequence of Grogu in the swamp on Nal Hutta as a nice segment in his character arc, and found myself annoyed that the filmmakers hadn't allowed Grogu to succeed on his own, but leaned instead on this convenient hermit as a device, infantilizing The Child instead of letting him grow as fully as he might.

In short, my writer's knowledge of storytelling craft got in the way of what the story intended to tell me all along: that as we grow up, everyone around us has the chance to make a difference in our lives. Some choose to be Ahsoka Tano. Some choose to be Owen and Beru. Some choose to be Bail Organa. And some choose to be Din Djarin or the swamp hermit. There was a larger tapestry hung up on that screen for me to see, but I let my penchant for the constraints of writing conventions overwhelm the root purpose of all art -- to offer up meaning for those open to it.

I'm now really excited to see the film again before it leaves the theaters. Maybe I can do a better job letting myself see, instead of judging surfaces and assuming what's below is simple artifice.

Difficult to see ...

As of today, I'm really glad I looked up where to slot the various "Tales of ..." episodes in my chronological rewatch of everything Star Wars. The three that fit between The Acolyte and The Phantom Menace were fine, but the ones in the gap between TPM and Attack of the Clones really felt like they enriched the larger storyline.

Actually seeing Dooku erase Kamino from the Jedi archives and then leave the order created a sense of an arc from the pre-TPM episodes through to AOTC. And having Ahsoka's birth and revelation of her Force powers put into chronological context did even more to emphasize the passage of time between Episodes I and II.

I Will Not Condone a Course of Action ...

I've been annoyed for almost 30 years at the seeming non-sequitur of Queen Amidala telling her advisors that she won't condone action that would lead to war, considering that nobody described such an action in the discussion that leads up to her avowal. The governor says an invasion is imminent, and her security chief says that the security forces will be no match for the Trade Federation's troops, but neither makes any recommendation of what should be done about that. They're basically telling her that the Trade Federation is about to start a war, and that if that happens, the Naboo will lose, and her response is that she refuses to start a war. It's always provoked a big "Huh?" from me.

But as I watched the scene yesterday, I did what I always advise people to do, and instead of thinking she has no reason to say what she says, I asked myself, "Why would she say that?" And the answer is pretty obvious, actually: the Naboo have excellent starfighters, and they're unaware of how well-defended the Trade Federation ships are. We see both of those facts play out later in the film.

So what was really being said in those lines was this: 

Sio Bibble: The Trade Federation is about to land troops on the planet to attack us.

Captain Panaka: If they do that, we'll be wiped out. 

Queen Amidala: I hear what you're saying, but I am not going to be the one to attack first.

He Is a Political Idealist, Not a Murderer / Truly Wonderful, the Mind of a Child Is

According to the best (i.e., basically the first) timeline I could find, three short "Tales of ..." episodes fit into the gap between The Acolyte and The Phantom Menace, so I watched those tonight: two "Tales of the Jedi" episodes featuring Count Dooku and one "Tales of the Underworld" episode about the street-rat childhood of a character I presume ends up being Cad Bane. (Or maybe not, as a Cad-Bane-esque gangster manipulates the kid into becoming part of his operation.)

The Dooku stories follow him through two vignettes that instill or compound his alienation from the politics of the Senate, as both feature corrupt senators who enrich themselves off the suffering of their people and call on the Jedi for help.

The proto-Cad-Bane episode was one I hadn't seen before, as I've never gotten around to watching "Tales of the Underworld." The two urchins recruited into the gangster's schemes seem to live a pretty happy-go-lucky existence scrounging through trash and stealing fruit from a hapless droid. Like the Dooku episodes, it's clearly intended for a younger audience than some of the more substantial animated shows. There's very little suffering visible in the homeless kids' existence; they dig around in garbage for food, but don't actually complain much about being hungry or uncomfortable sleeping outdoors, and manage to consistently entertain themselves, running around and giggling through large portions of the story. Presumably things will get a little harder for the character I assume is Cad Bane, since he ends up alone with the gangsters after his friend gets nabbed by the police. The timeline, makes it appear the story continues with an episode set between TPM and AOTC, and another between AOTC and ROTS. We'll see if it develops any more depth.

Your Eyes Can Deceive you. Don't Trust Them.

I finished up my rewatch of The Acolyte this morning, and my view of the show has changed significantly since it first aired. Previously, I thought it got off to a rough start and then got unevenly better over time. Though it had a lot of great stuff in it, I thought that overall it didn't rise much higher than "pretty good."

But with the advantage of a second viewing, and especially with my realization of how much better the story would flow with episode three put in correct chronological order, the entire thing seemed far more consistent and well constructed. The first time through, I kept hoping for Sol to be the hero that he wanted to be despite his guilt over mis-handling things on Brendok. I put a lot of blame on Indara for the debacle with the coven, and hoped Sol would redeem his fellows from the mistakes of that mission. Seen in full context, though (spoilers ahead), his centrality to the disaster and his subsequent self-delusion pretty squarely make him the villain of the entire story, and only at the end when he tells Osha, "It's all right," as she's Force-choking him to death, does he truly do the right thing.

Some other realizations along the way:

Torbin even more than Sol refused to face his own culpability. He spent ten years in silent meditation, and yet when Mae finally gets through to him, he still says, "We thought we were doing the right thing." Of all of them, his selfish behavior is what brings calamity down on the mission and the coven, but he hasn't the courage to say, "I" when accepting Mae's absolution, and he hasn't the courage to admit that he really didn't think he was doing the right thing -- he just thought he was going to get to go home.

And despite seeing two different versions of the coven's demise, and revisiting their home 16 years later, we never actually see anyone onscreen check to make sure they're all dead.

I doubt there's any real chance of another season, or even an eventual sequel to tie things up, and in light of how good the series came across this time, I think that's a genuine shame.

He's Here.

Two more episodes into The Acolyte, it's more and more obvious how impaired the story flow was by not putting episode 3 at the start of the series. Not only would it have better informed the following two episodes, but the action would have flowed uninterrupted from episode 2, with Mae and Qimir ending that episode having escaped the Jedi, into episode 3, where they arrive on the next planet to hunt down wookiee Jedi Master Kelnacca. Similarly Sol and Osha transition from the mission to find Mae on Olega to attempting to head her off before she gets to Kelnacca. It would have been a steady ramping up of the pace from the investigation and surveillance on civilized Olega to the expedition into dangerous jungle on Khofar. But with the interruption of the flashback episode, that sense of progression is reined back, and the viewer has to climb out of the past to get back into the mounting action, instead of being pulled directly along with it.

We'd also get to see the transformation of Qimir into the Stranger just a single episode after his introduction, again letting us feel a quick-paced development instead of a start-and-stop one.

I can't help but feel that with episode 3 up front, I would have been far more intrigued, and the show would not have needed episodes 4 and 5 to overcome my skepticism, but instead would have notched itself up in my estimation from good to exceptional with all the powerful action and revelations in these two chapters.

And of course, Manny Jacinto's performance in both episodes is terrific, and it would have been great to see it directly build on episode 2.

Maybe someday they'll find a way to revisit these characters and let him bring the character to full fruition.

The Power of One. The Power of Two ...

So. Last time I kind of dumped on episodes 1 and 2 of The Acolyte. This morning, I got on the treadmill and watched episode 3, and ... 

Good grief, whose idea was it to put this episode out of sequence? It provides all the emotional context we need to immediately engage with the characters, it's honest with us right up front that the Jedi are in the wrong about a lot of things, it provides all the stakes that previously felt missing about the opening scenes that the show started off with, and it's SO much better-written than the other two episodes.

[Spoilers Below]

If I'd started my rewatch with this episode, I would totally have been able to maintain my naive viewer pretense, because we start outside of the Republic, outside of the Jedi order, with mostly sympathetic characters who just want to do their own thing and an interesting conflict because for one of those characters, her own thing is not aligned with everyone else's. The Jedi show up as interlopers who arrogantly intrude on someone else's property and interrupt a private ceremony, making demands they don't actually have the authority to insist on.

Whereas on my original viewing of the show, I was suspicious of everyone's motives for episodes 1 and 2, and then suspicious of the coven in episode 3 because the two well-established parts of the story so far were how much Sol cared for Osha, and how Osha had clearly made a life for herself after leaving the order, if I'd started with E3 in the first place, it would have been easy to see the appropriateness of the coven's concerns and the wrongness of the Jedi's actions, while also believing in Sol's good intentions.

Instead of having the fire alluded to and the deaths of Osha's family laid out with expository dialogue, in chronological sequence, we get to see the tragedy unfold with a full understanding of what's going on ... and then we're left with some uncertainty over whether the witches were actually all killed, or if maybe they were playing possum using the Force in order to protect themselves from the Jedi returning and shield Osha from a lifetime of uncertainty or regret over whether she'd made the right choice. So we still get a major mystery to ponder as the series unfolds, but we also have all the setup we need to become deeply invested in the characters, and we're left without the false drama of "Wait, is this woman waking up on the spaceship the same woman who just killed that Jedi?" followed by the disorienting revelation that Osha "had" a twin, which is the blindingly obvious explanation for who actually committed the murder.

Anyway, now I'm kicking myself for starting off this chronological rewatch of the whole franchise by stupidly failing to use chronology in approaching the very first series of the effort.

Yord. Put Your Clothes On.

Threads was teeming today with Star Wars fans posting hot takes and Episode rankings and throwing gauntlets over which hated movie was actually genius and which truly deserved the notoriety of worst Star Wars movie ever. I left some replies here and there, some of them actually bringing interesting or at least appreciative responses, but I felt slightly left out because I haven't obsessively watched anything Star Wars in several years.

So I sat down and added up how much Star Wars there is and how long it would take me to go through all of it chronologically, just because I think that would be an interesting exercise -- especially if I can put myself in a mindset of, What if I really was seeing all of this for the first time?

Chronological order, of course, means I had to start with The Acolyte ... which might have been a mistake. I don't say that because it's no good, but because I don't have the familiarity with it needed to pretend I'm unfamiliar with it. That is, having seen it when it came out, and rewatched some of the episodes, my memory of it remains clear enough to notice things I did or didn't notice before. That seemed to put my brain in a comparative mode, evaluating this viewing against my previous experience and stymying my efforts to roleplay a novice viewer.

So how did it go?

Well, for one thing, I just couldn't stand to watch it in color. I tried, for a couple of minutes, but the garishness of the color palette and what I consider the low-budget look of the costuming just overwhelmed me. I discovered the first time through (around episode 3) that putting my computer in grayscale mode made the cinematic composition work much better and look more artistic than watching in color, and knowing that just made it intolerable to keep subjecting myself to the show as shot.

It felt like my eyes breathed a sigh of relief when I set the display to black and white and restarted the show. But I think it also made it even harder to indulge in my pretense of finding things novel.

As for the two episodes I watched tonight ... (spoilers ahead)

I didn't remember wrong that the project starts off really rough. Lee Jung-jae is pretty good as Master Sol, and Manny Jacinto is terrific in every scene. But their characters are both playing roles at this point in the story, causing their dialogue to go oblique at key moments and preventing us from immediately getting a good feel for their true personalities and motives.

And unfortunately, almost every character has some similar block making them less accessible than they ideally ought to be. Mae remains masked through almost the entire opening sequence, putting on airs of being a merciless assassin. Osha then has to overcome the barrier of the audience wrestling whether she and Mae are the same person, or if there's some sort of twin thing going on. Yord gives off a stiff, awkward vibe, but how does one measure the degree to which that vibe reflects the unusual situation of arriving to arrest his former colleague, versus how much is simply him being a stiff, awkward person?

As a result, it's very hard to get attached to anyone, even though almost all the characters have likable aspects to them.

I did manage to feel like my uninitiated viewer's perspective made for a more straightforward judgment of the Jedi order during this High Republic period. They're entrenched in their formalism, mired in politics, and constantly express underlying trust issues that hang between them. It's interesting to observe -- but again keeps one at arm's length from whole-hearted enthusiasm for the story. and I actively dislike Vanestra, the head of the Jedi Council, who embodies the entire order by way of her authority.

A personal issue of mine also distances me from the story at this point: I want to watch stories about people who are both competent and good, and these characters are, so far, occluded in both of those categories. By the midpoint of episode 2, Yord is the only one who defies that, as he's pretty obviously straightforward, dutiful, stuffy, and unimaginative even while coming across as a pleasant enough fellow underneath his cloak of formality.

There's more than enough to keep one going -- mysteries as to what's going on with almost all of the characters wafts of engaging personalities from most as well. But so far those attractions merely tease the possibility of a satisfying storyline rather than delivering one.

I know the show gets considerably better. We'll see whether I can follow through on the immense project of a full rewatch ...

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.

There's Nothing You Can Say To Change My Mind

Well, my reverse-order rewatch of The Last Jedi was way overdue, but I finally got to it tonight. I wish I hadn't delayed so long; part of the idea behind an endeavor like this is to have the films benefit from close juxtaposition. But things have been weird lately, and a couple of nagging worries made me less enthusiastic about watching TLJ than I wanted to be. One, of course, was the exhaustingly intense squabbling in the fandom over TLJ being better than TROS or TROS being better than TLJ. There's been so much ugly strife over these films, and I didn't want it at the forefront of my thoughts as I watched. Another bit of anxiety was the possibility that rewatching TLJ would bring down my opinion of TROS ... or that having liked TROS so much would lower my appreciation of TLJ.

But after watching TROS a few weeks back and watching TLJ tonight, I can safely say, people who hold one of the two up as a masterpiece while trashing the other are kind of full of it. Either they're both great filmmaking, or neither one is. Both of them have lots of dumb things in them, and both of them have amazing scenes and performances and a terrific underlying spirit.

I'm going to go with both of them being great, and please don't bother trying to debate me on that.

Anyway, some thoughts on TLJ in the context of TROS:

Knowing that Leia completed her Jedi training years ago makes her Force abilities in The Last Jedi really leap out. When Kylo Ren is shooting up the cruiser and swinging around to target the bridge, the intercutting of their faces and the interaction of their expressions couldn't be more obviously a Force connection. When Leia uses the Force to fly back into the ship after the bridge gets blown out, it's clearly something she intended to do, not just an instinctive activation of latent power. When Luke arrives at the end, gives her Han's golden dice, and kisses her forehead, she totally knows that he's not really there.

Next, what's likely a very unpopular opinion: Rose Tico is just okay in this movie. Kelly Marie Tran's performance is fine but unexceptional, and the character has no developmental arc of her own to speak of. She's a foil and a catalyst for Finn's growth story, she has some endearing qualities, and she's admirable for being a very ordinary person demonstrating heroism. But while I really wish TROS had given us more of the scenes they supposedly filmed between her and Leia at the base, the people who expected Episode IX to put her on equal footing with the main three characters obviously had a whole different experience of her in this movie that I did. If TLJ had been bold enough to actually have Finn die flying into the battering ram cannon, I would have been fine with her becoming the third leg of a trio in the final movie. As it is, though, TROS really needed to showcase the relationship between Rey, Finn, and Poe, because they'd never been together prior to that. So I'm fine with her not tagging along to Pasaana and elsewhere.

Another possibly contentious admission: this viewing confirmed my opinion that people are simply off-base when they say TROS retconned TLJ or demeaned and insulted it. This movie starts off with Luke tossing away his father's lightsaber, but it ends with him deliberately choosing to appear on Crait with that same saber. We're expressly shown that he has changed his thinking in radical ways over the course of the film. He spends most of the movie insisting that Kylo is beyond redemption, then tells Leia at the end that, "No one's ever really gone," in response to her saying that her son is truly lost. He literally does exactly what he said he wouldn't do by walking out with a laser sword to face down the whole first order and be the inspiring hero Rey asked him to be at the start. So in TROS, when he talks about having been wrong, he's only stating out loud the things we see him acting upon at the end of TLJ.

Likewise, the next film doesn't run down Admiral Holdo or write off the Holdo Maneuver as a fluke. It establishes very plainly that people are aware of Holdo's heroic sacrifice and want to be like her. It even shows a Holdo Maneuver having worked over Endor at the close of the movie. The fact that Poe thinks it can't be reliably duplicated isn't a diss -- it's a testament to how well Holdo timed her lightspeed jump and how well she piloted the ship.

So ... how did The Last Jedi hold up in the context of The Rise of Skywalker? Well, the fact is, the unexpected death of Snoke ought to rank right up there with "I am your Father" as one of the great cinematic shockers in science fiction. The confrontation between Luke and Kylo on Crait is similarly right up there with some of the best moments in all of Star Wars. And the reveal that Luke is still back on Ahch-To is frankly genius-level stuff. I saw TLJ nine or ten times in the theater, and that revelation audibly blew people's minds over and over.

It's a heck of a film.

He Went Completely the Other Way

I've decided to try a Star Wars viewing order I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about. Now that The Rise of Skywalker is on Disney+, I'm going to make my way through all eleven films in reverse chronological order: IX, VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, Rogue 1, Solo, III, II, I. Whatever interesting insights or observations occur to me, I'll blog as I go along.

First up, The Rise of Skywalker!

Let me say, for all the fuss about Finn never saying what it was that he meant to tell Rey, I think it's become pretty obvious he was going to tell her about finding his connection to the Force. Right from the first sequence of TROS that he's in, he's getting feelings and intuitions about things that haven't happened yet or are happening elsewhere. I don't think I paid any mind to it while in the theater (six times), but when he says, "I was just thinking that," in response to Poe's suggestion that they boulder the TIE fighters, it's not just because he's in tune with Poe and they're both strategizing -- it's because he's in touch with the Force and getting impressions of his surroundings or of impending possibilities.

I'll also say that from a purely filmic perspective, Rose Tico is actually in this movie a lot for someone who isn't playing a major plot role. I think she has more screen time than Hux, who was downgraded from one of the principal villains in the first two films to a bit part in this one. And of course, Captain Phasma didn't come back at all. Now, there's probably someone out there right now ranting at the computer screen about how JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio made a horrible mistake in choosing not to give her a major plot role, but (a) I believe it when they say she originally had a much larger part, but that many of her lines were cut because they were scenes with Leia where the CGI wasn't working the way they wanted, and (b) it's actually really hard to give large numbers of characters significant plot roles in the course of a film. Yeah, yeah, you've seen it lots of times, but that doesn't make it easy. And when you're plotting a story, you inevitably make choices about where your focus will be. For TROS, the filmmakers chose to leave Captain Phasma out, cut Hux off at the knees, have Maz Kanata appear without showing any of her plucky personality, put Luke in only a single scene, and separate Rose from the big three characters so that the audience would have an important character back at the base to play against the hodgepodge of repurposed Leia footage. This isn't some kind of crime against humanity; Yoda played an enormous role in the middle installment of the OT, and then had almost nothing to do in Return of the Jedi. Count Dooku was the main villain of Episode II and gets only a single scene in Return of the Sith. Boba Fett was hyped like crazy for Empire and sparked a fan base that has spent 40 years waiting for him to have a major film role, but literally got thrown down a hole in ROTJ. All three of those disappointed me, as did Rose's small role in TROS. The tradeoff is, we got to see our three main characters interacting a ton in this film, unimpeded by any need to establish Rose's place in what would then be a quartet instead of a trio. And for people who thought Rose was merely okay in TLJ, that was probably a much bigger payoff. People need to stop treating straightforward story choices like personal affronts to their very being. You can be disappointed without screaming that the screenwriters need to rot in hell for all eternity.

Okay, getting off that particular soap box and maybe onto another one ... like the prequels, TROS is a movie that does a huge amount of storytelling through implication, putting its trust in the viewer to connect the dots. Kylo Ren is the Supreme Leader, and from the conference room scene, we know he can pretty much do whatever he wants. He's clearly chosen to elevate General Pryce over Hux, yet keeps Hux around just for the purpose of rubbing his nose in his fall from near-greatness. None of these three characters has a single line of dialogue explaining that motivation or describing Pryce being put in charge or Hux being functionally demoted. But by playing the characters off one another in the way that they do, the filmmakers tell us plainly what has happened in the year since Kylo took over.

The same thing occurs when Rey calls Leia "master." That one word makes it clear that Leia hasn't just been helping Rey train because she's the leader of the Resistance and tangentially knows stuff about the Jedi from her brother. She's taken her on as a padawan, which validates the way Leia saves herself from the bridge explosion in TLJ. That wasn't just a fluke or an instinctual use of the Force; it was the action of a powerful Force user who fully knows what she's doing -- to the extent of comfortably taking on the role of master to an apprentice. It also explains why Leia goes up to Rey and hugs her when she gets off the Falcon at the end of The Force Awakens. The two of them have never met, but Leia knows there's already an important bond there because of Han, and because of their Force connection.

When Rey watches the children laughing at puppets in the desert of Pasaana, we're being told that she recognizes and appreciates their freedom to be children, despite living in a physically harsh environment similar to the one where she grew up. Also on Pasaana: when Kylo steals Rey's necklace, the camera stays on her while she's thinking through the implications of him taking it. She doesn't tell us or her friends that she knows the necklace will let Kylo figure out where they are; we know her thought process without any dialogue at all.

The whole movie is full of that kind of stuff. This is JJ's famous "mystery box" technique, which he gets criticized for all the time because people think it's an empty trick rather than a thoughtful method of storytelling. By showing us something that provides us the opportunity to fill in the blanks ourselves, he's able to squeeze a much greater amount of story into the film and keep it moving at a much faster pace, because the characters don't need to tell each other and the audience every little thing. Not only that, but since we're filling it in ourselves, it becomes more meaningful to us and involves us more deeply than if we were led through it by the hand with dialogue.

There's lots more I could say about this movie, but I'll leave it here for now. For one thing, I think it's very likely that rewatching The Last Jedi next, even more connections within TROS will come bubbling up for me.

Overall: The Rise of Skywalker is a tremendously fun movie that ties together all three of the sequel films as well as the saga itself. We start with Palpatine and with Anakin being foretold as the one who would bring balance to the Force, and we end with Palpatine and with Anakin telling Rey that she can return things to balance too.

I Guess I Was Wrong. There Was No Danger At All.

Okay, so I’m going through the movies in a slow-mo marathon of one every couple of weeks in the runup to Episode IX, and tonight I watched Attack of the Clones.

I always go into it worrying that somehow, I’ll finally see what the naysayers see and the film will let me down. But nope, every time it’s miles above I and III, and above most of ROTJ (though of course it can’t touch “I am a Jedi, like my father before me”).

Not only are the colors and landscapes and music just gorgeous from an aesthetic point of view, and not only does the movie deliver the thematic heart of the entire prequel trilogy, but it's rip-roaring fun from beginning to end, with only a few hiccups along the way.

I have a vivid recollection of being in the theater on opening night and seeing Obi-Wan jump through that window without a second's hesitation and deciding right then and there that, unlike The Phantom Menace, this was damn well a Star Wars movie. 

So here's a list of some of the things I love about Star Wars Episode II.

The big silver flying wing approaching Coruscant from the bottom up, rolling over to re-orient itself, gliding across the clouds and then down and through their misty obscurity. Absolutely beautiful, with terrific, moody music accompanying it.

Mace Windu patronizingly telling Senator Amidala that Count Dooku couldn't possibly be behind the assassination attempt on her because Dooku used to be a Jedi, so it simply wasn't in his character. The Jedi are meant to be putzes in the prequel trilogy, which a bafflingly large number of fans manage to overlook or deliberately ignore, and Windu's mansplaining here really hammers the point home.

Virtually every line Ian McDiarmid speaks.

Small echoes of Jake Lloyd in Hayden Christensen's performance as Anakin. One might argue that they're simply both failing as actors in the same stilted way, while speaking lines that Lucas wrote in the same stilted way, but the fact is, if you listen closely, their dialogue and delivery is extremely consistent. The way Anakin interrupts Padme on Naboo when she says he's just a Padawan learner harkens right back to his "I'm a person, and my name is Anakin," line when she calls him a slave in Episode I.

Jar Jar's dramatically reduced yet much more important role. He is still annoying, but he's there for a clear purpose, which we finally see when he plays the patsy by making the motion to give Palpatine emergency powers.

Anakin's rebellious insistence that "Investigation is implied in our mandate," and the awkward discomfort his argument with Obi-Wan engenders in everyone else in the room. The fact is, he's right. But Obi-Wan is being too by-the-book and too I'm-your-teacher to see or admit it.

The speeder chase. Sure, parts of it are cheesy, but it's a sustained sequence of the Jedi being absolutely amazing, doing the things they're good at, full of great kinetics, wild sound effects, and multiple holy-crap-did-he-really-just-do-that? moments.

Obi-Wan's gentle chastisement of Anakin when he catches up to him outside the club. He truly feels like a patient mentor here.

Anakin's shift from "Who hired you? Tell us," to "Tell us NOW," and the look of hopeful respect Obi-Wan gives him in between the two lines.

Jango Fett.

The scene of Padme packing, where she very reasonably defends Obi-Wan's actions as a mentor in response to Anakin's teen surliness. A lot of people find Anakin too immature and creepy in this scene, but that's pretty much the whole point. And Padme deals with his immaturity perfectly ... up until his gaze unsettles her.

Yoda bemoaning the fact that even some of the older, more experienced Jedi have become too sure of themselves. He's going down the hall with Obi-Wan and Mace Windu, who nod knowingly at his wisdom -- and all three of them fail to realize that they're the ones he's really talking about. The irony is absolutely savage.

Dexter Jettster, the four-armed diner owner. He's so amiable and Obi-Wan is so clearly delighted by him as a friend. It's also clear that he has more than a touch of unsavoriness in his backstory, and that presages Ben's ability to negotiate the scum and villainy of the cantina in Episode IV.

"Aggresive negotiations."

Anakin's dislike of sand, which tons of people seem to think is dumb because it comes out of nowhere and is basically a dude saying, "I don't like that" in response to his crush's description of something she enjoyed. But his clumsiness at romance is totally believable given his upbringing, and the sand line is a clear call-back to his childhood and his formative identity as someone who fixed things in an environment that was constantly breaking them.

"I'd be much too frightened to tease a senator." The whole scene where Anakin and Padme debate the merits of the Republic's version of democracy just exudes the influence Palpatine's guidance has had on Anakin and foreshadows Anakin's eventual role in the dictatorship of the Empire. Yet he segues into genuine charm and humor when the object of his affection becomes concerned at the things he's saying, and deflects her worries like a true pupil of the manipulative Chancellor.

Obi-Wan inspecting the troops on Kamino. Despite a lot of weirdness and awkwardness in his dialogue with the Kaminoans, this moment is a chilling harbinger of the stormtrooper legions we know it will eventually give rise to.

The verbal duel between Obi and Jango in the Fetts' quarters. I find the feigned politeness and tension between these two endlessly entertaining, and the dialogue here is really good.

Hayden's performance during the fireplace scene on Naboo, and to a lesser extent, Natalie Portman's as well. There's a lot of truly cringe-worthy dialogue here, but Hayden delivers it like a trooper, and for the most part, Natalie does too. If the writing had been just a little bit sharper (well, maybe a lot sharper), this would have been an amazing scene.

The actual duel between Obi and Jango on the landing pad. Exciting, great music, great use of weather as both a visual backdrop and an integral part of the fight itself.

The return of Watto. Honestly, I find his scene in this film one of the best performances by a CGI character in any live-action film I know of. He's a terrible person in the way a lot of ordinary people are terrible, and yet his genuine affection for Ani and the squalor into which he has fallen bring out an unavoidable sympathy in me.

Cliegg Lars. This dude is Tatooine wrapped up in a nutshell.

The shadow-puppet imagery as Anakin prepares to go after his mother, where we see the shape of Darth Vader's helmet cast by Anakin's hair.

Anakin's "Duel of the Fates" ride through the sunset Tatooine desert. Not the greatest green-screened sequence, I'll totally admit. But it's visually stunning nonetheless, and the re-use of "Duel of the Fates" at this critical juncture in Anakin's life is a fantastic piece of musical storytelling.

Freakin' seismic charges in space. I swear, the delayed explosion sound is probably the single dumbest piece of physics in any movie ever, but it's so awesome in combination with the visuals that I love it twice as much.

The reversed Pieta image in Shmi Skywalker's death scene. It's flipped left-to-right from Michaelangelo's statue and flips mother and son as well, and it foreshadows Anakin's fall to darkness instead of a resurrection, and it's just not the kind of fine-arts allusion you expect to find in a Star Wars film.

Every word Christopher Lee says.

The garage scene where Anakin reveals his slaughter of the sandpeople. Hayden Christensen is fantastic here. You could also argue that there's a subtle critique of Padme's background as part of a colonizer culture in her willingness to tolerate her boyfriend's murder of indigenous people, right down to the children.

That incredible arena sequence and its transition to the Battle of Geonosis. These are both vast, ingeniously conceived and executed action scenes, full of eye-popping architecture, creatures, and tech designs. I could probably write a whole blog post about all the things I love from each one of them.

Obi-Wan bringing Anakin to his senses by asking what Padme would do if she were in his place. It's another bravura scene for Hayden, and here Ewan MacGregor is at a similar emotional peak.

Badass Yoda. People have weirdly mixed reactions to this, but I didn't hear anything mixed in the theater I was in on opening night. The crowd went wild. I loved it then, and I will always love it.

Dumbass Yoda. I mean, what the hell, Yoda? Don't you remember the part where, oh, an hour and a half ago, you were telling Obi and Mace what a shame it was that even the older, more experienced Jedi were getting too sure of themselves? And now you're going to just keep toying with your old Padawan Dooku and taunting him while Obi-Wan and Anakin are lying injured on the floor? This is the ultimate payoff for the earlier scene, and the cruelest commentary on the fallibility of the Jedi.

Dooku's solar sail spaceship. Another makes-no-sense torturing of the laws of physics, but it's beautiful anyway.

"Begun, the Clone War has." The first full-throated appearance of the Imperial March ringing out through the literal sunset of the Republic, with the vast machinery of conquest on full display while poor Bail Antilles is able to do nothing more than ineffectually clench his fist against a balustrade -- this is one of the most vivid and meaningful scenes of the whole saga for me.

The musical modulation from the Love Theme to the closing-credits theme. I find this a very close second place to the credit transition in The Empire Strikes Back. The juxtaposition of melancholy romance and rousing symphonic triumph nails the ending of the film for me.

So, no, not even close to a let-down, even after 17 years worth of viewings.

I Promise To Return And To Finish What I Started ...

Yikes. I just realized that I haven't posted here since before The Last Jedi came out!

Maybe I can get back in the swing of things with The Mandalorian and The Rise of Skywalker coming out ...

Burn the First Order Down!

The Last Jedi is getting close, so I decided to get started on my pre-Episode-8 marathon. Last time around, I watched everything in chronological order. This time, I decided to try the fabled "Machete" order (4, 5, 2, 3, 6), except that I'm a completist, so I'll put The Phantom Menace in there after Empire Strikes Back, and I decided I'd begin with Rogue One. Having taken the day off today, I put R1 in the Blu-ray player and got started.

Despite the weirdness of CGI Tarkin and the awful weirdness/weird awfulness of CGI Leia, I think Rogue One is the best-made Star Wars film, and this viewing did nothing to change that opinion. It's the only SW movie to pay major attention to the way external lighting conditions affect the interior illumination aboard spaceships, for instance -- one of many touches that make it such a visually beautiful and immersive film.

What I was really eager to see, though, was how it affected my viewing of A New Hope ... so eager, in fact, that since I had the day off, I put in Episode IV after little more than a lunch break.

Two things worried me, going into the experience. First, would the modern cinematic sophistication of Rogue One make the original film look really cheesy in comparison? And second, would the action-packed, drama-packed, emotion-packed war movie make Star Wars seem too slow and too popcorn-fluffy?

But I settled in and tried to put myself in the mindset of some total neophyte who had somehow watched Rogue One as its own movie and was now watching Star Wars: A New Hope as a sequel that just happened to have been made 40 years earlier.

A great deal of surprising entertainment ensued!

To start with, Imaginary-Star-Wars-Newbie Herb appreciated the 20th Century Fox fanfare reminding him that he was about to watch a really old movie. Reign in those special-effects expectations, Imaginary-Star-Wars-Newbie Herb! Then the "A long time ago..." screen popped up and made me feel like, "Oh, look! Total continuity!"

Main Title Theme, logo, and screen crawl: these piled on the expectations of a hugely different tone and approach than Rogue One. The decision to avoid a crawl in Rogue One turns the ANH crawl into a distinguishing element that completely resets the viewer's mood. Everything described in the text is familiar from the "previous" film, but couched so differently that it eases you into the film and prevents the 40-year jump in filmic technique from being too jarring. Plus, we find out the name of the creepy CGI chick from the end of R1.

And then, Bam! The Star Destroyer pursues the fleeing Rebel Alliance ship across the screen with really chintzy laser blasts and explosions, but surprisingly good ship visuals. Inside the ship, we see those two robots who showed up in the rebel base last movie for no apparent reason, and it turns out now they're going to be important.

Let me tell you, the moment Leia puts that data disk into Artoo becomes stunning in light of Rogue One. Before, the disk was just some flimsy little data-transfer device of no real significance -- all the meaning of the scene was bound up in Leia and Artoo interacting. This time, that disk was the thing everybody in the last movie died to get hold of. Suddenly, instead of being our cute robot hero being given a mission by the movie's female lead, what we see is the transfer of the most important thing in the galaxy to this little droid who doesn't even speak a human language.

What follows is a long sequence of seemingly low-key adventures (compared to the action of R1), but with the slow pace turned on its head by the knowledge that no one in the whole first half of the movie has any idea how important this information is! (Except Artoo, and he can't tell anyone.) Owen ordering Luke to take the droids into town and have their memories erased changes from a curmudgeonly uncle trying to stave off trouble into a horrifying command that would render Jyn and Cassian's deaths meaningless.

I read and heard a lot of people saying that Darth Vader's display of power at the end of R1 was inconsistent with and would undercut the drama of his actions in Episode IV. But for me, it had the opposite effect. R1 Vader does a lot of Force-lifting and throwing, but he really doesn't move any quicker than ANH Vader. And the opening of ANH shows us that Vader behaves very differently when a situation is under complete control than he did when in the middle of a pitched space battle. The 1977 Darth Vader basically served as Tarkin's henchman for most of the movie. But within the context of Rogue One, we can now see that he stands behind Tarkin not because he's a lackey, but because the two of them have very firmly established spheres of authority, and Vader is totally comfortable letting Tarkin run the bureaucratic part of the Death Star's activities.

Another cool thing about Episode IV as a direct sequel to Rogue One is the sophisticated slow build about the Jedi. In Rogue One, we hear them mentioned as figures revered by Chirrut and Baze -- and Chirrut mentions that khyber crystals power the Jedi's "lightsabers." Having this in mind when Obi-Wan reveals that he was "once a Jedi knight, like your father" creates a far greater sense of things coming together than that line does in the original film alone. This dude is one of the guys Chirrut and Baze looked up to ... and not only that, but this Luke kid who wouldn't last two seconds in a fight with Jyn or Cassian is the son of another of those guys! Seeing the lightsaber turn on for the first time becomes a fulfillment of the anticipation set up by Chirrut's reverence for the Jedi in R1.

This viewing also marked the first time I could really see Obi-Wan through Owen's eyes. Thanks to the willful isolationism of Saw Gerrera, meeting this "strange old hermit" lent a lot more credence to Owen's line, "That wizard's just a crazy old man." Saw and Obi-Wan have both sought refuge in desolate wastelands. Both of them are aging and unkempt. Obi-Wan's still in one piece, but he looks even older than Saw, and he moves like an old man as well. And the look in the Jedi's eyes when he tells Luke, "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you're to come with me to Alderaan," has a clear echo of Saw's unhinged fanaticism.

Which brings us to Luke's response that "It's all so far away." By virtue of the completely different pace, and the total naiveté of our young farmboy hero compared to the protagonists of Rogue One, this line finally feels entirely real, not just the excuse of someone who's not ready to take up the hero's mantle. What we've seen in ANH to this point really is whole worlds away from what we saw in Rogue One. Luke isn't just attempting another teenage dodge here -- he's genuinely reacting to information and events that are alien to him.

Other fun elements of Episode IV as a Rogue One sequel:

• The Easter egg of seeing those two guys who bumped into Jyn in Jeddha City again.
• The idea that ISWN Herb would have been surprised to realize that Red Leader and Gold Leader from Rogue One were actually in the 1977 film.
• The worry that "Red Five" was not necessarily an auspicious call-sign for Luke to be given.
• The extraordinary continuity of technological design, like the Imperial plug-in sockets that both Artoo and K2SO use, and the Scarif tower interfaces compared to the tractor-beam controls.
• The subtle return of that blue milk from the Erso farm.

There was more, but that's probably enough for now.

On to Episode V ... !